Guides/Picture
Vertical video and the canvas
Fill the bars around a wide shot in a tall frame with a blur, a colour or a picture, and size a clip to the frame with Fit or Fill.
Make the project 9:16 (the New project sheet’s Shape, or the Inspector’s Modify button for an existing timeline) and a 16:9 clip sits in the middle of the frame with black above and below it. In 0.2.7 the way to fill those bars is by hand: put a second copy of the clip on a lane below, scale it up and give it a blur effect. The canvas below does it in one step.
The canvas
Select a video or still on the main lane, the lowest lane that holds a picture, and open the Inspector’s Video tab, Basic page. The Canvas section sets what fills the frame where the picture does not reach:
| Background | What it draws |
|---|---|
| None | Black |
| Blur | The clip’s own picture, enlarged to cover the frame and blurred. Softness sets how much |
| Color | One flat colour |
| Image | A still from the bin, enlarged to cover the frame. Import a picture first to pick one |
Apply to all gives every picture on the main lane this clip’s background, as one undo step.
The background is drawn behind the main lane only, where CapCut has its main track. Titles, shapes and pictures on the lanes above sit on top of a frame that is already filled. It travels with its clip through fades, dissolves and wipes, and a picture that already covers the frame gets none. The monitor and the export draw it the same way.
On a phone, Canvas on the bottom strip (and on a picture’s strip) opens a sheet of tiles: four softness steps and twelve colour swatches, with Fit and Fill at its head for a clip, and Apply to all.
Fit and Fill
The Transform section has a Size row with two buttons, also on a clip’s right-click menu as Fit to frame and Fill frame:
- Fit: the whole picture inside the frame, as large as it goes. Every picture starts this way.
- Fill: the frame covered, the picture centred and cut at the edges that overhang.
Neither stretches the picture. If the clip’s scale or position has keyframes, Fit and Fill add a key at the playhead rather than replacing the animation.
Scripts reach the same with the frameClip, setTimelineBackground and updateClip edits; see
Edit commands.