Safe-zone checker for vertical video
Platform interfaces own the edges of every vertical video. Drop your own clip, type a timestamp, and the checker pulls that real frame and measures each app's top and bottom band against your frame's own pixel height — then shows the band that clears all three. It runs entirely in your browser.
Given a frame from your own vertical video, produce the exact pixel band that platform interfaces leave clear, in under five seconds.
Your file is decoded by your browser and drawn to a canvas on this page. Nothing uploads, nothing is stored, and there is nothing to delete.
The layout system nobody hands you
Short-form video ships into someone else's interface. Compose edge to edge and the app composes over you — the like rail over your graphic, the caption box over your caption, the progress bar over the bottom third you spent twenty minutes designing. The safe-zone checker exists because this is invisible while you are editing and obvious the moment you post.
Two numbers do most of the work: roughly the top 200 and bottom 320 pixels of a 1080×1920 frame are spoken for. Everything that has to be read — a face, a stat card, a caption line — belongs in the band between them.
How to check safe zones by hand
- Export one frame. Take a still from the middle of the clip, not the first frame. The first frame is usually a title card and tells you nothing about where the subject sits.
- Overlay the bands. In any image editor, draw a rectangle across the top 10.4% of the frame height and another across the bottom 16.7%. Those are the practical envelopes.
- Post a test and screenshot it. Upload the clip as a private or draft post on each app and screenshot the playback. This is the only way to see the real chrome, and it is why almost nobody does it twice.
- Move the subject, not the overlay. If the face or the caption is under a band, reframe. Shrinking the graphic to fit around the chrome is how vertical video ends up unreadable.
Where the manual way breaks
Checking one frame is a two-minute job. Checking every clip is not, and the safe-zone problem is per clip: a subject who sits centre-frame in clip three sits low in clip seven, because they leaned back. Eight clips from one recording is eight checks, and the Editing Tax dataset already puts finding and cutting those eight clips at 90 minutes before anyone looks at framing.
Never removes the check rather than speeding it up. The reframe measures the subject per shot and keeps the face inside the clear band, and the word-timed caption pass places caption lines in the same band on every export, so the composition is correct by construction instead of by inspection.
Read the transcript
Safe-zone checker for vertical video Platform interfaces own the edges of every vertical video. Drop your own clip, type a timestamp, and the checker pulls that real frame and measures each app's top and bottom band against your frame's own pixel height — then shows the band that clears all three. It runs entirely in your browser.
Frequently asked questions
Are the safe zones identical on TikTok, Reels and Shorts?
Close, not identical — each app draws slightly different chrome, and TikTok's bottom rail is the deepest of the three. The checker shows all three plus the band that clears every one of them, so composing inside that band means never checking per platform again.
Why does it need a frame from my own video?
Because the bands are a fraction of frame height, and 300 pixels means something different in a 1920-tall frame than in a 2160-tall one. A diagram tells you the rule; your own frame tells you whether your subject's chin is under the caption box.
Does my video leave the browser?
No. The safe-zone checker decodes your file with the browser's own video element and draws the frame to a canvas on this page. There is no upload, no storage and nothing to delete afterwards.