Vertical video and the live backdrop

A landscape screen recording put on a portrait canvas leaves two large empty strips. Cilevi gives you three ways to deal with them.

1. A background

The wallpaper or gradient shows through, which is the plain option and often the right one.

2. The live backdrop

On the Background tab, choose the option that fills the space with the recording itself: the picture is enlarged to cover the whole canvas, blurred and dimmed, and your real recording sits sharp on top of it.

Blur sets how soft it is and Darkness how far it is pushed back. Both matter. Too little blur and the viewer's eye keeps trying to read the giant copy behind. Too little darkness and the sharp recording stops standing out from it.

This is the look that vertical video on every platform has converged on, and it beats an empty bar because there is no dead space in the frame.

The backdrop moves with the picture. When a zoom pushes in, the blurred copy behind pushes in with it, which is what stops the two halves of the frame looking like two different videos.

3. The camera above the screen

If you recorded with the camera on, put it in the space instead. See Split screen and stacked layouts.

The best version of this is decided before you record, not after: the portrait size presets on the recorder have an option that leaves the upper part of the frame for the camera and captures only the lower part from the screen.

What to check before you publish

Play the whole thing once at the vertical size. Text that was comfortable on a 16:9 canvas is smaller here, because the same recording is being shown at a narrower width. If it is too small to read, reduce the padding, or add a zoom, or record the next one at a portrait size in the first place.