The reframing problem
Widescreen recordings were composed for a horizontal frame. A speaker sits a little off centre, a slide fills the right half, a second camera angle shows two people side by side. Drop that into a vertical phone screen and most of it disappears. Many tools solve this by cropping to the middle and hoping; the result is a slide with the headline cut off or an interview where the guest is a shoulder at the edge of the frame.
AI Shorts Creator makes the choice explicit. Centre crop takes the tallest 9:16 slice from the middle of the frame and scales it to 1080×1920 with a proper resampling filter, so a centred speaker fills the screen with no distortion. Blur-pad keeps every pixel of the original picture, scaled to fit the width of the vertical frame, and sits it over a blurred and gently darkened copy of itself so the top and bottom are filled with colour that matches the shot.
When to use centre crop
Use it when the subject is in the middle and the edges do not carry information: a podcast host behind a microphone, a talking-head explainer, a fitness coach demonstrating in a studio, a street vlog where the camera is pointed at the person speaking. The result looks native, as though it had been shot on a phone, and the captions sit over clean background instead of a busy desk.
The crop is computed from the frame dimensions on the fly, so rotated phone recordings and odd resolutions are handled without you having to tell the clipper anything about the source.
When to use blur-pad
Use it when the whole frame matters. Screen recordings of a presentation, gameplay with a HUD at the corners, a two-camera interview with both people in shot, product demos where the item is held at the side. The source stays complete and readable, the blurred surround keeps the frame from looking like a black letterbox, and the captions are placed in the lower band where they never overlap the footage.
- Presentations and screen shares: titles and bullet points stay intact.
- Gameplay: minimap and health bars remain visible.
- Two-person interviews: both faces stay in frame.
- Landscape phone clips: nothing is cropped away.
Output you can rely on
Every short is encoded as 1080×1920 H.264 at 30 frames per second with AAC stereo audio and the index at the front of the file, which means it starts playing immediately when it is streamed from the web and uploads cleanly to any vertical video platform. Captions and the progress bar are part of the picture, not a separate track, so nothing depends on which app plays the file.
The clipper cuts at the window chosen by the transcript picker, re-encodes only that range, and leaves the original untouched. There is no generation involved: what comes out is your footage, reframed.
Running several variants
Because the upload stays on file for twenty-four hours, you can run one job with centre crop and another with blur-pad against the same source and keep whichever reads better for each clip. Each run is a separate job and spends its own credits, but the upload itself only happens once.