Portrait pays for three placements. Widescreen pays for two.

There are four shapes a finished Nitaris film can arrive in: 9:16 for Reels, TikTok and Shorts, 16:9 for a product page or the web, 1:1 for a feed, and 4:5 for the Meta feed. That reads like four options. It is two options and two consequences.

Only 9:16 and 16:9 are rendered. Nothing generates a square or a 4:5 frame natively, so those two exist only as windows cut out of a master that was rendered in one of the two real shapes. The master itself is never cropped — it ships at the size it was filmed, rescaled — and every other placement is a crop of it.

Which crops each master can reach

This is the part worth knowing before you set a shoot up, because it is decided there and nowhere else.

• A portrait master reaches three placements: 9:16 itself, 4:5, and 1:1. All three are cuts down the height of a tall frame, so all three are available from one render.
• A widescreen master reaches two: 16:9 itself, and 1:1. A square crops out of a wide frame by taking a slice of the width, which works. A 4:5 does not — it is taller than it is wide, and there is no taller-than-wide window inside a 16:9 frame to take it from.
• The square is the free rider. It crops equally well out of either master, so it attaches itself to whichever family is already rendering and never causes a second one.

So asking for widescreen and the Meta feed shape in the same breath is not one film in two sizes. It is two renders: the 16:9 you asked for, and a second portrait master rendered for the sole purpose of cutting a 4:5 out of it. Two renders are two charges, and the shoot quotes both before you commit — this is not a surprise on the invoice. It is a decision that is free to make at setup and costs a whole second film to change afterwards.

What a crop actually costs the picture

The arithmetic is worth seeing, because "you also get a square" sounds like a bonus and is in fact a subtraction.

From a portrait master of 1080 by 1920, the 4:5 keeps 1350 of those 1920 rows and the 1:1 keeps 1080 of them. Just over seven tenths of the height for one, a little over half for the other, both taken from the middle of the frame. Whatever was in the top and bottom of your composition — the fall of light behind the product, the empty space the shot was balanced around, a reflection on the surface underneath — is outside both windows.

That is not a flaw in the cropping. It is what a crop is. But it changes what you should ask the shoot for: if you know the square and the 4:5 are going to be used, the film wants its subject nearer the middle of the frame and its interesting parts nearer the subject, so that the two tighter windows still contain a composition rather than a fragment of one.

Every cut is rescaled to a standard size afterwards, so a 1:1 is 1080 by 1080 and a 4:5 is 1080 by 1350 regardless of what the master came back at. You are not getting a smaller file by taking a crop. You are getting a tighter frame.

The free preview only comes in the master's shape

One detail that catches people out when they are comparing options. The free watermarked preview produces the master ratio and nothing else — a free render does not come with the full placement set. So if your plan depends on seeing how the square version looks before you commit, the preview will not show you that; it shows you the shape you chose to render, which is the shape all the others will be cut from.

That is the right thing to look at anyway. If the master works, the crops are predictable from it. If the master does not, no crop of it will.

How to choose

Pick the master your most demanding placement needs, then take the crops.

Most of the time that means portrait, not because vertical is better but because it reaches more of the four. A 9:16 render hands you the vertical feed, the Meta feed and the square from one charge, which covers every social surface a small shop actually posts to. Widescreen earns its place when the destination is a product page, an embedded player or a display placement — somewhere a tall film would letterbox — and when you are not also planning to run it in a 4:5 slot.

If the honest answer is that you need both a true 16:9 and a true 9:16, that has always been two films, and there is a separate argument for why that is a feature rather than a billing quirk: a frame is composed for its shape rather than cropped to it. That argument is in "Vertical is a different film, not a crop", and it is the companion to this one. This post is only about the cheaper half of the question — which single master to render, when you are rendering one.

The test

Before you set the shape, list the places this film is actually going. If the list is all phone surfaces, render portrait and let the crops do the rest. If the list is a product page and nothing else, render widescreen. If the list contains both a product page and a 4:5 ad slot, you are buying two films, and it is better to know that now than to discover it as a second charge after you have already fallen for the first one.