Landscape in, vertical out
The subject stays in frame.
A 16:9 recording cropped to 9:16 loses about two-thirds of its width. Which two-thirds you lose is the entire problem — and a fixed centre crop gets it wrong the moment anyone moves or a second person speaks.
In short
Ascynd reframes 16:9 video to vertical 9:16 automatically, tracking the active speaker across the frame so the subject stays centred throughout the clip rather than being lost to a fixed centre crop.
- vertical output from any source
- 9:16vertical output from any source
- subject tracking, not a static crop
- Per-framesubject tracking, not a static crop
- handled as the speaker changes
- Multi-speakerhandled as the speaker changes
Why a centre crop fails
Cropping 16:9 to 9:16 discards roughly two-thirds of the horizontal frame. If your subject happens to sit dead centre for the entire clip, a fixed crop is fine — and that almost never happens.
In a two-person interview the speakers sit either side of centre, so a centre crop frames the gap between them and cuts both faces in half. In a solo piece to camera the presenter drifts, gestures, or leans out of frame. In a screen recording the thing worth seeing is a region of the screen, not its midpoint.
The manual fix is keyframing the crop position across the clip. It works, and on a batch of thirty clips it is hours of tedious work that has to be redone whenever you re-cut.
How the tracking works
Ascynd detects the subject in the frame and follows it, adjusting the crop window as the clip plays rather than fixing it once at the start.
When more than one person is present, it uses the audio to determine who is currently speaking and frames them, moving as the conversation moves. The transitions are damped rather than snapping — a crop window that jumps on every small movement is more distracting than a static one, so the motion is smoothed to stay readable.
The reframe is applied at export, so it composes with everything else: captions are positioned relative to the final vertical frame, not the original landscape one.
Aspect ratios and where they go
9:16 is the default because it is what TikTok, Reels and Shorts all use full-screen, and it is the ratio that fills a phone display.
It is not universal, though. Square 1:1 still performs on some feed placements, and there are cases where keeping the original 16:9 is correct — LinkedIn native video and YouTube's main feed among them. Exporting a clip in the wrong ratio for its destination means either black bars or an unintended crop, both of which look careless.
Because clipping is uncapped, exporting the same moment in more than one ratio for different platforms costs nothing beyond the processing time.
Frequently asked questions
- What does auto-reframe do?
- It converts landscape 16:9 video into vertical 9:16 by choosing which part of the frame to keep, following the subject as they move instead of cropping to a fixed centre point. On multi-person recordings it switches framing to whoever is speaking.
- Does it handle interviews with two people?
- Yes. It uses the audio to identify the active speaker and frames them, moving as the conversation moves. A fixed centre crop on a two-person interview typically frames the gap between them and cuts both faces.
- Can I adjust the framing manually?
- Yes — automatic tracking is the starting point, not a locked result. You can adjust framing before export, and because clipping is uncapped, re-exporting after a change costs nothing.
- Which aspect ratios can Ascynd export?
- Vertical 9:16 for TikTok, Reels and Shorts, plus square and original-ratio exports for platforms like LinkedIn and the YouTube main feed where vertical is not the right format.
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