Aspect ratio crop
Also known as: reframing crop, format crop
Cutting a widescreen frame down to a different shape, usually square or vertical, so one recording can be published in more than one place.
Updated
What it means
A camera records one shape. Publishing wants several, so the frame is cropped rather than reshot, and the question becomes which part of the picture survives. Nothing is added; something is always lost.
The arithmetic is unforgiving. Taking a 9:16 slice out of a 16:9 frame keeps under a third of the width, so a Vertical video (9:16) crop discards most of what was recorded.
Aspect ratio is the format itself; the crop is the operation that changes it. One is a property of the file, the other is a decision somebody made.
How it works in practice
The safe approach is filming for the crop. Keeping the subject near the centre and leaving headroom means a vertical version exists without reframing every shot by hand. The composition is slightly compromised everywhere and ruined nowhere.
Where it was not planned, movement saves it. Keyframe animation on the crop position follows a rider across the frame, which is slower than filming wide and better than losing them.
Resolution is the budget. A 4K video source survives a vertical crop and still delivers a sharp 1080p result, while a 1080p source does not. Shooting larger than you deliver is what makes the crop painless.
What to watch out for
Cropping tight loses context. An action shot works because of what surrounds the subject, and a vertical slice of a wide landscape frequently removes the reason the shot existed. A jump without the gap below it is a person in the air.
Burned-in elements break first. A Lower third or a Burned-in subtitle positioned for widescreen lands outside the crop, which is why those are added after the format is chosen.
Automatic cropping follows the wrong subject in a group. Smart crop tracks what it judges to be important, and in a lineup of four riders that is not reliably the one who matters.
How RawClip handles it
Where a vertical or square version is wanted, the crop is applied to the assembled sequence rather than to each source clip, with the subject tracked so it stays in frame. A wider original gives that step room to work, which is the argument for recording at the largest shape available.