How to join clips whose frames are different sizes without stretching them
Tell Vizard Agent that nothing may be stretched to fit. It measures every clip's real dimensions, picks one canvas, fits each clip inside it at its true proportions, and fills whatever space is left with a soft background derived from that clip's own frames, so the joins read as design rather than as bars.
What do you type into Vizard Agent?
Rule out stretching in a sentence of its own. Squeezing everything to one frame is what Vizard Agent would otherwise default to, because it's the only way to make four differently shaped clips identical, and it's the one outcome you can't accept. Give it all the clips at once, so the canvas suits the whole set.
Prompt
What does Vizard Agent actually do?
The layout is built on measured dimensions, because a container can report a size the picture doesn't actually have. The first joined version is honest and slightly ugly, with empty fields in it. Filling that space with a blurred, darkened version of the same clip turns a compromise into an intentional treatment. In the session behind this article it:
- Checked the parameters of four vertical clips that shared a width but had three different heights, and confirmed every source file was reachable and complete.
- Reviewed the four sources together as one contact sheet and checked the audio tracks and the intended order.
- Joined them into one video with nothing deformed, then inspected the start, the joins and the ending.
- Replaced the empty fields with a soft background taken from the frames themselves, normalised the frame parameters and rendered again.
- Added overlapping transitions and checked them before, during and after, since an overlap borrows time that clips of different lengths don't all have.
When does this not work well?
Very different shapes can't be reconciled kindly. Mixing a tall vertical with a wide landscape on one canvas leaves so much empty space that the background treatment becomes most of the screen, and cutting rather than fitting is the better answer. Very low-resolution clips look soft when fitted, and clips with their own bars need trimming first.
Common questions
Why not just scale them to fit? Because that deforms faces and text. Vizard Agent fits them honestly instead.
Is a blurred background better than black? Usually, and it reads as intentional. Ask Vizard Agent for either.
What if the clips are different frame rates? Vizard Agent normalises them rather than letting the speeds drift.