One song, four cuts: formats for every platform

A song does not need one video. It needs four, and they are not crops of each other.

The specs

Platform	Aspect	Length	Notes
YouTube	16:9	Full track	1080p minimum, 4K for particle
Shorts	9:16	Under 60s	Cut to the hook, not the intro
TikTok	9:16	15–60s	First second decides everything
Reels	9:16	15–90s	Same cut as TikTok usually works
Spotify Canvas	9:16	3–8s	Silent, seamless loop
Instagram feed	1:1	30–60s	Safe area matters, controls overlay

The vertical cut is not a crop

The most common mistake is exporting 16:9 and letterboxing it into 9:16.

Vertical needs its own composition — the subject centred in a tall frame, not a wide frame with black bars. If your visualizer is a spectrum across the width, that width does not exist in vertical. Re-render, do not crop.

Start at the hook

For the vertical cuts, find the most recognisable eight seconds of the song and start there. Nobody watches an intro on TikTok.

For YouTube, start at the beginning. Different surface, different behaviour.

Canvas is the cheapest one

Three to eight seconds, no audio, seamless. It takes almost no rendering and it sits behind your track in the Spotify app forever.

Most artists never make one, which is a strange thing to skip given the cost.

Render them together

Four separate exports of the same track is four rounds of waiting and four chances to mislabel a file.

Rendering the set in one pass from one master is faster and keeps them consistent — same colour, same style, same track position. That is what the music video generator is built to do.

Naming

Do it now, not later:

track-name_16x9_youtube.mp4
track-name_9x16_shorts.mp4
track-name_1x1_feed.mp4
track-name_canvas.mp4

You will thank yourself the second time you upload something.