Vertical Video Dimensions: The 9:16 Guide

Set your export canvas to 1080 by 1920 pixels. That is a 9:16 aspect ratio, and it fills a phone from the top of the screen to the bottom with nothing wasted on the sides. TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts all treat 9:16 as their native home, so a single master built to that size travels almost everywhere you need it.

The pixel count is the easy part. What separates a video that looks made for the feed from one that looks reformatted is where the important elements sit inside that tall frame. I spend most of this guide on that, because a wrong number is a two-second fix and a caption buried under the share button is not.

The exact vertical video size, and why it is 9:16

The vertical video size is 1080 by 1920 pixels. Written as a ratio, that is 9:16: nine units wide for every sixteen tall, the mirror image of the 16:9 widescreen shape you know from television and desktop YouTube.

Why 1080 by 1920 specifically? It is Full HD turned on its side. You can shoot and export 4K vertical at 2160 by 3840 if your camera supports it, and there is nothing wrong with keeping a 4K version for your archive. For the file you actually upload, 1080p is the sweet spot. Every social platform re-encodes your video the moment it lands on their servers, and a heavier 4K upload usually gets crushed back down to roughly 1080 on a phone screen anyway. You carry the larger file for no visible gain.

A quick way to sanity-check any project: the height should be the bigger number. If your sequence reads 1920 by 1080, you built it sideways, and the fix is to swap those two values before you cut a single frame of graphics.

Why vertical is worth building for

People hold their phones upright almost all the time. Research on mobile viewing has put that figure around 94 percent, and you can feel the truth of it in your own thumb. Nobody turns the phone sideways to watch a fifteen-second clip. A 9:16 video meets that habit head on. It occupies the whole screen edge to edge, so there is no shrunken letterboxed rectangle and no reason to rotate. Peer-reviewed work on mobile advertising has found that the same creative pulls better in vertical than in landscape once it hits a phone.

That full-bleed frame does two things for you. It reads as native, which is an immediate signal to viewers that the video was made for the place they are watching it. And it gives the platform’s ranking systems a format they are built to push. Google’s advertising guidance now tells marketers to build square and vertical assets because mobile is where the views are, and Think with Google’s creative testing lands in the same place: design for the smaller screen first. When you fight the format, you hand the algorithm a reason to show your video to fewer people.

Vertical video specs by platform

Here is the reference I keep pinned. The ratio is 9:16 across the board and 1080 by 1920 is the resolution you want almost everywhere, so the real differences come down to length limits and file caps.

One master at 1080 by 1920 covers every row. If you want the full picture on containers and codecs beyond the vertical world, my guide to the best video formats breaks down when to reach for MP4 versus MOV and why it matters at upload.

Safe zones, the part most people skip

Getting the frame size right only wins you a blank canvas. Every one of these apps paints its own buttons and text on top of your video once it is live, and if your content lives where those overlays land, it disappears.

Picture the phone screen in three bands. The bottom holds the caption and the account name, with a scrolling audio label tucked underneath. The right edge stacks the engagement icons up the side. The top-left corner usually carries profile information. What is left is the central column that runs about 60 to 70 percent of the height down the middle, and it is the only ground you fully control.

So here is the rule I give every editor: anything that must be read or seen goes in that center column. Logos, the caption you burned in, the product in someone’s hand, the payoff of a joke. Center all of it and keep it clear of the bottom fifth of the frame. This is the single most common miss I catch in footage that was otherwise shot well, and it is the difference between short-form video that communicates and video that looks fine on your laptop and broken on a phone. If you are new to designing for these placements, my primer on short-form video and Reels is a good next read.

TikTok dimensions and safe zones

TikTok wants 9:16 at 1080 by 1920, and of the big three it is the least forgiving about off-format uploads. Post a square or landscape clip and it sits marooned in the middle of the player with dead space above and below, which reads as a repost from somewhere else.

Two TikTok-specific notes from experience. The bottom-left region is busier here than anywhere, because the caption sits above the account name and the sound title scrolls along underneath, so give that corner extra clearance. And the right-side icon stack sits higher up the frame than you expect, so a logo tucked into the top-right is not as safe as it looks. Keep H.264 as your codec and you will avoid most of the compression mush that shows up on gradients and skin tones.

Instagram Reels and Stories dimensions

Reels and Stories are both 9:16 at 1080 by 1920, and people constantly assume that means one file works for both. It does not, and the reason is length and layout rather than pixels.

Reels now run up to three minutes, which is a lot of room for a real narrative or a full tutorial. If you want help matching runtime to the story you are telling, I went deep on that in my guide to the ideal Instagram Reel length. Stories cap each clip at 60 seconds and layer interactive stickers and link buttons across the frame, so a Reel dropped straight into a Story gets its captions clipped and its ending cut off. Build a separate 60-second Story version, and if you want the exact sticker-safe measurements, my Instagram Story specs breakdown lays them out. Both formats accept MP4 and MOV and share a 4 GB ceiling.

YouTube Shorts dimensions

Shorts want the same 9:16 at 1080 by 1920. The format changed meaningfully in October 2024, when YouTube raised the Shorts length limit to three minutes for anything uploaded as vertical or square. YouTube’s own documentation says 9:16 is best suited for the Shorts feed and gives better performance, so while a 1:1 or 4:5 upload can still be tagged as a Short, it will not fill the screen and it will not earn the same reach.

The Shorts interface behaves a little differently from the others. The audio detail spins in a disc on the lower right rather than the lower left, and the subscribe prompt sits along the bottom. Keep your subject centered and you clear all of it.

LinkedIn, Facebook, and Pinterest

Vertical is no longer just a consumer-app trick. LinkedIn added a dedicated vertical video feed and accepts 9:16 at up to 10 minutes and 5 GB, which makes it a real home for founder clips and recruiting films; my LinkedIn video specifications guide covers the finer points. Facebook Reels mirror Instagram at 9:16 and cap around 90 seconds. Pinterest is the odd one out, content with either 9:16 or a slightly less tall 2:3, and it allows video Pins up to 15 minutes.

Export settings that survive the upload

Correct dimensions can still be undone at the export stage. These are the settings I use for a clean 1080 by 1920 file that holds up after a platform re-encodes it:

• Format: MP4. It is the container every platform accepts without complaint.
• Codec: H.264 for video, AAC for audio. Widely supported, efficient, and exactly what the platforms expect.
• Frame rate: 30 fps for most social content, or 24 fps if you want a more filmic feel. Match whatever you captured.
• Bitrate: somewhere around 8 to 12 Mbps for 1080p vertical. Higher is not better here, because the platform re-compresses everything anyway, and an oversized file just gets crushed harder.

Save that as a preset so you are not rebuilding it every project. And if you regularly move footage between codecs or containers, my walkthrough on how to convert video formats will save you the trial and error.

How to make a horizontal video vertical without it looking reformatted

Sometimes the source is a 16:9 shoot and the brief is vertical. You have two options.

The better one is to reframe. Crop into the part of the shot that matters and rebuild it as a true 9:16 frame, keeping the subject in that center safe zone. On a talking-head clip this is nearly invisible when done with care. It does mean losing the sides of the original, so it works best when the action is already near the middle.

The fallback is a padded layout: place the 16:9 clip in the middle of a 9:16 canvas and fill the space above and below with a branded color block and a headline. This only looks intentional if you actually design that empty space. Drop a raw widescreen clip into a tall frame with plain black bars top and bottom and it looks like a mistake, because it is one.

Whichever you pick, decide what earns the first second of the frame before you crop, since the opening moment is what stops the scroll.

The specs, in one line

Build to 1080 by 1920 and keep everything that matters in the center column. Export a right-sized MP4 and you are set. Do that and your video will look made for the feed on every platform that counts.

If you would rather not think about any of it, my team at Moonb works as a company’s embedded creative team and cuts one shoot into every platform’s frame with the safe zones already handled. That is us, though. The specs above are simple enough to run yourself once you have built to 9:16 a few times.