How to make vertical gameplay clips for TikTok and Shorts without losing the HUD

The short answer: do not crop gameplay to 9:16 by default. A vertical window taken from a 16:9 game keeps about 32% of the width, which is usually the wrong 32%. Fit the whole frame into the vertical video instead, or stack the facecam above the game. Crop only when the action never leaves the middle of the screen.

We make GetClipMachine, an AI clipping tool, and we learned this the expensive way. Our framing was built for people talking, and for a while it treated a game like a podcast. This article is what we changed and why.

The arithmetic of a vertical crop

A 1080x1920 vertical video, cut from a 1920x1080 frame at full height, takes a window 608 pixels wide. That is 31.6% of the frame. Put that window in the middle of a shooter and you keep the crosshair and lose the minimap, the kill feed, the health bar and the enemy at the edge of the screen.

On a face that trade is right: the subject is in the window and the rest is a background. That is what auto-reframe was invented for. On a game, there is often no single subject, and the information is spread across the whole screen on purpose.

The three layouts that work

Layout	What you keep	What it costs	Use it for
Crop to 9:16	the middle third, full height	HUD, minimap, edges	action that stays centred, a streamer's face
Fit the whole frame	everything, at full width	the picture is smaller	most games, strategy, anything with a HUD
Facecam stacked over game	the cam and the game	needs a cam in a known box	reaction-led clips

Fitting puts the full 16:9 picture across the width of the vertical video. At 1080 wide it is a 1080x608 picture with space above and below. That space is not wasted: it is where the captions go, clear of the game's own text, and where a headline can go above.

Stacking splits the screen: the streamer on top, the game below. It is the classic streamer layout and it works when the reaction is the clip. It needs to know where the cam is, which means a fixed box or a manual crop in an editor. We do not detect webcam boxes automatically yet, so for this one an editor such as CapCut is the honest recommendation.

What our clipper does with gameplay now

Our framing follows people. In a talking-head video that is right; in a game it went wrong in a specific way. A paying customer's Valheim stream, with no webcam, came back as crops of a third of the picture that followed whatever the face detector had mistaken for a face in the game world. The HUD was gone. The customer told us it never centred on their character, and they were right.

Since September 2026 the rule is about people, not faces:

• A frame counts as having nobody in it when there is no confident face at least 16% of the frame tall. Characters in a game world rarely pass that, and when they do, they rarely pass the confidence bar too.
• A face up to about a quarter of the frame tall, sitting in a corner, counts as a facecam overlay, not a subject. The game behind it is what the clip is about.
• If 80% or more of a clip's frames have nobody in them, the whole clip is fitted, start to end. We tried deciding shot by shot first, and a game's own camera moves look like scene cuts: the clip snapped between whole and cropped five times in forty seconds.
• Between 50% and 80%, shots are decided one at a time. Under 50%, nothing changes, so a podcast whose host the detector briefly loses never flickers into a letterbox.

Measured in the render image: two windows of that Valheim stream fitted whole (53 and 58 of 60 frames had nobody in them), and a let's-play with a facecam in the bottom-right corner fitted whole with the cam intact (59 of 60). Our three talking-head test videos were unchanged.

The Framed layout: use the space on purpose

Fitting a game leaves two bands of empty space. The Framed layout puts them to work: your logo, name and @handle at the top, a headline above the video, the whole video full width, and captions underneath on a clean background. It reads like a post rather than a letterboxed TV picture, and for gameplay it is the layout we suggest. When most of a video's clips come back shown whole, the Studio says so and offers to switch them all.

Checklist for a gameplay clip

• Source quality matters more than usual. A fitted picture is shown at full width, so a 720p stream looks like 720p. Why clips look blurry has the order to check things in.
• Captions go below the game, never over the HUD. On a fitted clip they sit in the lower band, which is also clear of TikTok's buttons; the safe zones by platform are worth a look once.
• Keep the build-up. A clutch play without the three seconds before it is just noise. 20 to 45 seconds is the range we aim for; how long a clip should be explains why.
• Export 1080x1920 even when the picture is letterboxed. A vertical file counts as a Short; the original 16:9 file does not.

Clipping streams rather than your own gameplay? The link side of it, VOD links and very long streams, is in how to clip Kick streams and clipping for Twitch streamers.