Do you record your show in 16×9 or 9×16?
It’s the question that keeps modern content teams up at night. If you shoot horizontal, you alienate your mobile-first audience on TikTok and Reels. If you shoot vertical, you lose the cinematic polish expected on YouTube and broadcast.
For many, the “solution” has been brute force: hours spent in the post-production lab, cropping, resizing, and frantically clipping segments to feed the beast of social algorithms.
But what if you didn’t have to choose? What if you could produce for both formats, live, at the exact same time?
At AWS re:Invent, we aren’t just asking the question, we’re proving the answer.
Live Cloud Production in Action
Within the Industries Pavilion at the Sports Forum, attendees found a transparent, glass-walled Production Control Room (PCR), affectionately known as the “fishbowl.” Inside, a live production team of just three people ran a full week of shows, powered by a game-changing workflow from the cloud production duo of Tagboard and Grabyo.
“We are outputting two shows, in two totally different aspect ratios (16X9 & 9X16) simultaneously. It’s the same three people who are cutting, switching, and flying graphics, but we are creating two uniquely different shows,” said Christine Chalk, Chief Product Officer at Tagboard. “They have their own graphics, their own camera shots, layouts, you name it. All to show the power of how we can version things out and be flexible. So in one week we output close to 50 shows with those three people in the cloud control room.”
“The really amazing thing about this show,” said Bryan Samis, AWS Principal Solutions Architect. “All of the stuff to put this on we literally brought within one Pelican case.”
One Workflow. Two Outputs. Zero Compromise.
The production showcases a unified cloud workflow that solves the multi-format struggle through seamless integration.
1. Tagboard: One Graphics Op, Two Graphics Outputs The visual magic starts with Tagboard’s modern graphic system. Instead of needing multiple ops for different aspect ratios, a single graphics operator drives the on-screen experience. Tagboard is simultaneously flying bespoke graphics packages optimized for 16×9 and 9×16.
- What’s happening: Interactive segments, data-driven displays, and dynamic overlays that look native to the device they are viewed on, controlled by one person, in real-time.
2. Grabyo: One Director, Universal Distribution Those rich Tagboard graphics are fed directly into Grabyo’s cloud vision mixing platform as an HTML5 graphics layer. Inside Grabyo, the director mixes various camera and audio feeds, switching the show live.
- What’s happening: Grabyo takes the live show and instantly produces platform-ready horizontal and vertical outputs, each tailored for its destination with no manual reversioning. At the same time, its real-time clipping tools capture breakout moments the second they happen and push snackable, social-ready clips to every channel almost instantly. The workflow gives digital teams a faster path from live to feed, delivering more content in native formats without extra hardware, re-edits, or added crew.
If you want to start powering your own productions in 16×9 and 9×16, get connected with our team.