Faces Getting Cut Off in Vertical Clips? Fix the Crop

A face cut off in a vertical clip is almost always a crop-position problem, not a camera problem: the 9:16 box is sitting too low over a wider source, so it slices the forehead or the chin. Raise the crop until the eyeline lands on the upper third and re-center on the speaker. If every clip is cut the same way, the cause moved upstream, to how you sat when you recorded.

That split is the whole fix. There are two different reasons a head gets chopped, they have two different solutions, and trying the wrong one wastes an afternoon. The crop position is what the editor does to the footage you already have. The recording position is the footage itself, where you sat, how much headroom the camera left, whether you drifted out of frame mid-sentence. One you fix in two minutes. The other you fix at the next record.

Below is the diagnostic that tells them apart, a safe-zone map for where a face can actually live in a 9:16 frame, and the exact crop moves for each cause.

Why do faces get cut off when you go from wide to vertical?

Because a 9:16 clip is only about a third as wide as a 16:9 recording, so building the vertical frame means cropping a tall slice out of the wide one. Whatever positions that slice, an auto-reframe guess or your own drag, decides whether the forehead and chin survive the cut.

A 16:9 podcast recording is wider than it is tall. A 9:16 clip is the opposite, taller than it is wide. To make the vertical clip, something has to crop a tall slice out of the wide frame, and there is a lot of room to get its vertical position wrong.

When the footage is wide, two people at a table, a host sitting back from the camera with room on both sides, the vertical slice is narrow. There is a lot of horizontal room to get the crop wrong. Drop the slice a little and the top of the head goes. Lift it and the chin goes. Most auto-reframe tools aim for the face center, which works until the speaker is animated, stands up, leans in, or there are two heads and the box can only hold one well. See framing two speakers in one vertical clip when there is more than one head in the shot, that is a different problem with a different fix.

The face safe-zone map for 9:16

A 9:16 frame is 1080 × 1920 pixels, and the picture you see in the editor is not the picture the viewer sees. Each app stacks its own interface on top of the video. Roughly the top eighth and the bottom fifth of the frame get covered: a clock and status icons up top, then the username, the caption, the music ticker, and a vertical column of like-comment-share buttons crowding the bottom and right. That bottom band is the same one your captions fight for, covered in detail in the caption placement and safe-zone guide.

For a face, the consequence is specific. You have a usable band running from just under the top UI down to where the bottom caption zone begins, call it roughly 12% from the top to 18% from the bottom. The head should live inside that band, with the eyeline near the upper third of the full frame. Put the eyeline there and three good things happen at once: the forehead clears the top UI, the chin clears the captions, and the face reads at the natural focal height the eye expects.

The common mistake is centering the head vertically in the whole frame. That looks balanced in the editor and wrong in the app, because the centered head drops too low, the chin lands in the caption zone and the picture feels bottom-heavy. Aim higher than feels right. The app's UI eats the bottom, so your composition should too.

The one-question diagnostic: recording or crop?

Here is the question that splits every cut-off head into one of two buckets, and points you straight at the fix. Are all your clips cut the same way, or only some?

If the cut-off is consistent, every clip from an episode chops the same forehead, the same drift to the left, the same too-low chin, the cause is the recording. The crop is faithfully reproducing a problem that was baked into the footage. No amount of re-cropping fixes a head that was never fully in the source frame.

If the cut-off is inconsistent, some clips are fine, others slice the head, and the bad ones cluster around moments where the speaker moved, leaned in, or got animated, the cause is the crop. The footage held the whole head; the vertical box just failed to follow it.

The reason this matters: a crop fix is instant and only touches the clips you are exporting now. A recording fix costs nothing but does nothing for the episode already in the can, it only pays off at the next session. Most shows have both problems at once. Patch the crop on today's clips, then change one thing about your setup so the next batch needs no patching.

Fixing a crop-position cut-off (the clips you have now)

When the footage holds the whole head and only some clips chop it, work the crop. These moves apply whether you are dragging a box in an editor or correcting an auto-reframe.

1. Raise the box until the eyeline hits the upper third. This single move fixes the majority of chopped foreheads. Do not center the head in the frame, center the eyeline on the upper-third line and let the chin fall where it will above the caption band.
2. Leave a sliver of headroom. A face pinned hard to the top edge reads as cramped and risks the top UI clipping the hair. A thin gap above the head looks intentional. A lot of gap wastes the frame and pushes the face down into the caption zone, that is the over-correction.
3. Re-center horizontally on the active speaker. A head sliced on the side rather than the top is a horizontal-centering miss. The box is tracking the wrong person or the wrong half of the frame. Drag it onto the speaker who is talking.
4. Keyframe the movers. If a clip is fine at the start and chops the head when the speaker leans in, the crop needs to move with them. Add a position keyframe at the lean so the box follows the face instead of holding still while the face exits.
5. Check it in a real phone preview, not the editor canvas. Your timeline shows the full 1080 × 1920. The phone shows it under UI. A chin that looks clear in the editor can sit under the caption in the app.

Fixing a recording-position cut-off (so the next batch is clean)

When the cut is identical on every clip, the head was never fully usable in the source. You cannot crop your way out. Change the setup, and the same auto-reframe that chopped this episode will sail through the next one.

• Sit centered, with margin on both sides. A 9:16 crop pulls a narrow strip from the middle of your wide shot. If you sit off to one side, the strip misses you. Center yourself and leave horizontal room so the vertical box has somewhere safe to land.
• Leave headroom in the wide shot. A wide frame with no gap above your head gives the cropper nothing to work with, any vertical slice that keeps your eyes also keeps the top edge tight against your hair. A little headroom in the source becomes flexibility in the crop.
• Frame for the tall slice, not the wide one. If you only ever publish vertical clips, compose the recording with the vertical crop in mind: yourself near the horizontal center, upright posture, minimal lateral drift. Two hosts who sit far apart force the very tiny-floating-heads compromise covered in the two-speaker vertical framing guide.
• Watch the drift. Hosts lean toward the mic, gesture, and slide out of frame over a long episode. The cropper follows where it can, but a head that physically left the source frame is gone. A wider, looser source shot absorbs the movement.

Good recording technique is the cheapest fix on this whole page, it costs one habit, not a subscription. As Podcast Studio Glasgow puts it, treating clips as a production output from day one beats trying to rescue footage that was never framed for them.

Common mistakes that keep chopping heads

• Centering the head vertically. The single most common error. A head centered in the full 1080 × 1920 sits too low once the app's bottom UI loads. Aim the eyeline at the upper third instead.
• Trusting the editor canvas over the app. The editor shows the clean frame; the viewer sees it under buttons and captions. A face that clears in the timeline can sit under the username in the feed. Most social video is watched on mute and read through captions, Digiday reported around 85% of Facebook video was watched silent (Digiday, 2016, publisher-reported and directional), so the caption band is always there, always eating the bottom.
• Re-cropping a recording problem. If every clip is cut the same way, more cropping just relocates the slice. Diagnose first.
• Over-correcting into too much headroom. Lifting the crop to save the forehead, then lifting it too far, leaves a gap of ceiling above the head and pushes the chin into the caption zone. Save the head; do not float it.
• Letting auto-reframe ride on animated speakers. Auto-reframe is strong on a still talking head and weaker when someone moves fast. Every AI clipping step still needs a human review pass, how AI clip detection actually works explains where the tooling helps and where your eyes are still required. Spot-check the lively clips.

FAQ

Why is the top of my head cut off in TikTok and Reels but fine in my editor? Because the app stacks its interface over the video and you composed for the clean frame. Roughly the top eighth and bottom fifth of a 9:16 frame get covered by UI. Raise the crop so the eyeline sits on the upper third and preview on an actual phone before publishing.

Should I fix the crop or change how I record? Check whether every clip is cut the same way or only some. Same cut on every clip means the recording, sit centered with headroom next time. Scattered cuts mean the crop, raise and re-center the box per clip. Most shows need both.

Where should a face sit in a 9:16 vertical clip? Keep the eyeline near the upper third of the frame, with a sliver of headroom above and the chin clear of the bottom caption-and-button band, roughly the central region between 12% from the top and 18% from the bottom. That clears both the top and bottom UI at once.

Can auto-reframe cut off faces? Yes, especially when a speaker leans in, gestures, stands, or there are two heads and the box can only hold one well. Auto-reframe handles a steady talking head well; for animated moments, add a keyframe so the crop follows the face, or correct the box by hand.

My clip is also the wrong shape entirely, not just the crop. That is a different fix. If the export came out square or letterboxed rather than full 9:16, start with fixing a clip exported in the wrong aspect ratio, then return here to position the face inside the correct frame. A cropped face on top of a cropped frame compounds quickly, and it is one of the issues behind clips that quietly get no views. Movement helps too, once the framing is right, add motion to clips that feel static.