Auto Reframe: Convert a Horizontal Timeline to Vertical in Adobe Premiere Pro

One of the tasks editors are increasingly asked to do today is convert a horizontal timeline to vertical to post to social media.

Premiere makes this easy using Auto Reframe. Here’s how it works.

Here’s a timeline of a conversation between myself and Kylee Peña, Senior Product Marketing Manager for Professional Editorial at Adobe, recorded at the recent NAB Show in Las Vegas. I edited this for YouTube, but now need vertical versions for TikTok and LinkedIn.

First, I stripped out all titles and graphics, which most often don’t look good when converted to a different aspect ratio. However, Adobe reports that text titles created in Premiere generally convert OK.

Second, notice that I have individual clips, not a single edited movie. This is important, because Premiere individually scales and shifts each clip horizontally. If all you have is a single movie, use the Blade tool to break it into individual clips, or don’t use Auto Reframe.

NOTE: You can auto reframe individual clips; the Premiere help files describe how. However, in most cases, it will be far faster to reframe an entire sequence.

Select the sequence you want to reframe in the Project Panel.

Then, choose Sequence > Auto Reframe Sequence.

This panel appears. Give your soon-to-be-created project a name (I picked something obvious).

Next determine the aspect ratio. Premiere will pick the best frame size based on the media in your project.

Motion Tracking settings determine how many position keyframes to apply to each clip. As Adobe’s Help Files explain:

• Slower Motion. Appropriate for when there is very little or no camera motion (such as talking head interviews). When this control is used, results are almost static and the clip has very few keyframes.
• Default. Appropriate for most content. Here, the Auto Reframe effect follows the action, however the results may not be great if the action is very fast.
• Faster Motion. Appropriate for when there is a lot of motion in the footage and you want the Auto-Reframe effect to follow the action (such as in action sports or skateboarding videos). Here, Auto Reframe ensures the moving object is always in the frame, and adds a lot of keyframes to your clip.

Because this is an interview with essentially locked cameras, I chose Slower Motion.

The change to the new aspect ratio is almost instant.  Done.

NOTE: You can still manually adjust any clip by adjusting its horizontal position in the Effect Controls panel. All clips are scaled and positioned, but not cropped. The entire image is retain, though only a portion of it is visible.

THINGS TO KEEP IN MIND

• Auto Reframe does not work with still images.
• Don’t run Auto Reframe Sequence more than once on the same sequences. Weird things will happen.
• To preserve your original motion adjustments with your reframed sequence, apply clip nesting in the options at the bottom of the Auto Reframe panel.
• If you choose to nest clips, Premiere Pro places all of your video clips into a nest and uses the original cut points and track layering, leaving your graphics and audio unaffected.
• Select nesting if you have: Existing complex keyframes with motion that you want to retain – or – sequences that have speed and duration adjustments