Turning a 16:9 video into a 9:16 Short means throwing away most of the width of the frame. Do it with a naive center crop and you get foreheads, shoulders, and empty chairs while the speaker drifts off-screen. Face-aware reframing solves this.
The problem with center-cropping
A fixed center crop assumes the subject never moves and always sits dead-center. Real footage does not work that way — people lean, gesture, and shift, and interviews put two people on opposite sides of the frame. A static crop cuts them off.
How face-aware reframing works
Detection finds the face (or faces) in each part of the clip, and the crop pans to follow the person who is talking. You get three framing modes for different situations:
- Speaker — a tight vertical punch-in that follows the talker
- Wide — zooms out so the whole scene stays in frame
- Split — two faces stacked podcast-style, both framed
Why it matters for reach
Vertical clips that keep the subject centered simply look professional — and viewers stay on professional-looking clips longer. Watch time is the strongest ranking signal on every short-form platform, so framing is not a cosmetic detail; it is a growth lever.
See the reframe on your own footage — paste a YouTube link and pick a framing mode.