Vertical Video Safe Zones: What Covers Your Video

Every vertical platform draws its own interface on top of your video. A caption sits near the bottom left, a column of buttons runs down the right, a progress bar hugs the bottom edge, and on some screens a header covers the top. None of it is part of the file you exported — and all of it hides your content when someone actually watches.

This is the most common avoidable mistake in short-form video: a beautifully set subtitle that ends up underneath the "Follow" button. The fix is planning the layout around the chrome instead of discovering the problem after posting.

What actually overlaps your video

Four regions take damage, and they are the same four on every platform, in slightly different proportions:

• The right edge. A vertical stack of action buttons — like, comment, share, and usually a profile avatar with a follow control. It occupies roughly the rightmost 12 to 18 percent of the frame, from about a third of the way down to near the bottom.
• The bottom fifth. The creator's name, the caption text, a music ticker and a progress bar. On a video with a long description this area can grow upward, particularly while the description is expanded.
• The top. A tab bar or a "For You" header on some screens, plus a search icon. Usually shallow, but not always absent.
• The very bottom strip. A navigation bar on some devices, and the system gesture area on phones without one.

The exact pixel counts differ by device, app version and screen shape, and they change with app updates. Treat any specific number you read — including in this article — as a starting estimate, not a specification.

The safe rectangle

A layout that survives all three major platforms:

• Keep the central 70 percent of the width free of essential text.
• Keep the middle 60 percent of the height free of essential text.
• Treat the bottom 20 percent and the right 15 percent as permanently occupied.
• Allow a 5 percent margin at the very top for a header.

That leaves a usable box roughly from 10 percent to 75 percent of the height and from 5 percent to 85 percent of the width. It sounds cramped. In practice it is enough for a face in the upper two thirds, a two-line caption at around 65 percent height, and a small logo.

Why "just move it up" is not the whole answer

The obvious response is to push all text upward, and that creates a different problem: text competes with the subject. If a face occupies the top half and the caption sits immediately under the chin, the composition looks top-heavy and the caption reads as a label for the person rather than a subtitle of what they are saying.

The practical resolution is to plan the shot for it. Frame a talking head slightly high in the frame, with the eyeline around 35 to 40 percent from the top, and leave the lower third genuinely empty. Then the caption has somewhere to live that does not collide with either the face or the buttons.

Captions: the one element people always misplace

Subtitle position is the most consequential safe-zone decision, because captions are on screen constantly.

For most vertical video, a caption anchored at 65 to 72 percent of the height, centred horizontally within the safe box, clears the bottom interface on all three platforms. Anything below 80 percent starts to interact with the creator name and the first line of the description. Anything above 60 percent crowds the chin.

Two related decisions:

• Line length. Two lines maximum. A caption that wraps to three lines pushes into the face above or the buttons beside it.
• Width. Cap the text box at about 65 to 70 percent of the frame width. Full-width captions run under the action buttons on the right, and a line that disappears behind an icon looks like a rendering bug.

Logos and watermarks

Brand marks belong in the top area, but the top is not free either. A logo placed in the top-right corner collides with a search icon on some screens; a logo in the top-left collides with a back arrow. The safest position is top-centre or just below the header, at a small size, at moderate opacity.

Resist the temptation to place a watermark in a corner and call the layout finished. Corners are exactly where platform interfaces concentrate.

Test on a phone, not in the editor preview

Most editors preview a clean frame with no interface at all, which is precisely the wrong preview. Two habits close the gap:

1. Post to a private or draft state and watch it on the device. Every platform has some way to preview before publishing. The seconds it costs are cheaper than reposting.
2. Check with the description expanded. The bottom overlay grows when text is long, and a caption that was clear at 75 percent height can vanish under a two-line description.

If you cannot preview, export a still of the frame and overlay rough rectangles for the four regions. Crude, but it catches the obvious collisions.

Safe zones and the "one idea per screen" rule

Safe zones are a geometry problem, and geometry problems are easiest to solve when there is less on screen. Every element you add — a title card, a progress ticker, a second caption track, a stock b-roll window — competes for the same shrinking rectangle.

If a frame needs a title, a caption, a logo and a b-roll inset to make sense, the clip is doing too much. Cut one of them. The most common casualty should be the title, because the caption already carries the words.

A five-minute template workflow

Once you have a layout that works, stop rebuilding it:

• Create one master project at 1080 by 1920.
• Place a face-cam layer in the upper two thirds.
• Place a caption layer at 68 percent height, two-line limit, 68 percent width.
• Place a logo in the top centre at 10 percent of frame width.
• Save it as a template and duplicate it per clip.

Then the only decisions left per clip are which seconds to use and what the words say. That is exactly where the creative effort belongs.

The short version

Keep essential content inside the middle 70 percent of the width and between 10 and 75 percent of the height. Put captions at roughly two thirds down the frame, never across the right edge. Keep logos small and near the top centre. Preview on a phone before publishing, and assume the interface will grow rather than shrink.

Everything else is style. This part is arithmetic, and getting it wrong is the difference between a caption that reads and a caption that a share button eats.