Going vertical: 9:16 video for Shorts, Reels and TikTok

The frame: 9:16 at 1080 × 1920

Short-form apps are built around a phone held upright, so the shape to deliver is 9:16, nine units wide for every sixteen tall. At full-HD quality that's 1080 × 1920 pixels, the vertical twin of a standard 1920 × 1080 landscape video. If file size matters more than detail, 720 × 1280 is the same shape at a lighter weight.

Here's what each platform's help pages say at the time of writing:

• YouTube Shorts, a video counts as a Short if it's square or vertical and up to three minutes long. YouTube also notes that Shorts over one minute with an active Content ID claim are blocked, so licensed music matters more in longer Shorts.
• Instagram Reels, uploads can have any aspect ratio from 1.91:1 to 9:16, with at least 720 pixels of resolution and 30 frames per second. Reels can run up to 20 minutes, but Instagram says reels longer than three minutes won't be recommended to new audiences. Switching on Upload at highest quality in the app's media quality settings makes it upload at the best quality it offers, at the cost of slower uploads.
• TikTok, uploads can be up to 60 minutes long, and videos recorded in the app up to 10 minutes. TikTok's own ad specifications list vertical 9:16 as the recommended shape.

In short: a 1080 × 1920 export fits all three, and the length you can use depends on the app. Limits change often, so check before planning a long piece around them.

Turning landscape footage vertical

A 16:9 clip shown in a 9:16 frame leaves a lot of empty space, and you have four ways to deal with it. The video resizer offers all of them, with a live preview:

• Crop to fill, zoom in until the frame is full and choose which slice of the picture to keep. It's the most immersive option and ideal for a single person talking to camera, but everything outside that slice is gone.
• Blurred background, the whole picture sits in the middle of the frame over a soft, enlarged copy of itself. Nothing is lost, which makes it the safe choice for wide shots, two people, screen recordings and anything with important detail at the edges.
• Solid color, the video on a flat background, leaving clean space above and below for a title or captions.
• Fit with bars, the picture with plain black bars. Honest, but it wastes most of a phone screen.

With blur or color, zooming the video to 120 to 140% makes it noticeably bigger on a phone while keeping some background visible around it.

Avoiding awkward crops

Cropping a landscape video to 9:16 keeps less than a third of its width, and that has two consequences.

Resolution. A full-height 9:16 slice of a 1920 × 1080 frame is only about 608 pixels wide, so it has to be enlarged almost 1.8× to fill a 1080 × 1920 export and will look soft. A 4K frame (3840 × 2160) leaves a slice about 1,215 pixels wide, enough for a sharp result. If you know footage will be cropped vertical, record in 4K when you can. The resizer flags heavy enlargement before you export, and 720p output is a sensible fallback for small sources.

Framing. A crop position is fixed for the whole clip, so if the subject moves sideways, they can slide out of the kept slice partway through. Scrub through the entire video in the preview before exporting. If the action moves around, or two people sit far apart, blurred background beats a crop that keeps cutting someone off.

When you're shooting with vertical in mind, keep the main subject near the centre of the frame and leave room above their head, you'll have far more freedom when it's time to crop. For a hand-picked vertical slice of a single scene, the video cropper lets you draw the frame yourself.

Keep text out from under the buttons

All three apps draw their interface on top of your video: a header at the top, a column of buttons down the right-hand side, and the username, caption and sound details along the bottom. Text, logos and faces that land underneath are partly hidden for every viewer.

Meta's ad specifications for Reels recommend leaving about 14% of the frame clear at the top, 35% at the bottom and 6% down each side, no text, no logos. They're written for ads, but they make a good rule of thumb for any vertical video. The other apps' layouts differ and change over time, so check your actual frames rather than relying on memory:

• Open the finished clip in the safe zone checker and pick Shorts, Reels or TikTok, or All platforms when one video goes to every app.
• Play or scrub through with the overlay on, and step frame by frame where text appears.
• Download a PNG of any frame with the zones drawn on to share with an editor or client.

The zones are approximations, so leave a little breathing room rather than designing right up to their edges.

Captions that stay readable

Many people scroll with the sound off, so burned-in captions do a lot of work on vertical video. Auto Subtitles transcribes the speech on your device and offers a short-form style with big, bold words and word-by-word highlighting.

Placement is the part people get wrong. Use the Position slider to sit captions a little below the centre of the frame, higher than the app's username and caption text and away from the buttons on the right, then confirm it in the safe zone checker. For size, timing and styling, see our guide to captions people actually read.

A quick workflow

1. Finish the edit first. Trim the start and end, and cut dead air with the silence remover, every later step depends on the final timing.
2. Reframe to 9:16. In the video resizer, choose 9:16 at 1080p, then crop or blur as the footage demands.
3. Add captions. Generate and style them, keeping them in the lower-middle of the frame.
4. Check the safe zones. Scrub through in the safe zone checker with the platform you're posting to.
5. Export and upload. If a platform or messaging app needs a smaller file, run it through the video compressor last.