Before You Export: A Checklist for Formats and Delivery

Moving from horizontal to square or vertical removes picture from the sides. Before you export, scrub through your timeline and look at every shot in the new frame. A speaker standing at the left edge of a wide shot can vanish entirely once the frame narrows, and a caption placed near a corner may be cut off.

Reframing means choosing, shot by shot, which part of the image survives. Some shots will work with a simple centre crop. Others need to be shifted so a face or a key object stays inside. A few simply do not suit a tall frame and should be swapped for a closer angle from the same recording.

Do this check on the actual dimensions rather than imagining it. A rough preview on a phone, held at arm's length, tells you more than any amount of squinting at a large monitor.

Captions that sit comfortably in a wide frame can become cramped or clipped in a narrow one. When you duplicate a project for a new format, review the text layer again instead of assuming it carried over cleanly. Line lengths often need to be shortened so each caption fits in two lines without crowding the speaker's face.

Check the margins as well. Phone interfaces place buttons and labels over the lower part of a vertical video, so captions placed at the very bottom can be covered. Moving them slightly up usually solves it without changing the wording.

Keep the words themselves identical across versions. If a speaker says something in a particular way, the caption should match it in all three formats, so no version quietly changes what was meant.

Different places expect different running times, and the length you chose when planning should still hold after reframing. If the vertical version needs to be shorter, trim whole moments rather than rushing everything. Compare the durations of your versions side by side and make sure each one still tells the story from beginning to end.

Then look at the technical settings. Pick a frame size that matches the format, keep the frame rate the same as your source footage, and choose a quality level that balances sharpness with a file small enough to send. A huge file that will not upload or arrive by message helps nobody.

Export a short test clip first. It takes a minute and lets you check sound levels, caption placement and file size before you commit to a full render that could take much longer.

Once the exports are done, watch each file from the start, on the device it is meant for. Do not rely on the editing window. Open the vertical version on a phone, the square one in a feed-sized preview and the wide one on a laptop, and check that sound, captions and cuts behave as intended.

Listen with headphones for a moment and then with the speaker alone. Spoken comments should stay clear, and nothing should sound clipped at a cut. If a speaker's remark now feels shorter or sharper than it did in the original, go back and restore the missing context.

Ask one other person to watch without explanation. If they can tell you what the event was and what mattered, the delivery has done its job. If not, note what confused them and adjust.

The last items on the list are the dull ones that save the most time later. Give each file a clear name that includes the event, the format and a version number, so nobody sends the square cut when the vertical one was requested. Keep the project file and the exports together in a single folder.

Decide in advance how the files will reach people. A shared folder link, a message attachment and an upload to a page each have different size limits, and finding that out after a long render is frustrating.

Finally, confirm that you have permission to share the recording in each place you plan to use it. The footage must be authorised for the way you are using it, and that is worth checking before a single file leaves your hands.