The gentler crop is the one that cannot follow your product
Extra placements are cut from the film you rendered, and the cut is steered towards your product rather than the middle of the frame. But it is clamped at the edges, so the steering runs out. On a vertical film the square cut can follow a product across the middle 44% of the height, and the 4:5 cut only across the middle 30%.
Published — written and checked by hand.
A film rendered here arrives in up to four shapes, and only two of them were ever filmed. 9:16 and 16:9 are rendered; 1:1 and 4:5 are cut out of whichever of those two you chose. That much is on the pricing of it — the extra placements cost no extra credits because there is no extra render behind them.
Which placements you can have depends on which master you rendered, and that is a separate question with its own answer in Portrait pays for three placements. This post assumes you have already picked, and asks a narrower thing: once the cut is being made, how much can it actually move?
The cut is steered, and the steering is clamped
The crop is not a centre crop. It takes a focus point from the shot and slides the window towards it, so a bottle standing in the lower third of a vertical frame keeps its label in a square cut instead of losing it to a centred guess. That is the part the product page states, and it is true.
The part nothing states is that the window has to stay inside the frame. Slide it far enough and it hits an edge and stops. Past that point the focus is ignored — not partially honoured, ignored — and the crop is as off-centre as the clamp leaves it. So there is a band in the middle of the frame where the steering works, and two margins where it does not.
The bands, measured
Taking the shipped sizes — a vertical master is 1080×1920, a widescreen one 1920×1080, and every delivered file is scaled to a 1080-class size of its own shape:
- A square cut of a vertical film keeps 56% of the height. The focus is honoured anywhere between 28% and 72% down the frame — a band of 44%.
- A 4:5 cut of a vertical film keeps 70% of the height. The focus is honoured only between 35% and 65% — a band of 30%.
- A square cut of a widescreen film keeps 56% of the width, and behaves like the first case turned on its side: honoured between 28% and 72% across.
Read the first two together, because they are the wrong way round. The 4:5 cut is the gentler one — it discards 30% of the height where the square discards 44% — and it is the one that can least afford to move. A taller window has less room to slide before it touches an edge. The crop that takes the most is the crop that can follow you furthest.
What to do about it
Compose so the product's centre sits between roughly a third and two thirds of the way down a vertical frame. That band is inside every cut's honoured range at once, which means the square and the 4:5 both centre on the product properly rather than one of them clamping.
This is not the same advice as keeping the bottom of the frame clear for the app's own interface, and the two constraints stack rather than cancel: one is about where a platform draws its buttons, the other about where the crop can reach. A product sitting low enough to survive the chrome can still be low enough to clamp.
The practical version is shorter than the reasoning. If you know a square or a 4:5 cut is going out, keep the product off the top and bottom thirds of a vertical shoot — not because the crop will cut it off, but because the crop will stop trying to find it.
Read enough? Watch your own product.
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