Safe zone

Every short-form feed draws its own interface on top of the video. The account name, the caption, the music credit, the like and share buttons, the progress bar — none of that is part of the clip, and all of it sits over the top of it. The safe zone is what is left.

Roughly where the boundaries fall

• →Top: about 10% is at risk from status bars and the platform's own header.
• →Bottom: 15% to 25% carries the caption, account handle and audio credit — the most contested space in the frame.
• →Right: about 10% holds the action buttons on TikTok and Reels.
• →Left: usually clear, which is why left-aligned captions can be a sensible choice.

The exact figures shift with app updates and differ between platforms, so the practical approach is to keep anything essential well inside the middle sixty per cent vertically rather than trying to hit an exact pixel boundary.

The most common mistake

Captions placed at the very bottom of the frame, where a subtitle belongs in film, are the single most frequent error. In a short-form feed that is precisely where the platform prints its own caption and handle, so a clip's carefully timed words end up underneath them. Centre-lower placement, around a third up from the bottom, is far safer.

Why it matters more for clips than for original footage

A clip is cropped from wider source material, so its framing was never designed for a vertical safe zone. Faces drift towards edges, on-screen text from the original sits in the wrong place, and burned-in captions get added on top of all of it. Checking a clip against the safe zone before posting takes seconds and catches most of these.