Split screen and stacked layouts

By default the camera is a small box over the recording. It does not have to be.

On the Camera tab, the layout choice offers a block of its own: the camera takes part of the canvas and the screen takes the rest, with neither covering the other.

Side by side puts them in two halves of a landscape canvas.

Stacked puts the camera across the top and the screen underneath, which is the shape that works on a portrait canvas.

Camera share

Camera share is how much of the canvas the camera block gets. The screen has the rest. Push it up for a talking head with a bit of screen, down for a demonstration with a face in the corner of your eye.

What happens to each picture inside its block

Screen shows decides how the recording is fitted into its block. A recording taller than its block keeps the full width of the canvas and loses a little top and bottom, rather than being shrunk until there are empty sides. For a stacked portrait layout that is the right trade: a screen recording squeezed to a letterbox strip is unreadable, and a recording that fills the width and loses a slice is not.

The camera fills its own block the same way: what you cropped, and as much around it as the block's shape needs.

When to use it

A talking head introduction. Twenty seconds of your face at the start with the screen beside it, then back to an inset camera for the demonstration. That is a Camera clip on the timeline; see When the camera is on screen.

Anything vertical. The camera in the empty top strip is better than a blurred backdrop there, because it is a picture with something in it.

A conversation about a screen rather than a walkthrough of one, where the face is as much the content as the screen is.