Smart Conform: Convert a Horizontal Timeline to Vertical in Apple Final Cut Pro

One of the tasks editors are increasingly asked to do today is convert a horizontal timeline to vertical to post to social media.

Final Cut makes it easy using Smart Conform. Here’s how it works.

Here’s a timeline of a conversation between myself and Gergana Berman, Director of Growth Marketing at LucidLink, at the recent NAB Show in Las Vegas. I edited this for YouTube, but now need vertical versions for TikTok and LinkedIn.

First, I stripped out all titles and graphics, which won’t look good when converted.

Second, notice that I have individual clips, not a single edited movie. This is important, because FCP individually shifts each clip horizontally. If all you have is a single movie, use the Blade tool to break it into individual clips, or, if you can’t, don’t use Smart Conform; use Position keyframes instead.

Right-click the project name in the Browser and choose Duplicate Project. Then, to keep things organized, rename the duplicated project. I used “Vertical project” in this example.

Select the duplicated project in the Browser and choose Window > Project Properties (shortcut: Cmd + J).

Click the blue Modify button in the Inspector.

In this panel, set Video to Vertical, then pick the resolution you want. Although it enlarges the image, I’ve had good success converting 1080p horizontal video to 1080 x 1920 vertical. Yes, the video is enlarged a lot, but most of the time this video is played at smaller sizes on mobile devices so you can get away with it.

NOTE: If you need better image quality, select 720 x 1280. It scales the video less.

When you click OK, the video shrinks to fill the frame, which is not what we want. (Notice all the black above and below the image?)

Open the project in the timeline, select all the clips in the timeline, then choose Modify > Smart Conform.

NOTE: It is important to select all clips you want reframed before choosing the Smart Conform option.

Immediately FCP analyzes the clips, scales them to fill the frame and adjusts them horizontally to fill the frame in a pleasing manner.

NOTE: This is important. The clips are not cropped, they are simply horizontally shifted, as you can see in this screen shot – the frame boundaries are preserved.

If necessary, you can adjust the position of any clip easily by shifting the X Position setting in the Video Inspector.

And that’s it. Done.

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