Vertical video safe zones
See what each app covers with its own buttons — before the caption ends up underneath them.
Runs in your browser — free, no signup, nothing uploaded
Drop a still image or a short video anywhere on this card, or choose a file below. Nothing leaves your browser — a dropped video is read locally and a frame is drawn to the canvas.
TikTok safe area
1,080 × 1,402 px
top-left 0, 134
That box is the frame with the top and bottom interface cleared. On the right-hand side, TikTok also covers a column starting around 82% of the width — keep faces and text out of that strip too.
No frame loaded yet — the overlay above is shown over a placeholder so the numbers still make sense before you drop something in.
How much of the frame the apps actually take
Open the editor on a desktop and a 9:16 frame looks like yours to fill. Open the same clip in TikTok, Reels or Shorts and it isn’t — each app draws its own interface directly on top of the video, and between the status bar, the caption line, the username and a column of action buttons, something close to a third of the picture belongs to the platform, not to you. Nobody designs around that on the first upload, because nothing in a normal editor shows it. This tool exists to put that interface back on the screen before the clip goes out, not after.
Where a burned-in caption actually belongs
The instinct is to put captions near the bottom of the frame, because that’s where captions sit on a horizontal timeline and on television. On a vertical platform the bottom fifth of the screen is exactly where the app puts its own caption and username line, so a burned-in caption placed there doesn’t compete with the interface — it sits underneath it and disappears. It is the single most common way a church clip ships technically finished and practically unreadable. The safer band sits closer to the middle of the frame, high enough to clear the action-button column and low enough to stay off the speaker’s face, which is what the dashed guide above marks.
Why this is a guide, not a spec
The zones drawn here are measured from real builds of each app at the time this page was written — they are not published anywhere by TikTok, Meta or YouTube, and all three move their interface between versions without announcing it. Reels and TikTok both take a tall column up the right side; Shorts is lighter on the right and heavier at the bottom. Treat the numbers as a working starting point for where to keep faces and text, not as a guarantee for every phone running every app version.
Checking the real thing before a big post
For anything you can’t afford to get wrong — a launch clip, a paid promotion, a video going out under a public account you don’t control — the last step is still to post it (or use each platform’s draft/preview mode where available) and look at it on an actual phone, in the actual app. This checker gets you most of the way in seconds without exporting anything; a real preview catches whatever changed since this page measured it.
Questions people ask
- What is a safe zone in vertical video?
- The part of a 1080 by 1920 frame that the app does not cover with its own interface. Every vertical platform draws a caption, a username, a row of action buttons and a progress bar on top of your video, and anything you place under those is effectively invisible. The safe zone is what is left.
- How much of the screen do the apps actually cover?
- More than most people expect. Roughly the bottom fifth of the frame goes to the caption and username, and a strip up the right-hand side takes the like, comment, share and sound controls. The top carries a status bar and, on TikTok, the following and for-you tabs. Between them the apps claim something close to a third of the picture.
- Where should captions sit in a vertical clip?
- Around the middle of the frame, or a little above it — high enough to clear the platform caption and the action buttons, low enough that the speaker's face is not covered. Burned-in captions placed near the bottom of the frame, which reads naturally on a desktop timeline, is the single most common way a church clip ships unreadable.
- Are the safe zones the same on every platform?
- They are similar but not identical, and they move between app versions. Reels and TikTok both take a tall right-hand column; Shorts is lighter on the right and heavier at the bottom. The overlay here shows each one separately for that reason. Treat them as the working guide they are, not as a specification — check a real post on a real phone before a big launch.
- Does this upload my video?
- No. The frame you drop in is drawn on a canvas in your browser and never sent anywhere. It also accepts a still image, which is usually the easier thing to test with — export one frame from the point in the clip where the captions are busiest.