Square and vertical cuts

Cut the same film as a square, a vertical or a portrait version, and choose where each line is framed.

Video Square and vertical0:44

Every film is made wide, at 16:9. From the same recording, a build can also cut it in other shapes for feeds and phones. Nothing is recorded again.

The shapes

Shape	Size	How it is made
wide	16:9	Always made.
square	1:1, 1080 × 1080	A crop of the take that follows the cursor.
vertical	9:16, 1080 × 1920	Laid out rather than cropped (see below).
portrait	4:5, 864 × 1080	A crop of the take that follows the cursor.

The crops pan smoothly, and only when the cursor nears the edge, so what it came from stays in view. The recording is captured at twice the page size, so crops stay sharp. The open, close and chapter cards are drawn at each shape, and each shape gets its own checks, frames and contact sheet.

The vertical cut

A tall slice of a wide screen would lose most of the page, so the vertical cut of desktop footage is laid out in three parts:

at the top, the chapter and a headline for the moment;
in the middle, the whole screen, with a box showing where to look;
below, that box up close, following the cursor, with the words burned in underneath, because tall films are mostly watched with the sound off.

The headline is the line's Headline from the Line panel, else its callout label, else the chapter's title. Two to six words work best.

Choose the shapes

In the app

Open the film's Film panel.
In What a build makes, tick square, vertical or portrait under Shapes.
Save with ⌘S, then build.

In the terminal

Choose the shapes for one build:

showreel build compose --formats square,vertical

To choose them for every build, set formats in the storyboard file, such as ["square", "vertical"]. An empty list means none. The kit can set a default for every film.

Frame a line

By default the square and vertical crops follow the cursor. To pin one line instead:

Select the line on the timeline.
On the Line panel, choose Framing (square, vertical): left, centre or right, or follow the cursor to go back.
Save and build again.

In the storyboard file, frame can also be a number: the position across the page, in pixels, to centre on.

Leave the words off the vertical cut

Set "burnCaptions": false in the storyboard file.

Phone and tablet films

A film of an app filmed as a phone or tablet keeps its device in every shape. The square and vertical cuts frame the device rather than following a cursor.