9:16 as the working master
A single vertical master covers all three major short-form feeds. Producing platform-specific exports is usually wasted effort — caption placement matters far more than re-encoding.
Category
Formats, sizes and specifications
Most format questions have one correct answer that applies almost everywhere, and a long tail of exceptions that rarely matter. Vertical short-form runs on a 9:16 frame, commonly exported at 1080 × 1920, across Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts and TikTok alike. Getting the frame right once means one master file serves every destination, instead of a separate export per platform.
What this topic covers
Resolution is rarely the bottleneck
1080 × 1920 is sufficient for the overwhelming majority of creators. Shooting or exporting 4K vertical adds file size and processing time without a visible return in a compressed feed.
Safe areas are the real constraint
Each platform overlays its own interface — captions, handles, buttons — across parts of the frame. Text placed in those regions is obscured on the platform even though it looked fine in your editor.
Reframing landscape to vertical
Converting 16:9 to 9:16 discards roughly three-quarters of the horizontal frame. What survives has to be chosen deliberately, which is why speaker-aware framing matters on multi-person footage.
Put this into practice with Long video to Shorts or AI caption generator .
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