Before you resize anything, the first question is which shape you actually need — get that wrong and no amount of "auto resize" fixes it afterwards.
Which ratio goes where
| Platform | Best ratio | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| TikTok | 9:16 | Full-screen vertical; anything else gets letterboxed |
| Instagram Reels | 9:16 | Same as TikTok |
| Instagram feed post | 1:1 or 4:5 | 4:5 gets more vertical space in-feed than 1:1 |
| YouTube Shorts | 9:16 | Under 3 minutes, vertical |
| YouTube (regular) | 16:9 | The original widescreen standard |
| LinkedIn / X feed | 1:1 | Square holds up consistently across both |
Posting the same clip to TikTok, Reels and Shorts needs only one 9:16 export. Feed posts and regular YouTube need a separate export — there’s no single ratio that covers everywhere.
Resizing and reframing are two different problems
“Resize” gets used loosely, but there are really two operations:
- Resizing changes the canvas — e.g. 1920×1080 (16:9) becomes 1080×1920 (9:16).
- Reframing decides what stays in the shot once the canvas changes shape — which part of a horizontal frame survives the crop.
A plain online resize tool handles the first part fine. It rarely handles the second, because a naive resize just crops from the centre or stretches the footage — which is how a speaker’s head gets cut off, or one of two people in frame disappears entirely.
Doing it without losing the shot
- Decide the output ratio first, from the table above, rather than resizing and figuring out where to post it afterwards.
- Use subject-aware or face-tracking cropping if someone is talking. A fixed centre crop only holds up for a single, stationary subject.
- Check the edges after resizing — anything important that landed outside the new frame needs a different crop, not a resize you accept as-is.
- Export at the platform’s expected resolution — 1080×1920 for 9:16, 1080×1080 for square — instead of an arbitrary size that gets recompressed on upload.
If a resized clip already looks off — jittery cropping, a subject drifting out of frame, the wrong part of the shot in view — that’s a reframing problem, not a resizing one. See why auto-reframing looks wrong for the specific fixes.
At scale
Resizing one clip by hand is a five-minute job. Resizing and correctly reframing fifteen clips cut from an hour of source video is where doing it manually stops making sense.
Soft Clipper exports the same source clip to 9:16, 1:1 and 16:9 directly, with face-tracking crop — plus fit-and-blur, split-screen and centre fallback modes for shots where tracking one face doesn’t apply — so the resize and the reframe happen in one pass instead of two.