Meta's aspect ratios view fills missing variations: supply all four

When you upload fewer than the four ratio variations Meta wants (square, vertical, portrait, horizontal), Meta's system fills the gaps with padding, media expansion, cropping and AI-enabled features. You can avoid that by uploading all four yourself, and Sume can render or crop each of them.

What Meta says about the aspect ratios view

Meta's best-practices page says that when you create or edit an ad, an aspect ratios view lets you review every variation your ad needs, preview each one, opt in or out and adjust before publishing. If you do not provide all four, the system fills the gaps with padding, media expansion, cropping and additional AI-enabled features.

Its tips are plain: upload your own variations when possible, review auto-applied padding, cropping and expansion before publishing, opt out of any adjustment you do not want, and keep more than one variation active per ratio so you can test different looks. The page also says that cropping alone will not restrict delivery to a placement, so use placement opt-outs if an asset should go only to certain placements.

Map the four slots to ratios Sume can make

Meta lists 1.91:1 and 16:9 as horizontal, 1:1 as square, and 4:5 and 9:16 as vertical. For Feed it names 1:1 and 4:5 as supported for images and videos, and for Stories, Status and Reels it recommends 9:16.

In the Sume video catalog on origin/main, the Seedance family, Wan 3.0, Kling 3 and the MiniMax H3 rows all list 16:9, 1:1 and 9:16. None of the video rows lists 4:5. The 3:4 ratio is on the Seedance, Wan 3.0 and MiniMax rows, which is the closest source for a 4:5 crop.

Keep the story the same across all four

The cheapest way to keep four variations consistent is to generate once, then derive. Render the 9:16 master first, because it is the ratio Meta recommends for Stories, Status and Reels. Then render the 16:9 and 1:1 versions with the same prompt and, for Seedance, the same reference images, because a prompt-only re-render will not match shot for shot.

If shot-for-shot match matters, build the 1:1 and 16:9 variants from the master with Timeline fit modes instead. The fit options are cover, contain, stretch and blur, and the output size is set with output.width and output.height as even integers from 256 to 2160.

Let Meta's adjustments stay off

Meta's tips let you opt out of any adjustment for a single variation. If you have supplied a real 4:5 file, turn off padding and expansion for it. Otherwise the AI fill can replace a version you already made.

Timeline renders cost $0.10 per started output minute, and the video filter encode is $0.02 per job, so a full set of four short variants costs a few cents in assembly on top of generation. Show the arithmetic for your own clip: a 15-second ad is 1 started minute, so three Timeline variants are 3 x $0.10 = $0.30, and one crop encode adds $0.02.

Before you publish

Open the aspect ratios view and look at every slot. Keep more than one active variation for a ratio if you want a hook test, and read the single 9:16 master post for how Meta's two pages differ.