What this does
Employs AI computer vision to keep the speaker centered in frame when cropping landscape footage for TikTok, Shorts, or Instagram Reels.
Set your aspect ratio before you add captions and overlays. Switching afterwards repositions what is on the canvas, so anything you placed by hand may need adjusting again.
How to do it
Follow these step-by-step instructions in Cubix.
Upload landscape footage
Import your 16:9 widescreen video clip.
Widescreen 16:9 original footage before reframing.
Ask Cubix to reframe to vertical
Send a reframing prompt to Cubix AI Agent.
Landscape 16:9 video converted to 9:16 vertical with AI subject tracking.
Choose how the shot sits in the frame
There is more than one right answer. Fill crops to cover the new frame, which is the standard choice for full-bleed vertical. Frame keeps the whole shot inside a rounded inset card, which is a deliberate look rather than a compromise. Fit keeps everything and pads around it. Reframe is the one that follows your subject, which is what a moving talking head needs.
Vertical 9:16 reframed video ready for Shorts and Reels.
Handle two-person footage explicitly
Two people side by side rarely fit in a vertical crop, and a centred crop gives you half of each face. Say what you want instead — the frame following whoever is talking, or both speakers stacked vertically.
Pro Tips for Best Results
- Cropping to vertical uses fewer of the original pixels, so a 4K source leaves room for a punch-in on top of the crop where a 1080p source has less to spare.
- Keep captions and faces in the central band — the bottom strip and right-hand column of a vertical frame belong to the platform's interface.
- 1:1 square is a good middle ground for LinkedIn: it crops less than vertical and still reads better than widescreen on a phone.
- Reframe asks you to pick your subject before it applies, so it is not finished the instant you press it.
Reframing is stored as part of the timeline rather than baked into your footage, so you can change the framing, adjust it or revert it at any point before export — and the same project can be exported in more than one shape.
Frequently Asked Questions
Common questions around this editing workflow.