Size, shape, and where to put the subject

Resolution is the number people quote and the one that matters least. Where the subject sits in the frame decides whether anyone watches.

Shoot bigger than you deliver

A 1080p frame is about two million pixels. A 4K frame is about eight million. If you deliver 1080 from a 4K source you gain two real things.

You can crop. Punching in to half the width of a 4K frame still leaves you 1920 pixels, which is a full quality 1080 shot. Do the same to a 1080 source and you have 960 pixels stretched to fill 1920, which is soft and obviously so. A second camera angle that does not exist can be cut out of a wide shot this way.

And you get a cleaner picture. Downscaling averages four pixels into one, which removes noise and hides small focus errors. Footage often looks sharper at 1080 from a 4K source than it does at native 4K.

Delivering 4K because you shot 4K is usually just a bigger file that most of your audience watches on a phone.

Vertical is not a crop

1080x1920 is vertical. It is a tall box, and the framing that works in it is different in kind from the framing that works at 16:9.

Take a wide shot that reads beautifully in landscape, crop it to 9:16, and the subject is now a small figure in the middle of a tall strip with empty floor above and below. The shot is not worse because it was cropped badly. It is worse because a wide shot and a tall frame want opposite things.

Frame for vertical at the shoot. Get closer. Use the height for something: a standing figure, a stack of two subjects, a foreground object leading up to the face. If you must convert landscape footage, expect to punch in hard and lose the sides entirely.

Where the interface covers your picture

The safe area used to be about televisions cutting off the edge of the frame. On phones it is about the application drawing over it.

On the vertical feeds, the bottom fifth of the frame carries the caption, the account name, the audio credit and a row of buttons. The right edge carries the like, comment and share column. Anything you put in either place is covered on the platform and visible only in your editor, which is why so many videos have a title nobody can read.

Keep text and faces inside the middle 80 percent vertically and clear of the right sixth. If your tool draws safe areas, turn them on and leave them on.

Fit or fill, decided once

Put content of one shape into a frame of another shape and you choose between two things.

Fit keeps the whole picture and adds black bars. Nothing is lost and the picture is smaller. Fill keeps the frame full and throws away whatever hangs over the edges. Nothing is wasted and the composition may be ruined.

Neither is correct in general. Fit a wide landscape into vertical and you get a small strip in a sea of black. Fill it and you cut the subject's head off. When both are bad, reframe the shot with a deliberate crop and a slow push so the eye has somewhere to go.

The composition rules that survive contact

Thirds works because it leaves the subject room to look or move into. It is a guideline. Dead centre is strong and deliberate when someone is addressing the camera, and it is the right choice for most talking heads.

Headroom is the gap above the head. Too much and the subject sinks to the bottom of the frame like they are in a hole. Too little and they look squashed against the top. Put the eyes near the upper third line and the headroom sorts itself out.

Lead room is space in front of where someone is looking or walking. Without it they appear about to collide with the edge of the frame. It is the single most common framing error in interview footage.

The 180 degree rule says to keep the camera on one side of the line between two people. Cross it and they appear to swap places on the cut, which reads as them turning away from each other. Audiences cannot name this when it happens. They just find the scene confusing.

Shot sizes and what each one is for

• Wide shows where you are and how people relate in space. It carries no emotion and it disappears on a phone.
• Medium, roughly waist up, is the workhorse. Close enough to read a face, wide enough to see a gesture.
• Close is where emotion lives and where every flaw in focus, lighting and skin shows up. It is the least forgiving frame there is.

Cut between sizes rather than between two shots of the same size, which is what produces a jump cut. Change the angle by at least 30 degrees or the size by a clear step, and the cut disappears.

Rolling shutter, since nobody warns you

Most sensors read the image from top to bottom rather than all at once, so anything moving fast is recorded at slightly different moments down the frame. Vertical lines lean during a pan. Propellers bend. Camera shake becomes a wobble that looks like jelly.

Software correction exists and it crops and softens to do its job. The fix is to pan more slowly, which costs nothing.