The IGTV Cut

 

Hey! Everybody, it’s Craig Lillard here. So in this video, I’m gonna show you how to properly format because IGTV has some idiosyncrasies when it comes to posting your video content there that can cause you some trouble. Especially, if you’re wanting to put headlines, put text on it, put subtitles on it. I’m gonna tell you why that is and how to get around that. I’m gonna show you how to do it using Clipscribe but the principle you’re gonna learn here will work with anything.

ISSUE WITH IGTV

So 1st of, let’s just get down to what is the issue with IGTV anyway in posting, your video content there. The first thing is, IGTV is a vertical platform by default what does that mean? It means that shooting in vertical mode, holding your phone up like this because it’s really mainly and shooting vertically. Which video resolution wise you can see is usually or some variants of that depending on size aspect ratio 9 parts wide by 16 parts high. And the problem with IGTV is, however, is that it’s going to share that content over with Instagram and Instagram is not natively a vertical format social network.

VERTICAL SOCIAL NETWORK

What are vertical format social networks? Snapchat is one mainly, you’re gonna be shooting,  holding your phone vertically. Tik-tok is one and I would generally say that if all you’re gonna do is focus Snapchat, tik-tok and you’re going all-in on vertical, then just shoot vertical videos all the time. But the problem with IGTV is because it shares that content with Instagram, it does this thing where it crops off the top and the bottom and basically crops your vertical video to square and that’s what this looks like. So, if I uploaded this video here vertical and they’re gonna take it, it’s gonna look great as long as they’re showing it vertically. But when they crop it, it’s gonna look like this. So when it shows in the Instagram feed, it’s gonna look chopped off. And sometimes on IGTV it can show chopped off too, so, that’s a problem. And again, it’s especially a problem if you’re gonna put text. Let’s give an example and I’ve seen examples like this it’s happened with people they’re like, Craig, what’s the deal? Why is my video looking so weird? When I uploaded to IGTV? It’s vertical should be fine, right? Well, part of the time. So this example right here is gonna look fine when it’s shown full screen on IGTV. But when they crop it for the feed it’s gonna look like this. All of a sudden all your text is gone, right? It’s there. They’ve just cropped off the square so that text is not showing anymore. And you know that might be rather frustrating. So how do you make the most of this?

SHOOT YOUR VIDEO HORIZONTAL

Well, first of all, my suggestion is to shoot your video horizontal, classic HD horizontal 1920 by 1080 16 parts wide by 9 parts high. Now again, if you’re only target is a vertical platform. Fine, go vertical. But if you want to upload the same video, multiple places, you want to get then horizontal was the way to go you format it like this, you have space above and below to put text, put subtitles, you can build upon it. But the only way to modify a vertical video for other platforms is to crop it. You have to cut things out and vertically, that doesn’t generally work very well. It doesn’t look very good. I’m going to show you using Clipscribe, how you can make your video so it’s gonna look really good when you put it up on IGTV. And I’m gonna show you how to do it really easily too. And you can do this with any platform that you want to do it on.

KEY TO DESIGN YOUR VIDEO

The key is one shoot horizontal, two design in a square. Design your video in a square. Like, you see here you’ve got my text up here. I got my subtitles down here. And it’s a square and the reason that I recommend using on Clipscribe, using a square template is because everything is gonna be exactly where it needs to be. It’s gonna show up great when they crop it, it’s gonna look right, because what gonna do is we’re gonna take the square design. We’re gonna copy it over to a vertical design. Let me show you how we’re gonna do that here.

COPY TO VERTICAL LAYOUT

Once you’ve made your design, you’ve saved it in Clipscribe you’re gonna hit the copy button and you’re gonna come over here and this right here is the vertical layout, we’re gonna click on that, and what software’s gonna do, it’s gonna take everything and it’s gonna format it, perfectly for IGTV here. So when IGTV comes in and they crop out you know they’re gonna crop it off they’re gonna cut this off, and they’re going to cut this off. Then you’re fine. Your text is gonna be there. Everything. It’s gonna look just like it did when it was originally square. And of course, from here, we have other options that you can copy over to other layouts. Other sizes that you can copy over to you can even go over to, just regular HD. Of course, you probably need to remove your headlines and all that, because you’re gonna be kind of cluttered if you do that. But this is your solution. And even if you’re using something like after effects, you’re using some other platform. You can still design square and then just adjust the top and the bottom and in this example here, let’s say, you want to use that extra real state on the top of the bottom. You can still use that real state. If you wanted to put like an emoji or something or some other text or you can still do that. I would recommend it’s not something super important because again, it’s going to get cut off in the feed. Now, here’s a side note on this. That’s something kind of reason. I’ve seen this pop up on Tik-tok before, apparently, it’s popping up on IGTV. As well is that there are some phones that are even larger, they’re larger phones, some Samsung phones. I’ve even seen it on iPhone, like 11 pro max, where the screen size is no longer a standard 16 by 9 or 9 by 16 size and they’re not displaying it right? Personally, I think it’s more of an app issue than anything else. Tik-tok adjusted the app so that those vertical videos looked correctly. But just be aware you might run into that and again, in my opinion, it’s more something on the app makers part videos got to stay standard. You gotta have these standard sizes and everything’s gonna be different, it’s gonna be really difficult, because video just depends on and the standard aspect ratios to work. So that’s a side note there.

Let me know if you have any questions, comment in the comments, follow and subscribe, go to clipscribe.com. Other than that, thanks for watching everybody.

1 thought on “The IGTV Cut”

Leave a Comment