01
Which aspect ratio should each destination get?
Start from where the video will be watched. Full-screen vertical feeds — Reels, TikTok, YouTube Shorts and Stories — use 9:16, commonly exported at 1080x1920. A YouTube video, a website header or a presentation uses horizontal 16:9, commonly 1920x1080. Feed posts that sit between other posts often work better at 4:5, which takes up more of a phone screen than a square without being cropped.
Exporting to the native shape matters because the platform otherwise decides for you: it crops a horizontal video into a vertical frame, or surrounds it with black or blurred bars, and either way the composition you approved is not what people see. If one shoot has to serve several destinations, list them before filming so the camera operator leaves room around the subject, and name each export with its ratio so the right file goes to the right place.
02
What is a safe zone, and how much of the frame should stay clear?
A safe zone is the part of the frame no app interface will cover. On vertical platforms the account name, caption, music line and buttons sit over the bottom of the video and along the right edge, so text placed there gets hidden behind them. Those overlays differ between apps and change with updates, which is why there is no single exact measurement that holds everywhere.
The workable approach is to keep anything that must be read or seen — faces, product, prices, captions, a phone number — in the central part of the frame, with generous margins at the bottom and on the right. Check the final export in each app's own preview or a draft post before publishing; that is the only reliable test of what a viewer will actually see. On horizontal video, keep titles away from the very edges, where some players place controls.
