Every few weeks a host asks me some version of the same question, which is, if most of my audience is finding me on their phone anyway, why am I still publishing the full episode in a wide frame that they have to rotate the phone to watch properly, and shouldn't the whole thing just be vertical, right, and it is a fair question, because the instinct behind it is correct even when the conclusion usually is not.
So in this post I want to work through vertical podcast editing for full episodes honestly, when a complete 9:16 version earns its place, how you even frame two people in a tall narrow picture, what happens to captions, and why for most shows the smarter move is still a landscape episode with a steady stream of vertical clips around it. I will tell you where I land, but I will also tell you the situations where I would change my mind.
Should I edit my whole podcast episode in vertical?
For most shows the answer is no, because a full episode is watched by people who have already decided to spend an hour with you, and those people mostly watch on a television, a laptop or a phone turned sideways, where landscape fits better.
The thing is, right, vertical is the format of discovery, not the format of commitment. People scroll vertical feeds to find something, and when they find a show they like they usually go to the full episode somewhere it is comfortable to watch for a long time. So the job of vertical, for most podcasts, is to be the front door, and the job of the landscape episode is to be the room people sit in once they have walked through it.
That said, there are real exceptions, and I am pretty sure they will grow over time. If your audience genuinely lives inside a phone-first app and rarely leaves it, if your show is short enough that a vertical viewer will finish it, or if your format is a single host speaking straight to camera, a full vertical cut can make sense. The question is not whether vertical is popular, it is where your particular audience sits when they watch the whole thing.
When does a full vertical episode actually make sense?
A full vertical episode makes sense when your audience watches long content inside phone-first apps, when episodes are short, or when the show is mostly one person on camera, because those are the cases where 9:16 costs you the least.
Basically, the more people on screen and the more your audience watches on a big screen, the worse a full vertical episode gets, and the closer you are to one person talking to a phone audience, the better it gets. A solo show is close to vertical already, the host fills the frame naturally and nothing is lost. A three person panel in vertical is a constant compromise, because you either squeeze faces into tiny boxes or keep cutting between people and lose the reactions that make panels fun.
The other honest factor is length. A ninety minute conversation in vertical asks a phone viewer for a lot of patience, so if you are going to try a full vertical version, I would test it on your shortest episodes first and see whether people stay, rather than converting the whole back catalogue on a hunch.
How do you frame two people in a 9:16 podcast edit?
You frame two people in 9:16 either by stacking them, one face in the top half and one in the bottom, or by cutting between full-frame single shots of whoever is talking, and the choice depends on how much the reactions matter.
Stacking keeps both people visible all the time, right, so you never lose a laugh or a raised eyebrow, but each face gets half the screen and the space for captions shrinks. Single shots give each person the whole frame and feel more intimate, but the editor has to cut to the reaction at exactly the right moment or the listener feels something happened that they did not see. On a longer episode we usually mix the two, stacked for fast back and forth, single for longer answers, and the cut follows the conversation rather than a timer, which is the same principle as our multi-cam episodes in landscape.
The part nobody tells you is that this is decided on record day, not in the edit. If both people were filmed in one wide shot, cropping that into vertical throws away most of the picture and the result looks soft, right, so for any vertical work you want a separate camera on each person, framed with some space above the head and below the chin, and recording in 4K gives the editor room to crop without losing sharpness. I wrote more about that in shoot for clips while you record, and the same advice applies even more strongly to a full vertical cut.
Vertical does not forgive a lazy camera setup, so if you want 9:16 later, you have to frame for it on the day.
Where do captions go in a vertical podcast?
Captions in vertical belong in the middle portion of the frame, clear of the faces and clear of the app interface at the bottom and sides, and they should be accurate word for word rather than a rough automatic transcript.
Plenty of people scroll vertical feeds with the sound off, so captions are not decoration, they are the way a lot of viewers follow the conversation at all, and they are also how deaf and hard of hearing viewers get the episode, which the W3C guidance on captions explains well. In a full vertical episode the captions have to coexist with stacked faces for an hour, so the style needs to be calm, a few words at a time, big enough to read on a phone and small enough that they do not cover anybody's mouth.
Accuracy is the other half, because an automatic transcript gets names, technical words and fast crosstalk wrong, and a wrong word on screen is louder than a wrong word in the audio. Our view on that is in podcast captions and subtitles that match what was said, and for the landscape version of the episode a separate caption file usually does the job better than burned-in text.
Why are vertical clips usually the better choice?
Vertical clips are usually the better choice because a short, self-contained moment is something a phone viewer can actually finish in the feed, and each clip can point viewers back to the full episode where the real relationship with your show gets built.
Clips are something we cut every single week next to the single camera and multi-cam episodes themselves, and each one arrives captioned and ready to post, chosen by the editor who sat through the full conversation, right, because the best clip is often buried in minute forty-three, somewhere a silence-detection tool would never think to look. That is the whole idea behind shorts and clips.
So here is how I would put it, that is one, clips reach people who would never press play on an hour, secondly, they cost far less to produce than a full second edit of every episode, and the third thing is that you learn which moments land, which tells you something about the show itself. If you are working out which platform to start on, shorts vs reels vs TikTok for podcasts goes through it, and the platform specific side is in TikTok podcast clips and Instagram Reels podcast clips.
What does a full vertical edit cost compared with clips?
A full vertical episode is not on our fixed price list, so it gets scoped on the call, while vertical clips are a fixed 25 dollars each on top of the episode, which is why most shows start with clips and only test a full vertical cut later.
On the episode side, the multi-camera plan is the one that suits vertical work best, because it hands the editor a separate angle on each person to frame from, and cropping a single wide shot is where vertical starts to look soft. Say you publish weekly and add four clips to each episode, that is 100 dollars of clips per episode on top of the edit, and you get four chances at discovery for less than the cost of a second full edit. Everything fixed is on pricing, and if you want vertical at real volume across every platform, our sister team at Pixel Samy Studio runs short-form video editing at scale.
To be very honest, if a host insists on a full vertical version of every episode before they have tested whether their audience wants one, I will push back on the call, right, because I would rather you spend that money on more clips and better packaging first. The packaging matters for the landscape episode too, and our packaging studio handles that through its thumbnails built for podcast episodes.
How do I test whether my audience wants a full vertical episode?
Pick two or three of your shortest episodes, publish a full vertical cut alongside the normal landscape version, and compare how far vertical viewers actually get before deciding to change anything permanently.
The point of testing small, right, is that a vertical version is a whole extra edit, with its own framing decisions and its own caption pass, so you only want to commit to it when there is a reason. Keep everything else the same, the same topics, the same release day, and look at how long people stay rather than how many saw the first few seconds. If vertical viewers drop off early, the clips strategy is doing its job and the full vertical cut is not adding much. If they stay, right, that is a real signal and worth building on. Does that sound like a test your show could run in the next month, or is the audience still too small to read the numbers clearly? Either way the answer shapes the plan.
What should I send an editor if I want vertical work?
Send separate camera files for each person, ideally in 4K with headroom above and below the face, the clean audio, and a few of your recent episodes or clips so we can match the caption style and look you already use.
Heavy 4K files are no problem for the upload folder, and the timing works like any other episode, a first cut inside 48 hours, one round of notes from you and the fixes a business day later, with a possible extra day on a four-camera shoot or a graphics-heavy edit that I would mention before we start. The camera files, the project and every export stay yours, so whoever edits your show next, in whatever shape, can open the project and carry on. If you want my honest view on your own show, a 15 minute call where I look at a few recent episodes is enough for me to tell you which way I would go, or drop me a line at samy@pixelsamy.com. The way I see it, the format should follow the audience, never the other way round, and the cheapest way to find out where your audience actually sits is a handful of good clips, not a whole second edit.
So yeah. That's my way of saying it.