Every export is 9:16, composed rather than cropped

The export is a 9:16 MP4 with captions rendered into the frame. It downloads to your machine and uploads to any platform that takes vertical video.

Export is charged per minute of finished video at 20 credits. A thirty second ad is about 10 credits. A sixty second ad is 20. A full three minute cut is 60.

That sits on top of the 100 credit batch, which transcribes the take, directs the cut and searches for footage.

Charging by output minute rather than by project has one deliberate effect. The eleventh export of a thirty second ad is 110 credits, less than one more trip through the machine.

So you never ration versions. That matters, because winning creatives run at roughly 5 to 8 percent, per Motion's analysis of 550,000+ Meta ads.

A widescreen frame carries information across. A vertical frame carries it up and down. Crop one into the other and you lose the composition that made the shot work.

You also gain dead space above and below a subject that was never framed for it.

The symptoms are always the same. The speaker sits too small and too central. Captions land wherever there was room rather than where the eye already is. Something matters at an edge, and it is gone.

Here the composition is vertical from the first frame. Footage is placed into a vertical frame. Captions are positioned for one, because there is no other shape to serve.

The clipping is the part that costs money. A price, a logo or a hand holding the product sitting an inch outside the vertical frame is gone. Nobody in the review call notices until the ad has run for a week.

A vertical ad is watched in the worst conditions any video gets. Sound off. Small screen. Often outdoors in daylight.

The platform's own interface sits on top of your picture. The username, the caption text, a column of buttons down the right edge.

That is why the captions matter more than the picture, and why the first half second matters more than everything after it.

It is also why the opening headline is its own decision in the editor rather than a setting buried in a panel. That line has to stop a scroll before anybody has heard a word.

Keep the important part of the frame out of the top and bottom bands. Chrome lands there and varies by app, so middle-heavy composition survives everywhere.

Cuts land more often. Captions carry more of the argument. Shots run shorter, because a shot that feels calm on a television feels dead on a phone.

The pace setting is how you dial that in. Chill covers up to 40 percent of the ad with footage, normal up to 45, fast up to 52.

Faster pace means a tighter re-cut and more coverage. That suits a hard-hook direct response ad. Chill suits a considered read where the person is the point.

Transitions follow the same logic. Cut is invisible and correct most of the time. Whip, Punch, Glitch and Sweep exist for joins where the feed expects energy. Using them everywhere looks like you discovered a menu.

Pick the pace before you fight the cut. Most complaints about the machine cutting too much are a chill-pace read running at fast, and one setting change fixes the whole ad.

A widescreen master wins two rows. One edit covers every placement, and square, 4:5 and horizontal all come out of the same file.

If a site header and a pre-roll slot are on this quarter's list, cut that master in a timeline. It is the right tool for a brief with four shapes in it.

A vertical ad is a different job. It is watched in one shape, by somebody holding a phone, and it is won on composition rather than on covering placements.

So the export here is 9:16 and the frame is built for it from the first shot. No crop, no dead space, nothing important sitting outside an edge.

Film vertically where you can. A horizontal take leaves only so much vertical frame to build from, and viewers register that inside the first second.

Then run the free check. Watch the export on your own phone, at arm's length, with the sound off. Caption too low, headline too long, product too small in the frame: all obvious there and invisible on a desktop.