Automatic Vertical Cropping and Tracking of Walking Person in Adobe Premiere Pro

[Terry2024]

Hello everyone!😘

I have a video with a resolution of 3840x2160 and a duration of 15 seconds. I want to crop it into a vertical 9:16 video in Adobe Premiere Pro, keeping the original height and only cropping the width. The default crop position should be centered, resulting in a frame size of 1215x2160 (9:16). In the video, a person starts walking from the x-coordinate of 100 pixels at the second second and gradually moves to the x-coordinate of 2600 pixels over a duration of 13 seconds. Therefore, I need to set the starting point of the vertical crop's x-coordinate at 200 pixels. However, the person in the video continuously walks to the right. Since the cropped frame is vertically narrow (1215x2160), it should automatically slide to the right to keep pace with the person's movement and ensure that the person remains within the cropped frame. How can I configure the cropped frame to track the person, automatically sliding left or right in accordance with the direction and speed of the person's movement? Should I mark the person as a tracking object?👀

[Carlos Ziade]

if your final export is gonna be 1215x2160(vertical), you can adjut the size in sequence settings,

then keyframe the position property of the video from the Effect Controls panel, set a starting 

position keyframe, center the walking subject, move forward until the subject goes off frame, 

move the position back to the center, this will create another keyframe, keep doing it until the

shot ends and you should be good to go.

Now if you only want to vertically highlight your subject and down the opacity of the ramining frame,

you can do mask tracking: https://helpx.adobe.com/premiere-pro/using/masking-tracking.html

[Terry2024]

Thank you for your prompt guidance. 😊The image above is a schematic representation. What I ultimately need is a vertical video with a resolution of 1215x2160. When the video is lengthy, adjusting the x-coordinate positions of keyframes may be time-consuming. Is it possible to apply tracking data to the starting position of the cropping frame's x-coordinate? This way, the entire cropping frame (1215x2160) would consistently center around the person, sliding left or right in accordance with their movement. Can this be achieved in Adobe Premiere Pro, or should I resort to using After Effects?👀

[Mathias Moehl]

How are you cropping? Have you tried Auto Reframe Sequence?

[Terry2024]

Thank you for your response and reminder!😘 I haven't discovered this feature yet 😁 Haha, your reminder is really timely. So, is applying tracking data to the initial x-coordinate position of the cropping frame (1215x2160) the same? I mainly don't want to manually adjust the keyframe position of the cropping frame because some videos are very long, and manual adjustment would be very time-consuming. I just want the entire cropping frame to slide parallelly left or right, without any vertical movement.