How to Film B-Roll That Works Vertical and Wide

By Jimmy, developer of ContentCam · 9 September 2026

Most people frame their talking pieces carefully and then shoot b-roll on instinct. Then the vertical edit comes around, the beautiful wide shot of the coffee being poured has the cup sitting off in the left third, and cropping it to 9:16 either loses the cup or loses the hands. So the shot gets cut, and half a morning of filming ends up used in one format only.

B-roll is the footage that suffers most from dual-format publishing, because b-roll is where people compose most adventurously. The fix is not to compose badly. It is to understand exactly what each crop takes away, and to shoot inside the overlap.

The geometry, in one number

Take a 16:9 frame and cut a full-height 9:16 shape out of it. That vertical shape is 9/16 as wide as the frame is tall, and the frame is 16/9 as wide as it is tall. The vertical keeps 81/256 of the original width, which is about 32 per cent. Just under a third.

Do it the other way, cropping a full-width 16:9 out of a 9:16 frame, and you get the same number: about 32 per cent of the height survives.

Two things follow from that.

The crop only ever takes. Cropping a wide frame to vertical cannot add height, so your subject stays exactly as large as it was, and everything it had for company on the sides is gone.
Two thirds of a wide frame does not exist in the vertical version. Not blurred, not shrunk. Gone. Anything you place with the rule of thirds in the wide shot lands on or past the edge of the vertical one.

So the working area for b-roll that has to serve both formats is the centre column of the wide frame, or the centre band of the vertical one. Everything essential lives there.

1. Compose to the centre third, and test it with your thumb

Put the subject of the shot in the middle. That is a real cost, because centred framing is duller than an off-centre composition, and I would rather have the off-centre one too. So the honest version of the rule is: the thing the shot is about sits in the centre third, and everything you add for beauty sits outside it, where losing it does no damage.

A shot of hands kneading dough: hands centred, the flour dusting and the bench clutter out at the sides. A shot of a street: the person walking centred, the shopfronts and traffic filling the wide version's edges. In the wide cut the frame is rich. In the vertical cut it is tighter and still says the same thing.

The check that takes one second, before you press record: hold a thumb up at arm's length over the middle of the phone screen. That column is roughly what the vertical keeps. If the point of the shot is not under your thumb, move the phone.

The same rule decides where text, signage, a product label or a price tag goes. Put it near the centre. Anything readable that sits out at the edge is readable in exactly one of your two exports.

2. Fill the frame more than feels natural

Vertical clips get watched on a phone held in one hand, often at arm's length, often with captions and interface across the top and bottom. A wide, pretty, far-away establishing shot reads as detail on a laptop and as nothing at all on a phone.

So bias your b-roll tighter than you would for a purely wide edit. Get close to the thing. A hand turning a key, steam off a cup, a shoe hitting gravel, one face rather than three. Close subjects also give you the one thing that survives every crop: texture.

Get closer by moving the phone, not by pinching to zoom. Digital zoom on a phone throws away resolution you will want back when you crop, and you are already cropping.

One lens choice matters here. The ultra-wide gives you a lot of extra width, and the vertical crop deletes all of it while stretching whatever is left at the edges. Save the ultra-wide for shots you know are wide-only, and shoot dual-purpose b-roll on the main lens.

3. Move the camera in the direction the crop keeps

Camera movement is where dual-format b-roll usually falls apart, because the two frames have opposite strengths.

A horizontal pan is comfortable in 16:9 and frantic in 9:16. The subject crosses the narrow frame in a fraction of the time, so a pan that feels graceful wide feels like a whip vertically.
A tilt up a tall thing is the reverse: it lives happily in the vertical and runs out of frame instantly in the wide one.

Three moves survive both, and they are worth building your habits around.

The push in. Walk the phone slowly straight towards the subject. The subject stays centred and grows in both formats, at the same rate, and the move reads identically in each.
The orbit. Keep the subject centred and walk an arc around it. The background slides past and gives you parallax, which is what makes a shot look three-dimensional, while the subject never leaves the centre column.
The reveal past a foreground object. Slide sideways so something close to the lens, a doorframe, a branch, a shoulder, passes across the front of the shot. Because the foreground object is near the lens it fills the centre of both crops as it passes, so the reveal works in each.

If you do pan, halve the speed you think you need, and pick the end point before you start. Slow moves crop better than fast ones, because the subject spends longer inside the narrow column.

Hold a locked-off shot for a beat at the start and end of every move. That gives an editor a still frame to cut in and out of, and a still frame is the most reliably reusable thing you can hand a second edit.

4. Shoot ten seconds, not three

The most common b-roll mistake has nothing to do with framing. It is stopping the recording too early. A shot you thought was five seconds long often has two usable seconds in the middle, once you cut the wobble at the start and the moment your hand goes for the stop button.

Ten seconds per shot. Start recording, count three seconds before the action, let the action play, count three more, then stop. It costs you almost nothing and it is the difference between a clip you can cut two ways and a clip you can barely cut once.

Repeating actions get shot twice: once wide enough to show what is happening, once close on the detail. Those two takes cut together, which gives you a small edit inside your b-roll rather than one long stare.

5. Lock the settings so the b-roll matches the A-roll

B-roll gets filmed at a different moment from the pieces to camera it sits between, often in a different part of the room or an hour later. If exposure and white balance are automatic, the cut between them jumps in brightness and colour, and the viewer feels the join even if they cannot name it.

Set white balance to a number and leave it there for the whole shoot. Roughly 5600K for daylight, roughly 3200K for warm household bulbs, adjusted by eye until whites look white. Auto white balance re-guesses whenever the frame changes, and b-roll changes the frame constantly, so a wooden benchtop or a red jumper filling the shot will drag the colour of the entire clip.

Lock exposure the same way. Set it on the thing that matters, usually skin or the product, and accept a bright window rather than letting the camera hunt mid-shot.

Frame rate and shutter, briefly: match the frame rate you shot your A-roll at, and set shutter speed to about double it, so 1/60 at 30fps and 1/125 at 60fps. That is the 180 degree rule and it gives motion its normal amount of blur. Shooting b-roll at 60fps buys you the option of slowing it to half speed later, which suits push-ins and orbits. There is more on all four controls in manual camera controls for video.

6. Stabilise by holding it properly, not by fixing it later

Cropping magnifies shake. The vertical version of a wide shot is a magnified slice, so handheld wobble that looked mild in the wide export looks worse in the vertical one. Software stabilisation then crops in further to compensate, which costs you more of the frame again.

Cheaper fixes, in order of how much they help. Two hands on the phone with elbows pinned against your ribs. Walking heel to toe with knees slightly bent so your body absorbs the bounce. Leaning against a wall, a doorframe, a car or a table for anything static. And for a push-in, walking backwards is steadier than walking forwards, because you take shorter steps.

7. Log the shot while you are still standing there

A morning of b-roll produces forty clips with names like IMG_4471, and by the evening you will not remember which of the six pours was the good one.

Two habits solve it without an app. Wave a hand in front of the lens right after a take you know is a keeper, which gives you a visual marker you can spot while scrubbing. And keep a note on your phone with one line per setup: what it is, and whether the framing was checked for both crops. Anything more elaborate than that tends not to survive contact with an actual shoot.

The wider point: crop or capture

Everything above is about surviving a crop, and it works. But it does mean the wide version is composed defensively, with its subject parked in the middle and its edges filled with material you have accepted you might lose.

The alternative is to not crop at all. If both formats come out of the recording as separate full-quality files, the vertical stops being a slice of the wide one and each gets its own full frame. That is what I built ContentCam to do: one take, a full-height 9:16 and a full-width 16:9, both saved. You still want the centre-third habit for anything you might reframe later, but you stop paying for it on every single shot.

The pre-roll check

Six things, in the seconds before you press record on a b-roll shot:

The point of the shot sits under your thumb in the centre of the screen.
You are close enough that the subject fills the frame, on the main lens, no digital zoom.
Your move is a push, an orbit or a reveal, and it is slower than feels right.
White balance and exposure are locked to the same values as the rest of the shoot.
Elbows in, or something solid to lean on.
You are going to keep rolling for three seconds after you think it is done.

Try ContentCam free. Shoot your b-roll once and get a full-height vertical and a full-width wide file from the same take, with exposure, white balance, ISO and shutter locked where you set them. iPhone and Android, no watermark.