How to stack two interview speakers in one vertical frame
Ask Vizard Agent for a double frame and it builds one vertical shot with both speakers stacked. It measures where each person sits in the wide recording, draws a coordinate grid over a real frame to pin the crop boxes exactly, and re-measures for every scene where they move.
What do you type into Vizard Agent?
Ask for a double frame by name, and say where the location changes. The name is unambiguous in a way that "put them both in shot" is not, since that could mean a wide clip letterboxed into a vertical frame. A conversation that moves from a car to a street is two framing problems, and telling Vizard Agent so saves a round of fixes.
Prompt
What does Vizard Agent actually do?
A wide two-person shot doesn't crop down to vertical. Centre the frame and you get the gap between them; crop to one person and you lose the other. Stacking gives each person their own half of the frame, which only works if the crops are measured, scene by scene. In the session behind this article it:
- Checked the format of a ten-minute interview, transcribed it and built a contact sheet to see who sat where through the recording.
- Read the full transcript and picked the candidate clips for three vertical cuts.
- Measured the speaker positions on a full-resolution frame from the first scene, calculated the crop boxes and checked framing and balance on a layout preview.
- Drew a numbered pixel grid over a real frame and read the exact positions off it, instead of estimating them.
- Extracted frames from the outdoor scenes, where people stood differently, tested the split there and checked the timestamps around the transitions.
- Built word-timed captions, tested the burn on the composition and reviewed a test slice with captions and a headline.
When does this not work well?
Stacking halves the height available to each person, so the recording needs enough resolution to survive that crop, and each person has to be isolated without the two boxes overlapping. People sitting very close, more than two speakers and constant movement all break it, and heavy on-screen graphics get cut through the middle.
Common questions
Do I need two cameras? No. Vizard Agent crops both halves out of one wide recording.
What if the location changes? Vizard Agent measures each scene separately rather than reusing one crop.
Will the captions cover a face? No. Vizard Agent places them at the join and tests the result.