Tool Tip Tuesday for Adobe Premiere Pro: Steal Auto Reframe’s Motion Analysis for Pan and Scan

I love using oversized footage in your timeline, such as 4K clips in a 1080 sequence. Or 6k in a 4k sequence.
Perfect for punching in and creating pan-and-scan movement. I’m pretty quick at it, but look over there – there’s an effect called Auto Reframe.

Sigh. It won’t help. It won’t Auto if the footage ratio matches the sequence ratio.

Let’s trick it into what we need.

The Auto Reframe Limitation

Auto Reframe does a decent job at reformatting 16:9 footage for vertical, square, or 4:3 social media formats. I taught several Adobe Max classes on exactly this.
It analyzes your content and creates smooth motion, reformatting it. But it only works when there’s a difference in aspect ratio – UHD clips in a 1080 timeline won’t trigger the magic since both are 16:9.

We’re going to exploit this limitation.

Create a Temporary Square Sequence

Take your oversized material, create a new sequence, and choose Social Media Square from the presets.

Copy your clips from your main timeline and paste them into this square sequence. I do this in batches of ten or so clips.

Select the clips and drag Auto Reframe to all of them.

Premiere will automatically analyze each clip. You can see the outcome by selecting any clip, clicking on Auto Reframe in the Effects controls, and viewing the bounding box that this effect created.

Baking in the keyframes

We need to make these movements more permanent: select “Override generated path” in the controls. This converts the automatic analysis into keyframes.

Now copy the clips back to your original 16:9 sequence. You can quickly adjust the Reframe Offset and Reframe Scale until the footage fills your frame. The movement keyframes remain, providing automatic pan and scan motion despite identical aspect ratios.

Last Thoughts

This workflow gives Premiere automatic motion analysis. Auto Reframe does the heavy lifting of determining where the visual interest is, and you just fine-tune the results.