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Tiktok Video Error - Are You Doing This?
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Benefits of Clipscribe - To Increase Your Reach and Influence
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"Instagram is chopping my videos" – What can I do?
Hey, everybody! It’s Craig with Clipscribe. What's the deal with some social media platforms just chopping on videos when they get uploaded?
Originally it was just IGTV chopping the top and bottom off of our vertical videos when we wanted to share them to Instagram and now we see videos getting chopped off on the sides when they’re posted to apps like TikTok or Instagram Reels. Here’s an example of one of our own videos. As you can see the text on the headline at the top is chopped off on the side.
It’s Not You It Is Instagram
So today I was going to talk to you about why that is happening. You may have had that happen to you and you might feel it’s something wrong with your video and I’m here to tell you it’s not anything with your video. As long as your video is a standard vertical video – that’s an aspect ratio of 9 to 16. If you’re not sure what that means – it means width to height and the reason it’s 9:16 is nine parts wide and 16 parts high.
The typical actual resolution of that is usually 1080 by 1920, but what that ratio tells you is that your video can get bigger and bigger while still having the same aspect ratio. As long as it’s nine parts wide and 16 parts high. What is happening in this case is that your 9:16 video is shown on a screen that is longer than screens are intended to be. Basically what’s happening is the apps are either not catching up with it, or they’re not programmed to solve the issue.
So when you upload your regular, full HD video, or vertical HD (vertical videos are just an h-ray or HD horizontal video turned on its side), that’s all it is. It’s the exact same size. It’s just turned on its side.
Why Is This Happening?
As you can see here, there’s a bunch of space down at the bottom there. If your video was actually placed as it should be at the correct aspect ratio in the window, there would be a bunch of blank spaces at the bottom or at the top. I don’t know if Instagram or TikTok or whatever just don’t want to deal with it, but this is their way of fixing that issue.
I don’t really understand because, in my opinion, you just have to do something with the space. You can’t do this, just try to fill in all the space by blowing the video up. Now that it is getting cut off because they’re filling up the space with the video vertically, it’s not fitting horizontally anymore, so horizontally is blowing out past the edges of the phone.
So, hopefully, this doesn’t mean that we’re going to start shooting you know, a wider screen video and everything is going to start switching to that because in my opinion, it’s drama. But maybe that’s the route that we’re heading in and we’re all going to have to start shooting that way now. We’re going to have to shoot widescreen as well.
You Can Fix Your Social Media Content With Clipscribe
So, if you use Clipscribe – even if you don’t – I’m going to show you the solution for this. It is a rather simple solution but I’m going to show you how you can do it on Clipscribe very easily. Even if you’re using some other tool you can do it on that tool.
Look at my face here, it’s almost like I’m thinking "Why are they cutting our video off?". I don’t understand why they’re doing that.
So, in Clipscribe, we’ve added the video and you need to go over here and click this. There’s a little grid icon here. You get these grid options. And right here are a number of options that appear.
We’ve got the IGTV option that I was mentioning before. You might have experienced that at some point we’ve got the Clipscribe bars option which will show you when you have a design bar in the top and bottom. It will kind of give you the guide here and out of this tall screen safe area because I have no idea what else to call it.
Using Green Lines For Instagram And Tiktok
It’s going to put these grids on the side. You can use these green lines as a guide. So, instead of your headline being like this you’re just going to have to size it differently and make it like that and then just make it fit within this grid here. Now something that you could do is kind of a meet in the middle here that would be to blacken out – or whatever color you want to use, doesn’t have to be black, could be red whatever you want to use here.
You could do it like this where the text still is small enough, by controlling the font size so that it sits between these two guides but the banner goes all the way to the edges. That’s another way that you can handle that problem.
Basically, you can have kind of the best of both worlds there. It doesn't matter if you are using Clipscribe or not, but Clipscribe makes it really easy for you to know how to keep your text in there.
So that’s one option for using some other software. Again, the principle is just to bring your text in more narrow, don’t let it go all the way to the edges, and then that is going to solve your problem.
Does It Really Matter?
You could just not care about it. You could just be like – "I’m just going to trust that not many people are seeing it this way" – but they probably are, or you can say – "Surely they’re going to fix this at some point with an app update" – and maybe they already have even now, so I would guess that’s got to be something in the books. Who knows, maybe it’s already there and some of us just haven't updated our apps yet or something like that.
If you run into this, I just wanted you to know that it’s not you, it’s not your video. It’s just an issue with the app and you got to work around it and kind of do this hack to make it work for you.
Conclusion
Hopefully that helps you out, let me know if you have questions, comments like, subscribe if you haven’t. Check out Clipscribe, these are the types of things that Clipscribe does well, along with automatic subtitles and being able to add headlines, logos, all kinds of stuff to make it really easy for you to create social media content like this so you can get more attention in the feed and you can expand your influence by easily putting your content on more than one platform just like I showed you how to do today.
Let me know if you have any questions. Thanks for reading everybody. This is Craig Lillard and I’ll see you on another blog.