Google's AutoFlip uses AI to crop videos for you

Video filmed and edited for TV is typically created and viewed in landscape, but problematically, aspect ratios like 16:9 and 4:3 don't always fit the display being used for viewing. Fortunately, Google is on the case. Given a video and a target dimension, it analyzes the video content and develops optimal tracking and cropping strategies, after which it produces an output video with the same duration in the desired aspect ratio. As Google Research senior software engineer Nathan Frey and senior software engineer Zheng Sun note in a blog post, traditional approaches for reframing video usually involve static cropping, which often leads to unsatisfactory results. More bespoke approaches are superior, but they typically require video curators to manually identify salient content in each frame, track their transitions from frame to frame, and adjust crop regions accordingly throughout the video.