How to Create Content and Videos for TikTok and Instagram Reels
Hold up your phone. Swipe through a few apps. Go to your texts. Open Instagram. It’s all vertical. So why would you make any content that makes it harder for your customers to find, share or enjoy your content? STBY Studio suggests that you plan your content, shoot your content and edit your content in the vertical format (unless you’re doing something special, like a Fashion Film). Everyone’s getting in on it, from Shopify to Snickers, and each quality post is garnering thousands of hits, and leads to incredible conversion rates.
Other than hiring us to help you, here are 4 steps to start shooting your content the right way, the vertical way.
1. Shoot in 4k
Shooting on your phone is easy, especially because it’s already designed to shoot vertically. There’s nothing wrong with it, but you’re not going to get the most out of your content if you’re just shooting everything with the little device in your pocket. At one point, you’ll realize why all serious fashion photography and videography skips using phones. If you’ve got a pretty good camera to shoot with, however, you may want to consider investing in a gimbal (though it’s not going to be cheap or easy).
If you don’t have a gimbal, you’re going to want to shoot all your content in 4k resolution. Check the settings, as most modern cameras allow you to shoot in 4k. The advantage to 4k shooting is that it can zoom in cleanly, without noticeable loss in quality and resolution. This makes the editing far easier and cleaner, making your final product all that much more professional and cinematic.
2. Getting Ready to Edit Vertically
When you’re editing (if you don’t know how to start, here’s a handy guide we wrote) you’re going to need to edit in a vertical frame. This may be a little difficult to visualize, but it’s actually not that much different than editing a regular horizontal video. The process remains the same as if you had a standard 4:3 or 1920x1080p.
Before you begin editing anything, change the sequence settings to 1080x1920p for processing. You’ll find this in the settings of most editing software. We need to do this because resolution is read as (height)x(width), so in vertical videos, the height of the frame needs to be taller than the width.
3. Sequencing and Scaling
When you import the video, you'll have to scale it up to fit the sequence. So if you’d already shot something horizontally, you’ll have a bunch of space above and below your video.
All you’ll have to do is scale up the video to match the frame of the vertical sequence.
4. Moving Clips into Position
If you’ve already shot your content in a horizontal format, or if you’re adapting a horizontal video into vertical social media, you’ll have to move the positions of the clip to fit into the frame while you edit. Begin by changing the sequence settings to 1080x1920p.
To move the clips into position, find your way to the Effects Control Panel in Premiere Pro, under Position you can manually move your clip left or right to make sure your subject is in the middle of the frame . If the focus of your clip moves around a lot, then you’ll want to animate the position to follow along with the movement of the clip.
We edited our Palladium social media promo using the techniques described above!
Ask STBY for Help!
If you don’t want to go through the hassle of figuring all of this out, or if you want a professional hand working on your fashion content, STBY Studio is your solution.
Get in touch and bring your brand to life with STBY Studio’s lookbooks
Visit us online to see if our subscription services work for your vision
On Instagram to see what we’re up to
And on Youtube to check out our project