1080x2400 phone recording for Pinterest: crop height to 0.9 or 0.8

A 1080x2400 phone screen recording has a width-to-height ratio of 1080 / 2400 = 0.45, which is narrower than 1:2 (0.5). Pinterest's video ad specs say to avoid videos "shorter than 1:2 (width:height)" (read 2026-10-09). The fix is one Sume video filter job at $0.02: crop the height to 0.9 of the frame to reach 1080x2160 (exactly 1:2), or to 0.8 to reach 1080x1920 (9:16).

The wording on Pinterest's page is unusual, so quote it before you rely on it. The standard width video ad lines read: file types MP4, MOV or M4V; encoding H.264 or H.265; up to 2 GB; at least 4 seconds and at most 15 minutes, with 6 to 15 seconds recommended; and the ratio guidance above. We read the 1:2 line as a floor on width-to-height, which is what the 0.45 recording would violate. If Pinterest changes the line, the arithmetic below still holds for whichever ratio you target.

The crop arithmetic

Video filter's crop op takes fractions of the source frame: x and y in [0, 1], width and height in [0.05, 1], with x + width <= 1 and y + height <= 1. The compiler rounds to even values for yuv420p. Keep the full width (width 1.0, x 0) and shrink the height.

Which crop loses less

A phone recording has a status bar at the top and a gesture bar at the bottom, so a centered crop at 0.9 removes 120 px from each end, which is 5% of the height each. That usually takes out the bars and leaves the app. A 0.8 crop removes 240 px from each end. If the interesting content sits in the lower half, set y to 0.2 so the crop is 0.2 to 1.0, and the bottom bar stays while the top 480 px go.

The exact-1:2 result sits on the boundary of the line, so a 9:16 crop is the safer choice if a reviewer reads the line strictly. It is also a size every other vertical platform takes.

The request

Import the recording first. The program is one op. Keep the Idempotency-Key header. If you want to see the plan without paying, send the same body to POST /v1/video-filter/check, which is free and returns the compiled filters and an estimate.

{
  "video_url": "https://media.sume.com/artifacts/artf_demo/screen.mp4",
  "ops": [
    { "op": "crop", "x": 0, "y": 0.1, "width": 1, "height": 0.8 }
  ]
}

Limits that matter

Video filter takes sources up to 300 seconds. A Pinterest video can run 15 minutes, so a long recording needs a video trim first; see the order-and-cost post linked in related. The output keeps the source frame rate and audio unless the program changes them, and the job is worker ffmpeg only, so $0.02 does not depend on length or content.