Glossary · video-technical
What is Aspect ratio?
Aspect ratio is the shape of the frame, written as width to height. Three matter now: 16:9 for landscape YouTube and Facebook video, 9:16 for the full-screen vertical formats such as Shorts, Reels, TikTok and WhatsApp status, and 4:5 or 1:1 for the Instagram feed, which occupy more phone screen than a landscape post. The practical decision happens before you shoot, not in the edit, because you cannot invent picture that was never recorded. Filming landscape and cropping to vertical throws away most of the frame and usually cuts off heads.
What does Aspect ratio mean for a business in Pakistan?
Most local footage still arrives from a phone held horizontally out of habit, which forces a bad crop later. The fix is deciding the destination first: if it is going to Reels and TikTok, film vertical; if it is a YouTube explainer, film landscape and plan the vertical cuts as separate takes. Filming 4K landscape leaves room to crop a 1080p vertical out of it, which is the one workable compromise.
A worked example
A 4K landscape clip is 3840x2160. A 9:16 crop out of it measures 1215x2160, which is about 32% of the original width, so the subject has to be framed inside the middle third at the shoot or their head leaves the frame. Recording the same interview twice, once each way, costs eight extra minutes and removes the problem.
Terms that go with this one
These come up in the same conversations and are worth reading together.
- Safe zonesafe zoneA safe zone is the part of the frame where your text and important subject will not be covered by the app's own interface or trimmed by a crop. Every…
- Burned-in captionshard captions / burned-in captionsBurned-in captions are text rendered permanently into the video's pixels at export, so they cannot be switched off, restyled or translated…
- Cross-postingcross-postingCross-posting is publishing the same piece on more than one platform. It is worth doing, because audiences barely overlap, but the naive version —…
- ThumbnailthumbnailA thumbnail is the still image that represents your video before anyone presses play, and together with the title it decides whether the video gets…
- RepurposingrepurposingRepurposing is turning one piece of content into several formats for several places, rather than making everything from scratch. A recorded interview…
Aspect ratio — quick answers
What does Aspect ratio mean?
Aspect ratio is the shape of the frame, written as width to height. Three matter now: 16:9 for landscape YouTube and Facebook video, 9:16 for the full-screen vertical formats such as Shorts, Reels, TikTok and WhatsApp status, and 4:5 or 1:1 for the Instagram feed, which occupy more phone screen than a landscape post.
Aspect ratio ko Urdu mein kya kehte hain?
ایسپیکٹ ریشو — though in practice almost everyone in Pakistan says "aspect ratio". Most local footage still arrives from a phone held horizontally out of habit, which forces a bad crop later.
Why does Aspect ratio matter for a business in Pakistan?
Most local footage still arrives from a phone held horizontally out of habit, which forces a bad crop later. The fix is deciding the destination first: if it is going to Reels and TikTok, film vertical; if it is a YouTube explainer, film landscape and plan the vertical cuts as separate takes. Filming 4K landscape leaves room to crop a 1080p vertical out of it, which is the one workable compromise.
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