Does split screen stretch or squish your face in dual camera video?
No. Fitting a wide camera image into a narrower half of a vertical canvas has to change something, but in DualCam that something is how much of the frame is visible, not the shape of what remains in it. Faces keep their normal proportions in split screen; they do not get pulled tall and thin or squashed wide the way footage does when a video is resized to fit a shape it was never framed for.
There are two basic ways to fit a wide image into a narrow space, and they produce very different results. Stretching keeps every pixel of the source but distorts the proportions between them to make it fit. Cropping keeps every pixel’s original proportions but throws away the ones that do not fit. DualCam always takes the second option.
Crop, not resize
DualCam’s canvas is 1080 pixels wide, either 1080×1920 for standard 9:16 or 1080×2340 to fill a modern iPhone screen — a tall rectangle either way. A single camera image, even once rotated for portrait shooting, is much closer to a landscape shape than that canvas is. Fitting it into half the canvas is a crop, not a resize: the app keeps the source pixels at their original proportions and only decides how much of the frame to keep versus cut away.
That is the reason a face in a split-screen half looks like a normal face rather than a stretched or squeezed one. Nothing in the compositing pipeline changes the aspect ratio of what is inside the frame — it only changes how much of the original frame survives into the final one.
Where the missing part actually goes
Left-and-right split gives each camera the full height of the canvas but only half the width, and the source image already has more width than that half needs, so DualCam crops in from the sides — in practice, close to a quarter of the frame disappears off each side. Top-and-bottom split does the opposite: each camera keeps the full width, and the crop comes from the top and the bottom instead.
Either way, the part of the picture that remains is shown at its true proportions. What changes is the field of view, not the shape of what is in it — the same reason a person filmed near the centre of a split-screen half looks completely normal, while someone standing near the edge of that half can be cropped out of frame entirely.
The picture-in-picture inset works the same way
The small floating window in picture-in-picture layout is not stretched either. It is a smaller version of the source frame, scaled down, and cropped into whichever shape you picked — portrait, square or circle — the same crop-not-stretch approach as split screen, just applied to a shape that is not a plain rectangle. A round inset crops a circle out of the frame rather than warping a square image into an oval.
The one real trade-off with the inset is sharpness, not shape: because it is a smaller window sampled down from the source, fine detail can look softer than in the full-frame camera. That is a resolution question, not a distortion question — proportions stay correct at every size DualCam offers.
Why this matters for framing
Because DualCam crops instead of stretching, framing for a split-screen shot is really a question of what to keep near the centre of each half, not something to brace for visual distortion. A face near the centre of a left-right half or a top-bottom half reads exactly as it would in a normal photo — the same size, the same proportions, just occupying less of the total frame than it would full-screen.
The failure mode to plan around is not a stretched face, it is a cropped one: someone standing at the edge of their half, or leaning out of frame mid-take, is the actual risk. Keeping the subject centred in whichever half they occupy solves for that directly, and it is the same advice that applies to picture-in-picture and to any layout DualCam offers, because none of them ever distort what is inside the frame.
Common follow-up questions
Does DualCam stretch or squish faces in split screen?
No. Fitting a camera image into half of a vertical canvas is done by cropping, not resizing, so proportions stay correct — the trade-off is how much of the frame survives, not the shape of what is left in it.
How much of the picture do I actually lose in a split-screen half?
It depends on the orientation. Left-and-right split crops roughly a quarter of each source frame off the sides; top-and-bottom split crops instead from the top and the bottom. Either way, what remains keeps its true proportions.
Does the picture-in-picture inset distort the image to fit its shape?
No. The inset is a smaller, scaled-down version of the source frame cropped into whichever shape you chose — portrait, square or circle — not a stretched one. It can look softer than the full-frame camera because it is smaller, which is a sharpness question, not a distortion question.
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