Guide
TikTok, Reels, Shorts: see what each app draws over your video
Every vertical app draws its interface over your video — usernames and captions at the bottom, buttons up the side, system elements on top. The checker on this page shows those zones on your own file, in your browser, with nothing uploaded and no account needed.
- TikTok — top ~108px, bottom ~320px, left ~60px, right ~120px. Covers: system row up top; username, caption and sound at the bottom; the action rail down the right.
- Reels — top ~220px, bottom ~420px. Covers: camera and audio row up top; account line, collapsed caption and actions at the bottom.
- Shorts — top ~120px, bottom ~360px. Covers: search and camera up top; title, channel and subscribe at the bottom.
Margins are approximate — platforms shift their UI with every redesign, so keep anything essential well inside the dashed line. Your file is opened with a local object URL and never leaves the browser: nothing uploads, nothing is stored, no account needed.
- The frame every zone below is mapped on
- 1080 × 1920
- What Reels' caption zone takes from the bottom
- ~420px
- The band left clear on all three apps, roughly
- 900 × 1280
How the checker works, and why nothing uploads
Drop an image or a video onto the 9:16 frame above. A video shows its first frame, paused, and a slider lets you scrub to any moment.
Toggle a platform and its interface zones appear as shaded bands, each labelled with the pixels it takes on a 1080 by 1920 frame.
The dashed green rectangle is the intersection: the area no selected app draws on. Keep faces, product and text inside it.
The file is opened with a local object URL, which is a pointer inside your own browser. Nothing is sent to a server, nothing is stored, and there is no account step.
That is not a small distinction. Most online checkers upload your unreleased ad to their server to draw four rectangles on it. This one does the drawing on your machine.
With no file chosen, the empty grid still renders with the overlays. You can read the zones before you have anything to check.
TikTok's safe zone: the busiest edges of the three
TikTok covers roughly 108 pixels at the top of a 1080 by 1920 frame with the system row and search.
The bottom is the expensive part: about 320 pixels for the username, the caption, the sound line and the progress area.
The right edge carries the action rail — like, comment, share, the spinning record — about 120 pixels wide.
The left edge loses about 60 pixels. Less than the right, but enough to clip text that hugs the margin.
That leaves a working area of roughly 900 by 1,492 pixels. Anything essential outside it is gambling on the reader's thumb.
These are approximations on purpose. TikTok shifts its interface between app versions, regions and ad formats, so design a margin inside the margin.
- Top: ~108px — system row and search
- Bottom: ~320px — username, caption, sound, progress
- Left: ~60px · Right: ~120px — the action rail side
This is the whole editor
Highlight a phrase and a clip lands on those exact words. No timeline, no keyframes, no layers.
Reels and Shorts: fewer zones, deeper ones
Instagram Reels keeps the sides mostly clear but cuts deep at both ends. The top gives up roughly 220 pixels to the camera and audio row.
The bottom of a Reel gives up about 420 pixels — the deepest zone of the three — to the account line, the caption in its collapsed state, the audio attribution and the action row.
A caption that sits low in frame becomes unreadable on Reels first, long before TikTok clips it. If you design to one bottom number, design to 420.
YouTube Shorts takes about 120 pixels at the top for search and camera, and about 360 at the bottom for the title, the channel, subscribe and the buttons.
Shorts also runs its progress bar along the very bottom edge, inside that 360.
None of these are official constants. All three apps redraw their interfaces regularly, which is exactly why checking against today's approximations beats trusting last year's template.
- Reels: ~220px top, ~420px bottom, sides mostly clear
- Shorts: ~120px top, ~360px bottom
- Expanded captions and comment views cover more still
Design once for all three: the 900 by 1,280 band
Post the same file everywhere and the strictest margin on each edge wins.
Top: Reels' 220. Bottom: Reels' 420. Left: TikTok's 60. Right: TikTok's 120.
That leaves a central band of roughly 900 by 1,280 pixels — about 56 percent of the frame — that all three apps leave alone.
It sounds brutal and mostly is not. A face framed for a phone already lives in the middle. The casualties are captions placed low, logos parked in corners, and call-to-action text at the very top or bottom.
Put captions in the lower middle of the band rather than the bottom of the frame. Keep anything that looks tappable away from the right rail, where the viewer's thumb already hovers.
Toggle all three platforms in the checker and the dashed rectangle draws this exact band on your own footage.
Where Cutroom fits, and where it does not
Cutroom exports every video as a 9:16 MP4 on the same 1080 by 1920 frame these zones are mapped on, with the captions burned in.
Caption style, colour, weight, size and position are levers in the editor, so the words can sit inside the band instead of underneath an interface.
What no tool does is move your filmed content. If you shot the product at the bottom of the frame, that is a reframe on the next take — and far cheaper to catch here than after posting.
The checker itself asks nothing of you: no account, no upload, because it never touches a server in the first place.
Use it before you post, and again after any visible platform redesign. The zones will move; the habit of checking is the part that keeps working.
Questions people ask
- What is a safe zone in a 9:16 video?
- The part of the frame the app does not draw its interface over. TikTok, Reels and Shorts all overlay usernames, captions, buttons and system elements on the edges of your video; the safe zone is the central area that stays visible. Anything essential — faces, product, text — belongs inside it.
- Does my video get uploaded when I use this checker?
- No. The file is opened with a local object URL, which lives inside your browser's memory. Nothing is sent to a server, nothing is stored anywhere, and closing the tab removes every trace. That also means it works on unreleased ads you would not put on someone else's server.
- Are the pixel margins exact?
- They are close, current approximations rather than published constants. All three platforms shift their interfaces between app versions, regions and ad formats. Treat the shaded zones as a floor, keep a margin inside the margin, and re-check after any visible redesign.
- What if my file is not 9:16?
- The preview centre-crops it to 9:16, which is what the feed does to a mis-sized file. If the crop removes something you need, the fix is reframing to vertical rather than a different checker. Every Cutroom export is already 1080 by 1920, so files made here land on the exact frame the zones are mapped on.
- Do safe zones apply to organic posts or only to ads?
- Both. The interface is drawn over every video in the feed, paid or not. Ad formats often add elements — a call-to-action bar deepens the bottom zone further — so an ad deserves a stricter margin than the organic one you check here.
Drop the file, toggle the three apps, and keep what matters inside the dashed line. The zones will move again; checking takes ten seconds.