Where TikTok, Reels and Shorts cover your video, and how to keep titles out of it

You exported a clean vertical video. You open it on your phone inside the app, and the caption is under a username, the title is behind the like button, and the sound credit is sitting on the speaker's chin. Nothing is wrong with the video. The platform drew its interface over it, the way it does over every video, and your edit did not know.

This is where the interface sits on the three vertical platforms, the one box that is safe on all of them, and how to keep text inside it.

The chrome, roughly

Every platform moves its buttons a little with each redesign, so treat these as a map rather than a survey, and check on your own phone before you publish a series. For a 9:16 frame:

• TikTok covers the bottom quarter to a third of the height with the username, the caption and the sound credit, and the right edge, about a sixth of the width, with the like, comment, share and sound buttons. The top strip holds the navigation tabs.
• Instagram Reels is similar: the bottom quarter or so for the caption and the audio line, the right edge for the buttons, with the button column reaching higher than TikTok's.
• YouTube Shorts keeps its buttons on the right too, with the title and channel in the bottom fifth, and a little less clutter at the top.

Add that up and the pattern is the same everywhere: the bottom, the right edge, and a strip along the top. The left edge and the middle are clear.

The one safe box

If you want a rule you can apply without thinking, keep anything that must be read inside a box that starts about 12% down from the top, ends about 30% up from the bottom, and leaves the right 15% of the width alone. On a 1080×1920 frame that is roughly the area from 230 to 1350 pixels down, and no further right than 920 pixels across. Anything inside that box is readable on all three platforms. Anything outside it might be.

Faces can go anywhere, because a viewer will see a face under a button. Words cannot.

Titles: place them once, in the box

In Hiroska a title is a text layer on the overlay track: add it from the +, type it, and drag it on the preview to where it should sit. Put it in the upper half of the box rather than the bottom, which is where every platform puts its own text. Give it a background box at around 60% opacity if the footage behind it is busy, and keep it short: a vertical frame is narrow, and a title that wraps to three lines reads as a paragraph.

Entrance and exit animations are in the Timing tab. A slide in from the left is the one that works with the geometry, because the left edge is yours.

Captions: not at the bottom

The default place for captions on television is the bottom of the frame, and on a vertical platform that is exactly the strip the caption and username live in. Generate the captions (select the clip, Captions in the inspector, Karaoke for the phone), then move them. Captions are ordinary text layers, each with its own position, so select a line and drag it up into the lower third of the safe box, and give the rest the same treatment. Just below the speaker's mouth is where the eye expects them.

Footage that was not shot vertical

If the video was shot in 16:9, the subject is already in the middle of the frame and that is the right place for it. The two ways to put it in a tall frame are both free of surprises. The project's aspect chip switches the whole project to 9:16, and a clip's Transform → Frame controls include a blurred-background fill, which keeps the full width of the shot visible with soft colour above and below. Or run the finished horizontal clip through Change the shape, which generates what a taller frame would have seen and keeps the subject where it was. How to make a vertical video from horizontal footage compares the two. Either way, check where the subject's face lands against the box above before you add text.

Test it the only way that counts

Export at 1080×1920, send it to your phone, and open it inside each app as a draft before posting. Not in the gallery; in the app, with the interface drawn over it. If a word is covered, move the layer and export again. It takes two minutes and it is the only test that sees what the viewer sees. How to export for YouTube, TikTok and everywhere else has the settings.

The rule in one line

Words in the middle, faces anywhere, nothing you need read along the bottom or down the right edge. Platforms will keep redrawing their buttons; the middle of the frame has been safe for years and will stay that way.