How to cut two masters from rushes that are half portrait and half landscape
Ask Vizard Agent to rank every clip by duration and orientation before it cuts anything, then build the vertical master from the clips shot vertically and the landscape master from the clips shot landscape. The two films will not contain identical shots, and that is the point: cropping across orientations is what puts black bars down the sides or cuts heads off.
What do you type into Vizard Agent?
Rule out the compromise explicitly when you brief Vizard Agent. Left to pick for itself, the sensible-looking plan is one edit delivered in two shapes, and that plan is exactly what produces the pillarboxing and cropped heads you're trying to avoid. Ask for the sort to happen first, before any editorial decision.
Prompt
What does Vizard Agent actually do?
Sorting by orientation turns one impossible edit into two straightforward ones, because each cut works from material that already fits its frame. The sort comes before any creative choice, and only the few essential shots in the wrong orientation get reframed. Four shots reframed is a different job from a hundred and forty cropped. In the session behind this article it:
- Probed all hundred and forty-one phone clips from an event for duration and format, and ranked them by duration and orientation.
- Extracted the vertical shots with their live audio and reviewed them as contact sheets.
- Re-cropped the few weak vertical shots, filled a gap and tiled the replacements for review.
- Extracted the longer landscape shots, including slow motion, reviewed every one, and reframed the four weakest.
- Assembled each master separately, with its own grade, titles and mix.
When does this not work well?
The approach needs a reasonable amount of both. If ninety per cent of the day was shot one way round, the other master has too little material for Vizard Agent to work with, and reframing becomes the whole job again. A moment that exists only once has to cross and be reframed, and a clip rotated mid-take usually needs splitting first.
Common questions
Will the two cuts match shot for shot? No, and they should not. Vizard Agent reports what each master ended up containing.
What if a key moment is only in one orientation? It gets reframed deliberately. Vizard Agent flags which shots those are.
Can it tell me the split before deciding? Yes. Ask Vizard Agent for the orientation ranking and decide from the numbers.