Reframing and layouts

Most long videos are wide, and most short-form platforms want tall clips. Reeltopus crops each clip to follow the person speaking, and can stack two speakers in a split screen. This article covers framing, layouts, shapes and auto zoom.

Automatic framing

While a video processes, the Framing the speakers step looks at each clip and tracks faces. It plans a crop that follows whoever is speaking, moving as the speaker changes.

Framing is best effort. If it fails or doesn't finish in time, the clip keeps a centered crop and everything else still works. Clips you add with Find a moment… start centered and are framed in the background.

Choose a shape

Open a clip, then the Style tab. Under Shape and framing, pick a shape:

Clips start as 9:16 unless your default template sets another shape. The preview changes right away, and each change is one undo step. You can also ask in chat, like "make it square".

The shape of a dubbed clip is fixed. Change the original clip's shape before you dub it.

Follow the speaker or split screen

When a clip has two people who sit far apart in the shot, Reeltopus prepares a second framing. You'll then see two options under Shape and framing:

• Follow the speaker: one crop that moves to whoever is talking.
• Split screen: the two people stacked, one above the other, so both are always on screen.

Split screen is for 9:16 only. With another shape picked, the option is turned off.

If you don't see these options, the clip doesn't have a second framing. That's usually because only one person is on screen, or the people are close enough to fit in one crop.

Auto zoom

Under Auto zoom in the Style tab, turn on Punch in on the words that matter. The clip zooms in briefly on emphasized words, or every few seconds. The switch shows how many punch-ins the clip has. Punch-ins are marked on the timeline strip.

To choose which words are emphasized, see Caption styles and brand kits.

Hook and progress bar

Two more overlays live in the Style tab:

• Hook: a short line shown on screen for the first 3 seconds. Edit it, or turn off On screen for the first 3 seconds.
• Progress bar: a bar along the bottom that fills as the clip plays.

Sharpness and export resolution

Cropping a tall clip out of a wide video uses part of the picture, so the crop has fewer pixels than the original. When you export, Reeltopus shows when the framing limits how sharp the clip can be, like "This clip's framing holds 1080p, so that is the sharpest it exports at without upscaling."

Every plan exports at 1080p. Pro and Agency can export at 1440p and 4K. A sharper source video gives you more room. If your source is low quality, the project page says "low bit rate, so expect softness".

For other edits, see Edit a clip and Edit a clip with chat.