Your reel is 1080 wide. Only 804 of it is yours.
Every app stamps its own bars and buttons over your video. Once the header, the caption strip and the button rail are accounted for, 52 percent of the pixels you shot are behind furniture — put your hook, your price or your face there and the viewer sees a like button sitting on it. The Frame is the placement standard every reel we make is built inside, and the automatic check that refuses to let one publish if it isn't.
Red is the app's furniture — top bar, caption and audio strip, the button rail. Gold is yours. The inner bands are where the hook, the eyeline, the captions and the proof shots have to land.
What the platform takes back
Measured on a 1080 × 1920 reel against the strictest profile — the union of what Reels, TikTok and Shorts each cover — because the same file goes to all of them.
Off the top
Header, tabs and the "Reels" label. A hook placed here is half a hook.
Off the bottom
Handle, caption, audio ticker, progress bar. This is where most people park their captions.
Off the right
Like, comment, share, profile. A logo or a price living in this column is invisible.
Of the canvas, spoken for
Overlapping zones, one strict profile: only 804 × 1239 of a 1080 × 1920 reel is guaranteed clear on every network.
Everyone knows the rule. Nobody enforces it.
The difference between a graphic on a designer's wall and a standard is what happens at 2am when a reel is being produced and nobody is looking.
1 · It is a file, not a poster
The zones and the bands live in one machine-readable spec. Every renderer reads it, so a reel is composed inside the frame rather than corrected afterwards.
2 · The hook is timed, not hoped
The check requires hook text in the upper band inside the first second and a half — the window where the scroll is actually decided.
3 · The eyeline is measured
Facial landmarks put the subject's eyes on the upper third. Centre-framed faces read as an ID photo and lose attention; this is scored, not eyeballed.
4 · It blocks, it doesn't warn
A reel that breaks the frame does not publish. It comes back with the exact zone, the exact percentage and an annotated frame showing what tripped.
5 · Old footage gets rescued
Existing or client-shot video with text buried under the interface is re-composited into the safe area and re-scanned to prove it passes.
6 · Every client, every network
The same standard runs across every account we publish for, so a grid looks deliberate instead of like six different people took turns.
Questions
What is a reel safe zone?
The part of a vertical video that the app does not cover with its own interface. On a phone, the top bar eats roughly the first 220 pixels, the caption, handle and audio ticker eat about 461 pixels off the bottom, and the like, comment and share buttons sit in a column about 222 pixels wide down the right. Anything you place there — your hook, your price, your phone number, your logo — is sitting behind a button on the viewer's screen.
How much of the frame is actually usable?
On a 1080 by 1920 reel the genuinely safe area is about 804 by 1239 pixels, which is roughly 48 percent of what you shot. That is the real canvas. Everything we render is composed inside it, and a check blocks the file if anything important drifts outside.
Where should the hook, the eyes and the captions sit?
The text hook belongs in the upper band, on the first frame, as the biggest type on screen. The subject's eyes belong on the upper third — around 32 percent down the frame — because a face parked in the middle of a vertical video reads as a passport photo and loses the scroll. Burned captions belong mid-frame, not at the bottom where the platform's own caption sits. Supporting images and proof shots belong in the band below the captions.
Is this checked by eye?
No. Every finished reel is scanned automatically before it can publish. The scan finds the burned text and graphics, measures how much of each interface zone they intrude into, locates the subject's eyes from facial landmarks, and checks that a hook is on screen inside the first second and a half. Anything that fails is blocked and sent back, not published and apologised for.
Does this apply to every platform?
Yes, and the zones differ. Reels, TikTok and Shorts each stamp their interface in slightly different places, so the default profile is the strictest overlap of all of them — a reel that passes it is clean everywhere you cross-post it, which matters when the same file goes to four networks at once.
What happens to footage that already breaks the rules?
It gets repaired rather than binned. Client-supplied or older footage with text buried under the interface can be re-composited so the entire original frame is lifted into the safe area, and it is re-scanned afterwards to prove it now passes.
Can I check my own reel here?
Yes — drop a vertical video into the panel on this page. It is read by your own browser, scored against the same zones, and never leaves your device. Nothing is uploaded and nothing is stored.
Want your reels held to this?
Text Rudy the word FRAME and send one of your recent reels. You get the scan back — score, the zones you're losing, and what it costs you.
Text Rudy · FRAME