A vertical version
Turning a cut framed wide into a 9:16 version for YouTube and TikTok — what it frames on, what it does when it cannot tell, and how to take it over.
Picture ▸ Make a Vertical Version… takes the cut you are in and makes a second one, framed 9:16.
This is for a cut that was framed wide. To cut vertical from the start — phone footage, a TikTok — make the sequence vertical instead: Cutting vertical, square or any size.
The cut you were in is untouched. The vertical version is a cut of its own, so you can trim it shorter, drop shots from it and give it its own notes without any of that reaching the wide one.
What it frames on
A 16:9 picture is about three times wider than a 9:16 frame, so two thirds of every shot has to go. B/side picks which third by measuring where across the width the picture is changing — which, on a presenter, an interview or a cooking shot, is the person.
That is a measurement, not a guess about what is in the picture. It does not know what a face is. It knows what moved, and on most footage what moved is what you were pointing the camera at.
Where nothing is moving, it says so and leaves the frame where it was. A presenter who stops moving to deliver a line keeps their framing, because "nothing is moving" is not a reason to drift back to the middle.
What it does when it cannot tell
Centres the shot, and tells you how many it did that to:
> Vertical version of 34 shots — 3 centred, because there was nothing moving in them to frame on.
A shot ingested before this existed has nothing measured either, and is centred for the same reason. Three centred shots in a cut of thirty-four is a draft worth finishing; the number is there so you find that out now rather than in the fourth shot.
How it moves
Like somebody holding a camera, rather than like a filter:
- It never pans across a cut. Every shot is framed on its own.
- A still subject gets a still frame — no drift, no breathing.
- It holds, moves once, and holds again. A frame only moves when the subject has genuinely left the comfortable middle, and then it is one push of about a second rather than a constant correction.
- It aims where the subject will be when the move lands, not where they were when it started.
- It never shows the edge of the picture.
Taking it over
What lands on each shot is an ordinary Transform — a scale and a horizontal position — so there is nothing special to learn and nothing to switch off. Open the Effect Editor on any shot and:
- drag Position X to reframe that shot;
- add or move keyframes if you want the frame to travel differently;
- delete the effect entirely to centre the shot.
It is undoable like any other edit, it shows up in Compare like any other change, and it exports from the normal export because the renderer was already drawing Transforms long before this existed.
Exporting it
The vertical cut knows what frame it is for, so Export ▸ Export… already has 1080 × 1920 — vertical chosen when you open it. You can change it — a wide file of a vertical cut is a legitimate thing to want — but the default is the one you almost certainly meant.
If your rushes are HD, expect to be told the master is a blow-up, and it will be right: a 9:16 window out of a 1920 × 1080 shot is 608 × 1080 of real picture, so a 1080-wide vertical master is scaled up about 1.8×. Shoot or finish from 4K and that goes away — 3840 × 2160 gives 1215 × 2160 through the same window, which is more than the frame needs.
Before you deliver
The vertical version is a cut, so everything else still applies: check it end to end.
Making a vertical version is on every plan, including Free — reframing a cut is editing.
Titles and burned-in captions are redrawn for the vertical frame. They are generated here, so they are laid out for whatever shape the file is coming out at — the type stays the same size relative to the frame rather than being stretched or blown up. You may still want to move a lower third that was placed for a wide shot; it will be the right size, in the place you put it.
A title is laid out again whatever your plan. A caption is laid out again wherever you have captions, which is Creator and up — on Free there are none to lay out.
A graphic you composited from a file is not redrawn, because it is a picture rather than something B/side lays out. Reframing moves the shot under it; it does not re-make it. If a cut has supered graphics from an art department, they need a vertical version of their own.