Prepare vertical video for Instagram Stories

The majority of Instagram Stories are both delivered and consumed in a vertical format.

So we're going to look at how to optimize 16 x 9 animations for consumption on Instagram in that vertical video format.

So before I dive too far into After Effects, I wanna tell you that there is a feature in Premiere Pro called Auto-Reframe that helps do just that.

In fact, it will analyze any video footage and try and track whatever pertinent information is going on in that clip, and in essence, auto reframe.

So, in this project, I want you to go ahead and double click on the Balloon Animation Original composition here to open it in the timeline, and then press the space bar to preview the animation.

And you can see the balloon just float right into the middle of the scene.

That's great.

I'll go ahead and press the space bar to stop playback.

Now double click on the Balloon 9 x 16 Instagram Auto-Reframe composition.

Notice this comp contains a Premiere Pro sequence, which actually utilized that auto reframe feature.

Notice the comp is vertical, and if I press the space bar, you can see the movement of the composition tracks along with the movement of the balloon, although it's not quite perfect.

So, I wanna recreate a comp that matches these settings where I can actually create the movement myself inside of After Effects.

I'll press the space bar to stop playback.

And I'll go to the Project panel and make sure this Balloon 9 x 16 comp is selected.

I'm doing that so I can see the comp settings up here.

Now let's go to Composition and choose New Composition.

Click on the preset drop down and choose the HDTV 1080 29.97 preset and make sure Lock Aspect Ratio is deselected, then we can change the width to match the width from our source here.

So I'll change it to 607, and we can leave the frame rate and duration the same, because that's the way it is over here.

So let's go ahead and call this AE_Insta Reframe.

And I'll click OK.

So let's move this comp up onto our AA_Compositions for Output folder just so it's by itself, then double click on that comp to make it active here in the timeline.

And we can drag our Balloon Animation Original comp right into the timeline like so.

Here you can see the edges of the 16 x 9 composition.

Now, I'm gonna move my current time indicator down the timeline until I can see the balloon stop, which is gonna be right about here at 1 second 28 frames.

Then I'll press P to open the position data and click on the stopwatch to add a key frame.

Now let's move the current time indicator back to frame zero, and I'll scrub on the X parameter to the right, so that my composition slides over to the right like so.

So now if I press the space bar to preview the animation, you can see the balloon kinda moves in and it stops rather abruptly.

So I'll go ahead and press the space bar to stop playback.

And to smooth this out, I'll click on the word Position to select both key frames.

Then you can right click on either one of the key frames go to the Keyframe Assistant and add Eazy Ease.

Now if we press the space bar to preview the animation, you can see it stops beautifully.

If we wanna save this composition as a preset, I'll go ahead and press the space bar to stop playback.

I'll go to Composition, Composition Settings, and since my last new comp was set up with the settings it's already loaded.

So to save it, I'll just click this little paper icon here.

And we can call this 9 x 16 insta, and click OK.

Now we've got a preset setup, and we have our project ready so we can actually render this and then in turn, upload it into Instagram.