GuidesCaptionsVoiceVideo maker

BolCaps › Guides

Safe zones for Reels, Shorts and TikTok

By the BolCaps team · Updated 28 October 2026

You spend an hour on a video, upload it, and the most important line of text is hidden behind the like button. Every vertical video app draws its own interface on top of your video, and each one does it slightly differently. This guide gives you one simple layout that works on all three big apps, with numbers for a standard 1080 by 1920 pixel video.

The short answer

Keep all important text and faces inside the centre of the frame: roughly 150 pixels in from the left, 200 in from the right, 250 down from the top, and 400 up from the bottom of a 1080 x 1920 video. That leaves a box of about 730 x 1270 pixels that no app covers on common phones.

These numbers are deliberately cautious. App layouts change with updates, with the length of your description, and with the phone's screen shape. A little extra margin costs nothing.

What covers the bottom

The bottom of the screen is the most crowded area on every app. Your username, the follow button, the description, music name and sometimes a product tag all sit there. On TikTok and Reels, a long description can push this text even higher when the viewer expands it. Captions placed in the bottom fifth of the video are the ones most often hidden.

What covers the right side

All three apps put a column of buttons on the right: like, comment, share, save, remix and the audio disc. The column is around 120 to 180 pixels wide on a 1080 pixel video. Long caption lines that run to the right edge will run underneath it. Centring captions with generous side margins solves this.

Place captions in the Caption studio

What covers the top

The top has less in it, but there is still the status bar, the "Following / For You" tabs on TikTok, and the search and camera icons on Reels and Shorts. Avoid putting your title in the top 250 pixels.

Where captions work best

For talking videos, the best place for captions is just below the speaker's chin, around 55 to 65 percent of the way down the screen. It is close to where the viewer is already looking (the face), and safely above the bottom interface. For videos without a face, place captions in the middle of the screen and make them large.

Titles, logos and watermarks

If you add a title at the top of a Short, keep it under the first 250 pixels but above the face. Small logos are best near the top left, inside the safe box. Never place your handle or website at the very bottom; it will be covered on every app.

A two-minute test before you post

  1. Export the video.
  2. Send it to your own phone and upload it as a draft or private post on each app.
  3. Pause on the frames with the most text and take screenshots.
  4. Check that nothing important is under a button or the description. Fix and export again if it is.

Do this once for your template and you will not need to repeat it for every video, as long as you keep the same layout.

Horizontal videos on YouTube

For normal 16:9 YouTube videos the rules are simpler: YouTube shows its own captions near the bottom, and the progress bar covers the bottom edge when the viewer pauses. If you burn in captions, place them in the lower third but not in the bottom 8 percent of the frame, and leave room for YouTube's own subtitles if you also upload an SRT file.

Place captions in the Caption studio

Free tools for this

More guides