How to reframe a video without moving the graphic that is locked into it
Tell Vizard Agent which element is locked. A finished master usually contains a fixed graphic, such as a leaderboard, a rank strip or a scoreboard, sitting above footage that can move. It measures where each band starts and ends, reframes only the footage under the graphic, and previews each proposed crop on real source frames before rendering anything.
What do you type into Vizard Agent?
Name the locked element and the target format in the same sentence. "Make it vertical" is an instruction about the frame as a whole. Naming the graphic turns it into an instruction about two separate regions, which is what the video actually is underneath. Mention anything baked into the footage too, such as stream text or captions.
Prompt
What does Vizard Agent actually do?
Reframing normally treats a video as one picture, so the crop shifts the graphic too, and a leaderboard that moves between shots stops being a leaderboard. Once Vizard Agent has measured the two bands, the crop becomes a problem inside a smaller rectangle and the graphic is simply carried through untouched. In the session behind this article it:
- Inspected the master of a ranking video at each of its key beats and measured the graphic band and the footage band separately.
- Set the crop to work only inside the footage band, checked the subject's position in each segment, and rendered and reviewed the crops at full size.
- Found a segment where text baked into the source footage clashed with the crop, tightened that crop, then moved it below the baked-in band when tightening wasn't enough. That one segment was re-cropped four times.
- Previewed the deeper crop on three source frames, the setup, the punchline and the payoff, before rendering it.
- Rendered the final version and verified the graphic had not moved anywhere in the video.
When does this not work well?
If the graphic occupies too much of the frame, there may not be enough footage band left to crop within. A graphic that moves or resizes during the video can't be treated as a fixed band, and one that gets stretched by the reframe needs redrawing rather than carrying over. Very different aspect ratios and low-resolution masters make it harder too.
Common questions
Why not crop the whole frame? Because the graphic moves with it, and viewers read it positionally. Vizard Agent keeps it still.
What about text burnt into the source? Vizard Agent treats it as a second constraint on the crop.
Can I see a crop before it renders? Yes. Ask Vizard Agent for previews on source frames.