How to get a proper landscape cut out of a vertical video

Last updated 2026-08-25 · 7 min read

What is the short version?

Going from vertical to landscape means throwing picture away, and the first question is which pixels are actually picture. Vertical files are frequently padded with borders or bars, and cropping without measuring means cutting the subject to preserve blank space.

1. Go to Vizard Agent and upload the vertical video.
2. Say you want a full landscape version.
3. Say what has to stay in frame.

What do you need before you start?

The video and a priority. Vizard Agent finds the real content boundaries itself, so you do not need to know how the file was padded. Saying what must survive is the useful instruction, since landscape from vertical always loses something and the choice of what should be yours.

• The vertical video. At whatever resolution it is.
• What must stay. A face, a product, on-screen text.
• Full resolution. Say so, or you get a small crop.
• The audio. Usually kept as it is.
• Where it is going. A site, a television, a presentation.

What do you type into Vizard Agent?

Ask for full landscape rather than just landscape. Vizard Agent treats the word "full" as an instruction to upscale the crop back to a proper delivery resolution instead of handing back the smaller frame that cropping naturally produces.

Prompt

Variants worth knowing:

• A specific aspect. Sixteen by nine, or something wider.
• An upscale. So the crop comes back at full delivery resolution.
• A fixed subject position. If the subject moves and must stay centred.

What does Vizard Agent actually do?

Here is the order Vizard Agent worked in on a real conversion. Most of the work is measurement, and the specific measurement is unusual: it read individual rows and columns of pixels to find where the real image stopped.

1. Inspects the video and extracts preview frames as a contact sheet.
2. Pulls a sample frame from the middle and views it at full size.
3. Analyses the frame geometry and measures the exact inner frame boundaries.
4. Extracts cropped sample frames and reviews them as a grid.
5. Analyses the audio properties and loudness, then listens to the track.
6. Analyses the border pixel rows and checks the left and right boundary columns to confirm where the padding sits.
7. Crops to a true sixteen by nine landscape frame from the measured content area.
8. Uploads the crop for super-resolution processing and upscales it to full landscape resolution.
9. Reviews the upscaled frames, checks the edges for artefacts, analyses the loudness normalisation and renders the final full-resolution landscape video.

Step 6 is the measurement that makes the crop correct. A vertical video with letterboxing looks like one picture and is really a smaller picture inside a frame, and cropping the visible rectangle rather than the real one wastes a third of what you have.

What does the result look like?

From the run this page is written from, probed on the delivered file: 1920x1080, H.264, 24fps, 13.99 seconds, AAC audio. Full landscape at delivery resolution, fourteen seconds, cropped from the measured content area and upscaled so the frame is genuinely 1080p rather than a stretched smaller crop.

Delivering at true 1920x1080 is the point of the upscale step. Cropping a vertical video to sixteen by nine leaves a frame far smaller than that, and handing it back at its natural size makes it unusable for the places landscape video actually goes.

When does this not work well?

This conversion removes picture by definition, and exactly how much it removes depends entirely on how the original was framed when it was shot. Vizard Agent measures the real content and upscales the crop, and neither of those creates image that was never captured in the first place.

• You lose the top and bottom. A vertical composition puts important things there.
• Upscaling recovers resolution, not detail. The crop is enlarged, not improved.
• A moving subject is harder. If they leave the landscape band, something has to follow them.
• Burnt-in vertical captions get cut. They were positioned for a different shape.
• Some videos should not be converted. A composition built for vertical rarely survives it.

How do you fix a result that came back wrong?

Name what got cut off. Vizard Agent keeps the measured content boundaries, every crop sample and the upscaled frames, so shifting the crop band or changing the target aspect is a re-render against measurements Vizard Agent has already made.

• "His head is cut off." The crop band moved against the measured content area.
• "The caption is gone." Repositioned, or the crop adjusted to keep it.
• "The edges look soft." Re-checked after the upscale and re-rendered.

How does Vizard Agent compare to doing it yourself?

By hand this means dragging a sixteen by nine crop box over a vertical file and exporting, which produces a small landscape frame with a badly chosen band of picture in it. The padding is the part nobody thinks about, because it looks like part of the image until you measure it.

Common questions

Why not just crop it in an editor? Because a padded vertical file contains a smaller picture inside a larger frame, and cropping what you see wastes part of what you have.

Will the result be full resolution? Yes if you ask for it. Vizard Agent upscales the crop back to a proper delivery size rather than handing back the smaller frame that cropping naturally produces.

How much do I lose? The top and bottom. How much that costs depends entirely on how the video was composed.

Can Vizard Agent keep a moving subject in frame? Yes, with a tracking crop, and it costs more of the picture at the edges.

What is padding and why does it matter? Many vertical files are a smaller image sitting inside blank borders, added when the video was exported or reposted. It looks like part of the picture, and cropping around it rather than through it is the difference between using all your image and using two thirds of it.

Will burnt-in captions survive? Often not. They were placed for a vertical frame and usually sit outside the landscape band.

Does Vizard Agent keep the audio? Yes. Vizard Agent analyses the loudness normalisation before the final render rather than passing the track through untouched.

Can Vizard Agent do a wider aspect than sixteen by nine? Yes. Name the aspect and Vizard Agent measures the content area and crops to that instead.

Does this work the other way round too? Yes, and that is a different job with different problems, covered separately.

Does Vizard Agent check the finished video? Yes. It reviews a full timeline sheet and verifies the render quality and sync before delivery.