Vertical layouts for stream clips: facecam on top, full frame, or blurred background
A stream is wide: 16:9, gameplay filling the frame, a webcam in a corner. TikTok, YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels want tall 9:16 video. Cropping the middle of a wide frame loses the face, the game or both. There are three layouts that work for most streams, and vodformer can draft a clip in any of them.
1. Facecam on top, gameplay below
The webcam goes in a band across the top of the frame, and a crop of the gameplay fills the rest. Viewers see the reaction and what caused it at the same time, which is why this is the usual layout for gaming clips.
It works when the webcam is a fixed overlay in the same spot all stream, and when the action in the game is near the middle of the screen. It works less well for games whose important bits sit at the edges, like a minimap or a kill feed.
2. Face full frame
The crop follows the streamer’s face and fills the whole vertical frame. This is the layout for “just chatting” and IRL streams, where the streamer’s face is the content and there’s no gameplay to show.
3. Gameplay over a blurred copy of itself
The whole wide frame is scaled to fit the width of the vertical one, and a blurred, zoomed-in copy of the same video fills the space above and below. Nothing is cropped away, so nothing important gets lost.
This is the safe choice when there is no fixed webcam, when the cam moves between scenes, or when the whole screen matters. The cost is that the picture is small on a phone, so text in the game can be hard to read.
How vodformer chooses
When it drafts a clip, vodformer looks for a face in the video. A face in a small, fixed box that stays put is treated as a webcam overlay, and the clip gets facecam on top. A face that fills much of the frame gets the full-frame layout. If it can’t find a steady webcam, it falls back to the blurred background, which never cuts anything off.
The detected webcam box is saved per channel, and if it’s wrong, you move it in the editor. The layout is set per piece of the timeline, not per clip, so one clip can start full frame on the streamer’s face and switch to facecam on top when the game starts.
A few tips that hold for any layout
- Keep captions away from the seam between the webcam band and the gameplay, where they cover both.
- Leave the bottom and the right edge clear. Each platform puts its buttons, the caption text and the account name there.
- Check the first second. Viewers decide fast, so make sure the opening frame shows a face or the action, not a loading screen.
vodformer is in a closed alpha. Join the waitlist to try it.