How I Automated the Most Annoying Part of Building in Public

Portrait Pro by Videograph — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 07:06:13 +0000

If you build in public, you already know the drill: ship something, record a quick demo, then spend way longer than you'd like turning that one recording into a Twitter/X clip, a LinkedIn post, a YouTube Short, and maybe a TikTok — each with a different aspect ratio, different pacing, and captions you have to add manually every single time.

I used to just skip this step entirely. Filming was fast. Reformatting one recording into four platform-specific versions was not, so a lot of good demos just never got posted anywhere except the one place I originally filmed them for.

The actual bottleneck

It's rarely the idea or the footage that's the problem — it's the batch conversion work:

Cropping to vertical (9:16) for Shorts/Reels/TikTok
Re-cropping slightly differently for each platform's safe zones
Adding captions (again, per platform)
Picking out the actually-interesting 30 seconds from a 10-minute screen recording

None of that is technically hard, it's just repetitive enough that it eats an afternoon if you're doing it by hand for every video.

What changed my workflow

I started using an AI tool called ReframeX specifically to handle the batch side of this. You upload one longer recording, and it:

Automatically finds the strongest segments and cuts them into clips
Reframes each clip for whatever aspect ratio a platform needs, with subject tracking so it doesn't just center-crop and cut someone's head off
Generates captions automatically
Lets you queue/schedule the output across platforms

It's not doing anything clever with the content — it's not writing your demo script or deciding what's interesting about your project. It's solving the "I already have the footage, I just don't want to spend three hours reformatting it four different ways" problem, which for me was genuinely the bigger time sink.

Is it worth it?

If you're already recording demos, standups, or build-in-public updates and just not posting them everywhere because reformatting takes too long, this kind of tool closes that gap. If your bottleneck is actually finding time to record in the first place, this won't help with that part.

For me, it's meant more of what I actually build gets seen, instead of sitting in a folder because turning it into four different video formats felt like a whole separate task.

Curious if others here have a different setup for this — always interested in how other devs handle repurposing demo footage across platforms.

DEV Community: Portrait Pro by Videograph

How I Automated the Most Annoying Part of Building in Public