A landscape recording has a person somewhere in it: shortshort's face tracking places the 9:16 crop on the face on screen and moves it as they move, and tracks the face again for a 4:5 export. Slides and wide shots stay full-frame, with nothing to set by hand.
30 free credits, no cardUp to 2 GB per videoMP4 · 9:16 or 4:5
Each short is cropped to 9:16 or 4:5 around the face on screen, tracked again for each format, with zooms between x1.0 and x1.6 and slides kept full-frame.
Face framing in shortshort: every plan, Free included.
Facts checked against the product on .
The crop is not pinned to the centre of the picture. Face tracking places it on the face on screen, and scene detection resets it when the shot changes, so the crop follows a face that shifts across the picture instead of leaving it at the edge.
In 9:16, the zoom on a tracked face stays at x1.0 or x1.04 for each shot, with gentle push-ins up to about x1.11 on emphasized words, and x1.6 is reached only on a passage that is not tracked. In 4:5, the shot zoom brings a small face to about 20% of the frame height, at most x1.4, and push-ins top out near x1.5, under the x1.6 ceiling of every format. Keeping the zoom low keeps the picture sharp rather than magnified into a blur. At x1.0 the crop is a straight 9:16 slice; the bound is the same on every plan.
When the picture is a slide, a shared screen or a wide shot of a room, cropping would cut the content. Those frames are detected and kept in full, with empty space above and below, so text stays legible in the vertical output.
Framing is written as keyframes in the edit, each with a centre and a zoom between x1.0 and x1.6, all set by the tracker. There is no manual framing control; if a crop lands wrong, change the clip bounds or pick another passage.
An illustration of the two rules the framing applies.
5 steps, all in the same shortshort studio.
A published transformation from the community, made with the same studio: the original on top, the shorts below, with the transcript of each short.
3 of 6 shorts shown · The Override That Saved Humanity · watch it in the community, with the transcript of each short
Demo footage: Tears of Steel © Blender Foundation, licensed CC BY 3.0. Cut, cropped and captioned by shortshort.
No. It follows the most visible face; it does not detect who is speaking, so in a two-person shot the crop can stay on the listener.
Not by voice: there is no automatic switching between speakers. The crop is placed on the face on screen and moves with it, and scene detection resets it when the recording itself cuts to another shot. Wide shots are detected and kept full-frame, with space above and below. The crop is placed automatically and has no manual override, so a passage that frames the wrong person is best replaced by another.
4:5, yes: choose it at export and the whole series renders at 1080 x 1350, on every plan, at no credit cost. Each short is framed again for the 4:5 frame, with the face tracked anew, rather than the 9:16 crop made wider. There is no 1:1 or 16:9 export and no 4K or 60 fps option. On every plan the studio can also export a short's edit plan as JSON for rendering on your own server.
The crop moves with the face on screen across the stage. In 9:16 the zoom stays close to the source: x1.0 or x1.04 for each shot, with gentle push-ins up to about x1.11 on emphasized words, and x1.6 is only the ceiling, reached on a passage that is not tracked. In 4:5 the shot zoom brings a small face to about 20% of the frame height, at most x1.4. A very wide or low-resolution source may therefore leave the speaker small, and there is no manual zoom.
A crop magnifies the source pixels, so the zoom is capped at x1.6 to keep the picture sharp on an ordinary recording, on every plan and in both formats. In 9:16 a tracked face stays much lower: x1.0 or x1.04 for each shot, with gentle push-ins up to about x1.11 on emphasized words; x1.6 is reached only on a passage that is not tracked. In 4:5 the shot zoom goes to x1.4 at most, to bring a small face to about 20% of the frame height, and push-ins top out near x1.5.
Yes. Tracking and full-frame detection for slides run on every plan, including Free, which allows up to 3 shorts per video with a watermark on the export. The AI analysis, the editor and the MP4 export need a free account.
No. shortshort works with the single file you upload and only crops and zooms inside it. It does not insert B-roll, stock footage, music or animated titles, and it cannot pull in a second camera angle that is not in the recording.
Free to try with 30 credits, no card. Exported shorts are listed in the public community gallery by default; any paid plan lets you keep them out of it.