A vertical clip from a horizontal interview: what happens to the frame
Who this is for
The shoot is horizontal — a camera, a Zoom call, a webinar, a live stream. The feed is vertical: TikTok, Reels, Shorts. The difference is not size: less than half of the original width fits into a vertical frame, so something has to go, and the only question is what.
What happens to the frame
A 16:9 frame becomes 9:16. Roughly a third of the width survives, and that is arithmetic, not a setting: the two shapes do not fit into each other.
There are three ways to handle it, and they are not equal:
- shrink the whole frame — black bars above and below, a tiny face. That is what quick converters do, and in a feed it reads as someone else's video uploaded by mistake;
- crop the centre — simple, but the person talking is rarely in the centre. In a two-person interview the centre is the table between them;
- follow the speaker — the frame goes to whoever is talking now. That is what we do. We find the speaker in the picture: we measure how much each face's mouth moves — not whether it is open, but how much more it moves than the neighbour's. Speaker labels from speech recognition do exist, but there is nothing to tie them to a particular face in the frame, and we did not invent such a link.
Where text must not go in a vertical clip
The platform draws its own interface over your video: the caption, the author's name, the buttons. Anything underneath is visible to you in the editor and invisible to the viewer in the feed.
Keep clear: 400 pixels of 1920 at the bottom, 140 at the top, and 180 of 1080 on the right under the like and share buttons. The numbers were cross-checked against three creator guides on 11.08; the platforms publish no official spec, and sources disagree on the bottom band — 320 to 400. We take the strict value: erring that way is cheaper.
They are stored as fractions of the frame rather than pixels, because a clip is rendered both at full size and at a smaller size for preview, where the same pixel count would mean something different.
A horizontal 16:9 clip has no such strips: the YouTube or VK player does not keep its interface over the frame, and the buttons hide while the video plays. A square 1:1 clip has none either: it goes into a feed where the caption and buttons sit below the post. That is why the editor draws no strips for 16:9 and 1:1 styles.
That is the answer to "why is the headline not where I would have put it". It is where the viewer will see it, not where it looks best in the editor.
What to check in your own clip, in a minute
- the speaker's face — whole in frame, not cut off at the chin;
- the subtitles — above the bottom 400 pixels, that is, noticeably above the edge;
- Kazakh letters — present (ә, ғ, қ, ң, ө, ұ, ү, һ, і), not holes inside words; How to test your own clip — in a separate article;
- cuts — driven by who is speaking, not by a timer every three seconds.