Choosing an aspect ratio

A screen recording is wide. Feeds are not. That mismatch is the single most common reason a good demo looks bad after it is posted, and the fix is deciding the shape before you record rather than cropping afterwards and hoping.

Where each shape belongs

**16:9** is the shape of your recording and the right choice for a landing page, an embed, a documentation page, an email, or YouTube. **1:1** is the safe universal square for feed posts — it takes more vertical space than 16:9 in a scrolling feed without the commitment of full portrait. **4:5** is the tallest shape most feeds allow in a normal post and therefore occupies the most screen a scroller will give you. **9:16** is for full-screen vertical: stories, reels, shorts. If you only make one, make 16:9 for your own site and 1:1 for everywhere else; those two cover most of the ground.

Vertical is not a crop

Putting a 16:9 screen recording into a 9:16 frame means either cropping away two-thirds of the width — usually including the thing you were demonstrating — or shrinking the whole recording into a letterboxed stripe in the middle of a tall frame, which is unwatchable on a phone. The route that actually works is to **compose** for the shape: the recording sits on a background with generous padding, and zoom moves crop into the parts that matter so the viewer sees a readable region rather than a whole distant screen. That is why the background and the camera moves matter more in vertical than anywhere else.

Record differently if vertical is the target

If you know the demo is going to a vertical feed, change the recording, not just the export. Make the browser window narrower and taller so the interface reflows into a shape closer to the target. Use the product's own mobile layout if it has one — a mobile UI in a vertical frame needs almost no compositional help. Zoom in the application itself, with the browser's zoom control, so text is genuinely larger rather than magnified later. Ten seconds of setup here removes the whole problem, and no amount of post-processing substitutes for it.

Padding and safe areas

Vertical feeds put interface over your video: captions, buttons, profile names, progress bars. Anything in the top or bottom eighth of the frame is at risk of being covered on some platform. Composing with padding around the recording helps here for free — the recording is inset from the frame edges, so the parts that matter sit in the middle where nothing overlaps them. The same padding is what stops a bright screenshot from touching the frame edge, which is what makes composed demos look designed rather than cropped.