Your audience is split. Some of them are on a television or a laptop, where 16:9 is right. The rest are on a phone, where a landscape video is a postage stamp with black bars around it. Producing for one abandons the other.
Why cropping does not work
The obvious approach is to crop the landscape output to a vertical strip. It rarely survives contact with a real event.
A wide shot cropped to 9:16 is mostly empty stage with a person somewhere in it. A two-shot cropped to vertical cuts one of the two people in half. The framing that makes a landscape shot good is precisely what makes its centre crop bad.
The three real options
- Run two productions. Two switchers, two operators, two sets of cameras. Correct and expensive.
- Stream landscape and cut vertical clips afterwards. Cheap, but you are not live on the vertical platforms.
- Produce one show with two independently framed outputs from the same sources.
The third is what you want, and it is the one most software cannot do.
How independent framing works
Rather than deriving the vertical from the finished landscape picture, the vertical output is composed separately from the same inputs. The same camera feed, framed differently for each shape.
In practice that means the landscape output can hold a wide two-shot while the vertical output holds a tight single on whoever is speaking. Both are live, both come from the same cameras, and one operator runs both.
Framing for both at once
- Shoot slightly wider than you would for landscape alone, so the vertical framing has room to work with.
- Keep essential graphics out of the extreme left and right — lower thirds sized for 16:9 get cut in half at 9:16.
- Put titles and text in the middle third, which survives both shapes.
- Check both outputs in multiview before you go live, not after.
Bandwidth
Two outputs is two streams of upload. Measure your actual upload speed and budget for the total, not for one. If the arithmetic does not work, drop the vertical bitrate first — phone viewers on mobile data are the most tolerant audience you have.
Doing it in Skynat Live
Open Outputs and add a vertical output alongside your landscape one. It is framed independently from the same sources, so it is a genuine second production rather than a crop.
Both go out live to their own destinations — landscape to YouTube or Facebook, vertical to TikTok, Reels or Shorts. And you can mark clips while the event is running, which are exported in both shapes ready to post.