Timestamp:
3:11 – See the sample of shooting vertical video
5:55 – Different sizes of layouts to choose from
6:57 – Watch how to use Clipscribe for your vertical video
Transcript:
Hey everybody it’s Craig with Clipscribe. I’m going to give you some tips on how to prep or create video content for TikTok, for Reels. Mainly those two. I mean the same thing could work with Snapchat, and IGTV, because it’s really, it’s not super complicated.
Social Media Video Sizes
It’s basically you’re just creating a vertical video. So it just depends on whether or not you want to start shooting a vertical video or you want to shoot horizontal or something else and then go to vertical from there. So really, each of these social media networks until they come up with a new size and I think the last time a new size, they came up with was portrait size video, which is aspect ratio is 4:5 Vs HD is 16:9 vertical is 9:16 vertical videos just a horizontal video turned on its side. And so many of those platforms that go vertical, as I said, IGTV, TikTok, Snapchat, stories, those are all basically vertical videos.
Now there are some platforms that are there are some cameras and smartphones that are shooting like extra wide. And if you’re doing that, I would say don’t do that, switch your camera setting to just regular vertical video. Again, it’s a horizontal video turned on its side instead of 16 across nine down.
It’s nine across 16 parts up and down height-wise. So if you want to set up a video for one of these platforms. The first question is, how am I going to shoot my video? Am I going to go ahead and shoot it vertical? Or I’m going to shoot a horizontal. So that’s really up to you.
Shoot Horizontal for a lot more options
Generally, I recommend if you’re going to be putting video in a lot of different places, shoot horizontal because then you have a lot more options. Once you shoot that vertical video, it’s just difficult to go down to the square and down to horizontal from there without things getting just kind of weird because you’re going to have to start cropping your video in weird places.
If you start horizontal, you can easily stack up, you can put bars on the top and bottom of your video. You can even zoom in quite a bit, as long as it’s regular HD you just have to keep in mind, are you horizontal? You know, are you square in the center?
Like I am right now because if you are, then I could potentially take this part right here and make it into a vertical video again, as long as I’m shooting at least HD is the quality is going to go down a little bit, but I don’t think it’s going to matter.
You know, really enough. So, I’ve got two videos one, because I don’t usually shoot vertical video, but I do kind of have a sample here that I just uploaded. So if you upload vertical, it’s going to look like this with these bars on the side because again, that’s what it would look like if you went and put that into a horizontal frame just as is it’s going to put these bars on the side.
But I’m going to show you a way that you can work around that if you want to work around that so let me switch back here. All right, let me go start a new video. So again, if you’re shooting a completely vertical video, you’re most likely going to choose this layout right here, that has no bars on it at all.
Okay, that’s going to fill up the whole space with your video. So I’m going to go ahead and click that and just click start a new design here. Just let that guy load up. Okay, so once that loads up, I mean that’s it, that is the size you know, that is the vertical size for TikTok or IGTV or Reel.
So then you just need to process and how long does my video need to be based on the platform? I’m uploading it too you got to make those decisions. You might need to edit it down a bit if you’re going to IGTV it’s actually pretty easy because they let you do really long videos that you can then tell IGTV or tell Instagram to show on Instagram.
So that kind of makes that part pretty easy. But yeah, I mean this is basically what you’re going to do here now, I’m going to show you something with the subtitles, it’s become a pretty common thing to kind of have your subtitles in the center here. Obviously, I probably should have given myself a little less headroom here if I wanted to put my subtitles right over the center, but that is a common thing, I’m going to show you something else with the subtitles in just a second when I kinda, I’m going to kind of work around this and show you how to take a horizontal video and turn it into a straight vertical video.
But basically, this is it for just a regular vertical video. I’m going to TikTok, Reels, or whatever. So let’s go back here. I’m not going to say that or anything. So let’s say you’re shooting horizontal and you want to take that horizontal video and so you’ve got a couple of options with that. So let me show you a couple of options you have.
So here’s the horizontal video. I’m going to click start a new video. So I have a couple of things. One is this one where we’re going to keep my video the same size and we’re going to put these bars on top and bottom of it. Okay, I don’t really recommend this one actually because it’s going to auto crop your video for you.
That’s just something we’ve done from the beginning, probably something we need to phase out quite frankly, but that’s going to auto crop and unless your video is perfectly square, I don’t think I would recommend that and I would not recommend this one. It’s really more there for artistic purposes than anything else.
But it’s not an ideal format because certain platforms are going to crop you right down the middle, which is why this one is really probably the only option that I would use. So let me just go ahead and choose that and we’ll start a new design. And then I’m going to show you what you could do with Clipscribe as it is now if you wanted to go take your horizontal video and go full vertical on it.
Okay, so I’m going to show you how to do that. It’s not perfect. It’s not a perfect way of doing this for a couple of reasons and I’ll explain that to you here. So if you just simply want to use this layout, you just use it as it is, add your headline. I still recommend you keep your headline somewhere down here and not put it way up here just because again, depending on the platform, it can get cropped off, you know, unless you’re only going to go to like TikTok or reels, but I know IGTV is going to crop it somewhere around here if you want it to be seen in Instagram and so that’s why I recommend you keeping your subtitles in your headline close to your video so that it will work in full vertical.
It’ll work when they crop it down, which is what they typically do. Okay, so let’s say you know, you want to have that full vertical option there. So let’s just get rid of these headlines and we’re going to turn off the bars here. You do that with these little eyeball icons where to turn off the top bar we’re going to turn off the top bar.
Alright, I’m sorry, the bottom bar, and then we’re going to use this video position option to size the video all the way up. Now, one of the reasons this isn’t ideal, just from a Clipscribe standpoint is because we don’t UpRes your preview video or your thumbnail image here. And so when you blow it up that big, it’s not going to look great only in the editor.
Okay, so just be aware of that until we’ll probably start encoding these larger versions because I think more people are going to start doing what I’m doing right here. But just be aware in the editor, that even if you have a full HD video, it’s not going to look stellar. It’s going to look like you blew it up. But when you export it, as long as your original video was full HD, you should be okay.
It shouldn’t still look pretty good and pretty clean and not look really poor quality. So blowing this up, I’m going to come over here to this grid option here, which gives me some snap and some like grid and canvas options. And I’m going to hit this one that says hide elements outside of the canvas.
Shoot Horizontal and be Cognizant
Okay? So that’s going to get rid of everything. But what is actually going to end up on the final video and then I’m going to reposition this a bit to make it centered here. You know, the only one of the issues with this is that unless you keep yourself very much centered in the frame, which a lot of us don’t it can get you in trouble because if you’re recording a vertical video and you’re looking at yourself and your camera, you’re going to know, oh, I’m getting out of the frame or whatever.
If you shoot a horizontal video, you just have to be cognizant of that. Maybe draw some imaginary lines on the side. You can even put some tape on your phone here. So if you wanted to shoot horizontal, but you could even put some you know, I don’t know some tape here. You could use a liquid carefully here what I’m about to say.
But I have some liquid glass markers, some whiteboard markers, you better be sure they wipe off though. I’m not telling you to take any kind of marker that’s going to leave a permanent thing on there. But as long as it’s something that will wipe off, that’s something that you could do as well and just basically put in some guides so that, you know, you’re not going out of the frame, which would be a really easy way of doing that.
So as you can see if I’m not cognizant of that in this video, you know, I could easily go off even there. I’m already kind of leaning almost out of the frame a little bit there. So just be aware of that. But this is a way that you can still shoot horizontally, still put your video on youtube, your website, or have a square version for Facebook or LinkedIn and still blow it up, you know, to the full vertical side if you want to, as long as you’re aware of kind of these issues that you might run into.
So that’s that like I said, you export it, it should look fine. And you could you know, you could size it down a bit if you want to and you could put the headline up here. I mean, you basically with, you know, TikTok, and I’m pretty sure with reels too I don’t think you have to deal as much with the cropping issue that you did with IGTV, but I’m not 100% sure of that with reels, but I am with TikTok.
New Clipscribe Features
So here’s the other question and, a lot of this is going to be addressed and resolved in the new update that’s coming, the new Clipscribe updates going to have just some really cool features. A lot of the stuff that, you’ve been asking for, a lot of stuff that you’re seeing going on, especially with these types of vertical videos.
But one of the things that I’m seeing more is subtitle words that are just like one or two words and so we do have an option for that. If you go into the subtitle editor here and I love some feedback on this. Because I believe it does it based on character. So you can reprocess your original subtitles and you can tell it like the maximum amount of characters on a single line that you want.
So if you only want 15 characters max, you could put that in there. The default is 30, now, it’s not totally exact, obviously different words and punctuation is factored into it as well. So I would love your feedback. If you’re using this. If you try to use this, you’re trying to shorten things up, just let me know how it works for you.
If you have any issues. It might be something that, we can look into and address just because this use case is a new kind of use case here. So let me know, you know, let me know in that if there’s something that needs to be tweaked or modified, we could even do it on a word basis.
Like I only want one word per line or I only want two words per line. I mean we could even do something like that. I mean the sky’s the limit as far as what can be done. I just want to hear from you as far as what you know, you would like to be done there but be aware that is an option for you to adjust how long those lines are, you know on your subtitles.
So that’s pretty much how you can create TikTok videos, Reels, and beyond. Either start with a vertical video or start with a horizontal one. But again, I’m going to say it one more time. Make sure you shoot full HD 1920 by 1080 or even 4k.
You can upload a 4k video. I don’t recommend it usually, but in this case, I might just because you’ll get that extra resolution if you blow your video up, you know, to vertical from horizontal. So might be a good idea. But I don’t generally recommend uploading 4k’s the files are huge and it can take a really long time and it can just make your experience not great.
So just be aware of that. Other than that, I think that covers it. So let me know what questions comments you have in the comments, anything else I can answer for you.