One composition, nine aspect ratios
Re-cutting a video for each platform is not a formatting task, it is a design task, and doing it by hand is where consistency quietly dies.
The usual way to get a 9:16 version of a 16:9 video is to crop it and hope. It works for footage, because footage has no required content: if you lose some sky, you have lost some sky.
It does not work for anything with text in it. Crop a 16:9 composition to vertical and the headline leaves the frame, the chart is cut in half, and the logo lands under the platform’s own interface furniture.
Reflowing rather than cropping
A composition that reflows is built from the start as a set of rules rather than a set of positions:
- The safe area is declared per aspect ratio, not per clip.
- Type sizes are derived from the frame, so a headline that fits at 16:9 fits at 9:16.
- Elements have a reading order, and the layout for each ratio is an arrangement of that order.
- Anything that cannot survive the narrowest ratio is not in the composition at all.
The last one is the discipline that makes the other three possible, and it is the one most designers resist, because it means the widescreen version cannot be the most interesting version.
What this buys
The point is not that you save the hour it takes to re-cut. The point is that the vertical clip is the same clip. Same brand, same type, same colours, same animation, and the same correction when you fix something. The alternative is nine versions that drift apart at nine different speeds, and a correction that has to be applied nine times or not at all.
One composition, every ratio, every language. It is the least glamorous thing we do and the one that does the most work.
