Turn a horizontal video into a vertical one
Convert wide, landscape footage into a vertical 9:16 clip for a phone-first feed — and keep the subject centered instead of cropping them out.
Footage shot in landscape (16:9) doesn’t fit a vertical feed — Reels, TikTok, and Shorts all want a tall 9:16 frame. A naïve center-crop often chops off exactly what matters, because the subject rarely stays dead-center. The fix is to reframe and follow the subject.
The problem with a plain crop
Cropping a wide video to 9:16 throws away most of the width. If your subject drifts left or right — as people naturally do — a fixed crop cuts them off. You want the vertical window to move with them.
1. Upload the landscape clip
Open Auto Track and add your horizontal video.
2. Let the frame follow the subject
Click Auto-Track Subject to run the AI pass. It finds the subject and builds camera keyframes that keep them inside the frame across the whole clip — so when you crop to vertical, the subject stays centered instead of wandering out of shot.
3. Set the output to 9:16
Choose 9:16 Vertical as the aspect ratio. Pick a feel — Smooth for a calm, gliding reframe, or Bouncy if the subject moves quickly. If you’d rather frame it yourself, you can also adjust the crop and keyframes by hand.
4. Render
Choose your format (MP4 is the safe default for social) and render. You get a vertical clip that tracks your subject, ready to post.
Other vertical ratios
Not everything is 9:16. Auto Track also outputs:
- 1:1 square — a classic feed post.
- 4:5 portrait — takes up more vertical space in a feed than square without going full-height.
Because the tracking analysis is saved for 30 days, you can render the same clip to several ratios and only pay the render cost each time.