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How to resize videos for instagram

By PFT

July 18, 2023

Artificial intelligence (AI) has become a ubiquitous topic of conversation, transitioning from a technology understood by few to a widely accessible tool. Recent advancements in generative AI have made it possible for everyday content creators to harness its power. Over the past few years, AI has made its mark in social media. It has reshaped how we interact and connect through personalized ad recommendations, online avatars, and automatic content creation. Aspiring social media stars are eager to leverage this technology to reach their audience.


An organic Facebook post reaches just about 5% of its followers; for Instagram, this is about 15%. This shows that to cover audiences, a brand or individual needs to create multiple posts and ensure maximum reach quickly. Interestingly, videos have an audience reach of 92% worldwide* because they offer the opportunity to tell a story, build trust in a brand, and have a hard-to-beat ROI. Did you know users retain 95% of a message watched on video instead of only 10% if read as text? Video content has quickly become the go-to strategy for social media. However, the challenge lies in quickly generating videos, which poses problems for creative, post-production, and social media teams.


  • Content uploaded is often late due to the time it takes to adapt it to each social platform
  • Manual resizing of each video separately for each platform results in a lack of ability to scale
  • Costly editing machines, professionals, and software increase the cost per video
  • Loss of important angles while reframing/resizing tools from horizontal to vertical formats
  • Lack of resources to repurpose archived content that has been created for another platform

How can AI support your goals to reach your audience?


Media houses produce about 10 to 15K videos yearly, and news outlets release over 100 videos daily that must be distributed simultaneously on several social media platforms. The goal is to promote content or the brand across multiple social platforms and do it as quickly as possible while it is relevant.


AI allows you to focus on content creation while helping reach your audience quickly and with a certain velocity on time. The game changer here is its ability to let users create one video and automatically scale it for multiple platforms. AI technology can identify and track movement in a video, optimizing it for different devices and social media platforms. So, instead of adding your motion key- frames to track the subject of each clip, AI does it for you automatically.


Is auto-reframing technology the future of video content distribution?


According to a study by eMarketer, 61% of marketers believe that AI will be crucial in streamlining visual content creation processes. AI-powered video cropping and resizing applications can streamline the process of editing and enhancing visual content for social media. By using reframing platforms, a user can unlock the following benefits:


1. Multi-platform adaptation


AI can intelligently adjust the content's framing, composition, and visual elements to ensure optimal viewing experiences across different platforms, such as TVs, mobile devices, and social media platforms. Creative teams can use the widely preferred 16:9 format to shoot all their content and use AI to reframe it based on platform preference. Any team can scale their social media content to multiple platforms.


2. Faster time to market


With AI reframing software enabling a near-instant output video for each platform, content teams can ensure their videos hit all the social platforms in record time. This ensures they aren't outdated and lets them capture the latest trends on social media, boosting reach.


3. Scaling your content needs


Manual reframing of videos can be time-consuming and labor-intensive. It hampers scalability. AI automates the process, significantly reducing the time and effort required to adapt content to different aspect ratios. It helps in processing multiple videos for different destinations most efficiently.


4. Reduction in costs


With AI, costs associated with manual labor go down automatically. Additionally, it eliminates the need for costly editing software or hiring professionals who charge by the hour. The cost per video goes down significantly, and organizations can focus on producing more videos instead.


Technology has enabled multiple platforms to mushroom overnight. This has sometimes led to exaggerated expectations regarding what they can deliver. Companies and developers may market their AI tools as capable of performing tasks like online video cropping and resizing with high accuracy and efficiency. However, the technology might still be in its early stages or have limitations that affect its performance. Another major issue end users face is a need for more customer support for bug fixes and output errors.


Purchasing expensive software suites restricted to one machine becomes an expensive proposition. Secondly, most platforms provide a one size fits all approach, where the content reframing is done in a static fashion without keeping in mind the needs of the destination platform.


The challenges in using AI


While AI can automate repetitive tasks and optimize content for engagement, it may need more creativity and the emotional depth humans bring to content creation. The common issues with using AI platforms for video editing are loss of visual quality, incorrect framing decisions, and limited contextual output. Additionally, videos created/re-engineered using AI can lack artistic flair. The everyday user might also run into problems related to limited computational power. A lot also depends on the makers of these AI platforms and the extent to which they train their algorithms. Many biases from AI-related content result from biases existing in the platform's creators or the type of data the algorithm has been trained with.


Prime Focus Technologies (PFT) has introduced CLEAR® AI Reframe, an AI platform that eliminates the time-consuming process of resizing videos for different social media platforms to address these challenges.


Instantly resize your video for Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, and YouTube.


This fully AI-driven, cloud-rendered AI reframing solution is hosted on AWS. It automatically and accurately converts horizontal (landscape) videos into square and vertical (portrait) formats. With CLEAR® AI Reframe, you can generate compelling content variants for all major social media applications. This significantly reduces your lead time and enables you to scale at a fraction of the cost.


CLEAR® AI Reframe stands out with its patented CLEAR® 'Machine Wisdom' technology, which comprises home-grown AI engines that enable various automation, including


  • Text Re-creation: The AI captures the text from the original file, including graphical text elements, to ensure accurate recreation in the output format.
  • Genre-aware Context Retention: Transform and reframes content across various genres such as talk shows, general entertainment, interviews, news, and sports like basketball, soccer, baseball, cricket, and more.
  • Fit-to-focus: CLEAR® AI Reframe intelligently focuses on relevant areas while excluding unnecessary ones.
  • Dynamic Content Detection: It employs advanced analysis of attention models in real-time to capture the important parts of each video frame accurately.
  • Platform-based Video Rendering: It can seamlessly mask and stitch content frames and shots to match the destination resolution and aspect ratio.
  • Integration with Adobe Premiere Pro: lets creators easily import and export their content. A single click publish to all social media applications is available from the Reframe user interface.

In conclusion, while AI undoubtedly paves the way forward, it will not replace human creativity. Instead, it empowers creators to achieve faster results with fewer constraints.


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