Automated or hand-keyframed reframing during playback — AI or manual tracking follows motion. Essential for vertical-format content from 16:9 footage.
Dynamic reframing
You film a scene in the classic 16:9 aspect ratio, but the clients want the material also for TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts — meaning 9:16. Here, you don't just grab a static crop and accept that half the image is lost. Instead, you let the reframing run during playback: the image composition follows the action, zooms in, pans along. This is dynamic reframing — and it's now a standard workflow in post-production when vertical footage needs to be created from horizontal.
In practice, this works in two ways. The first: AI-assisted tracking. Software like Adobe Premiere Pro, DaVinci Resolve, or specialized tools analyze the scene, recognize faces, movements, cuts — and automatically generate keyframes that intelligently follow the image. You set parameters (how aggressive the zoom can be, which objects have priority), and the system does the rest. The advantage: fast, consistent, often usable. The disadvantage: sometimes too mechanical, sometimes it falters with complex image construction.
The second way: manual keyframe animation. You sit in the edit, look at the timeline, and set new positions and zoom levels for each new shot, each head movement, each cut. Time-consuming, yes — but the result is cinematic, visibly consciously composed. Good colorists and online editors use this method for high-quality productions where every frame counts.
Important: Dynamic reframing is not the same as zooming or stabilization (see Warp Stabilizer). It's about conscious framing, about telling the story vertically — not about image stability. At the set itself, you should already keep this in mind: shooting wide, loose compositions helps the reframing process later. Tight, rigidly composed shots are more difficult to adapt. And a rule of thumb: the more headroom and lead room you have, the more flexible your cropping will be later.
In the commercial context — commercials, social media content, branded series — dynamic reframing is now a standard deliverable. It costs time, yes, but it saves you the production of separate vertical shoots. And for long-form like documentaries or drama: what used to be only for streaming niches is now mandatory output. The future is multi-format, and dynamic reframing is your tool to achieve that.