Safe zones for vertical video — where Reels, Shorts and TikTok cover your frame
Every vertical platform draws its own interface over your video. Knowing which parts of a 1080×1920 frame survive is the difference between a title that reads and one buried under a share button.
You export a vertical edit, the titles sit beautifully, and on the phone half of one is behind a username and the other half is under a "Follow" button. The video is fine. The frame was never the whole frame.
What is actually happening
A vertical platform plays your video full-screen and then draws its own interface on top of it: the caption and account name along the bottom, a column of like, comment, share and sound down the right, and its own controls across the top.
None of that is in your export. All of it is in front of your export by the time anyone watches.
The zones, as proportions
Exact pixel values are the wrong thing to memorise — they differ by platform, by phone, by app version, and they change. Proportions of the frame hold up:
| Region | Roughly | What sits there |
|---|---|---|
| Top | first ~10% | profile, close button, "Following / For You" |
| Right edge | right ~15% of width | like, comment, share, sound, avatar |
| Bottom | last ~20% | username, caption, music ticker, progress |
| Safe middle | the remaining centre | yours |
On a 1080×1920 export that leaves you a usable area of roughly 900 × 1350 in the middle of the frame. Anything that must be read — a headline, a lower third, a price, a call to action — belongs inside it.
The two rules that fix most of it
1. Nothing readable in the bottom fifth. This is the single most common mistake, because it is exactly where a lower third goes in landscape. In vertical, the bottom is the platform's.
2. Nothing readable against the right edge. The action column is narrow but it is always there, and it is opaque.
Everything else — background movement, texture, a graphic that reads as atmosphere rather than information — can live anywhere. It is only legibility that has to respect the zones.
Captions specifically
Burned-in captions are the most-broken element in vertical video, because the natural place to put them is the bottom, and the bottom is the caption bar.
Put them in the lower-middle, above the platform's own text, not at the foot of the frame. Watch a few well-performing Reels with the sound off and you will see this everywhere: the captions sit around 60–70% down, not 90%.
If you are producing captions in Premiere, the built-in transcription and where it stops covers the workflow side of this.
Check it on a phone, not a monitor
The only reliable test is the one that costs two minutes: upload as unlisted or to a private story, open it on your own phone, and look. A 1080×1920 preview on a 27-inch monitor tells you nothing about what the interface covers.
Do this once per template, not once per video. A template that passes is a template you can stop thinking about.
Why cropping a landscape edit does not solve it
Scaling a 1920×1080 graphic to fill a 1080×1920 frame enlarges it to around 178% and throws away roughly 44% of the width. A centred title survives. A lower third anchored to the left edge, a three-column infographic, a logo in the corner — those get cut, or blown up until they stop reading as design.
They also land in the wrong place vertically. A graphic composed for the bottom of a landscape frame lands in the bottom of a vertical one, which is precisely the region the platform has claimed.
This is why packs worth buying ship a separate vertical edition rather than one set you are expected to resize — the difference between them is what they were composed on, not just their dimensions. AssetBender's vertical packs are laid out with the zones above already accounted for.