{"course":{"slug":"visual-storytelling","title":"Making It Say Something","url":"https://addaly.com/learn/visual-storytelling","level":"beginner","track":"create"},"lesson":{"slug":"platform-shapes-and-safe-areas","title":"Something is always sitting on top of your picture","url":"https://addaly.com/learn/visual-storytelling/platform-shapes-and-safe-areas","position":51,"of":64,"minutes":9,"answer":"The visible frame is smaller than the exported one and its boundaries change without notice, so compose for the intersection of every crop you will need, keep text out of the bottom fifth.","keyIdea":"The visible frame is smaller than the exported one and its boundaries change without notice, so compose for the intersection of every crop you will need, keep text out of the bottom fifth, and archive a wide master so a new shape is an export rather than a reshoot."},"body":{"format":"markdown","text":"## The frame you export is not the frame anyone sees\n\nYou export a 1080 by 1920 vertical video with your subject beautifully centred. On the platform, a username, a caption of three lines, a follow button, a music credit and a column of icons are drawn over it. The bottom quarter and the right-hand strip are gone. Your subject's chin is behind a share button.\n\nNothing has gone wrong technically. The file is correct. The **safe area** (the part of the frame that is reliably visible) is much smaller than the frame, and it was never in your editing preview.\n\n## The numbers, held loosely\n\nAs a working starting point for full-screen vertical video on the current crop of short-video apps: keep anything that matters out of roughly the **bottom 20 per cent** and the **right-hand 10 to 15 per cent**, and leave a margin at the top for the status bar and any header.\n\nThese figures move. Platforms change their interfaces without announcement, they differ between iOS and Android, and they differ between phone sizes: a tall phone with a notch and a short one with a home button crop differently from the same file. Treat published specifications as approximate and verify the only way that works: **post it privately, open it on a phone, screenshot it, and look.** Two minutes, and it catches the failure that no amount of reading catches.\n\n## Title safe is an old idea that is still right\n\nBroadcast television has had safe areas for seventy years. Cathode-ray televisions overscanned (they deliberately drew the picture slightly larger than the visible screen so that ageing components never revealed a black edge) and the amount varied by set. Producers therefore worked to two nested boxes: **action safe** at about 93 per cent of the frame and **title safe** at about 90 per cent, with text inside the inner one.\n\nCRTs are gone and the convention survived, because the underlying problem did not: the frame is still cropped by something you do not control, it is just an app's chrome now rather than a television's bezel. Every editor (DaVinci Resolve, Kdenlive, Shotcut, CapCut, Premiere) can draw these guides, and turning them on is a single setting.\n\n## The crop chain is the harder problem\n\nA single shot commonly has to survive several different crops of itself:\n\n- **9:16** full-screen vertical, 1080 × 1920.\n- **4:5** in a feed, 1080 × 1350: the tallest shape most feeds allow, and therefore the one that occupies the most screen.\n- **1:1** square, still used for grids and some previews.\n- **16:9** landscape for a website, a slide or a television.\n- A **thumbnail** crop, often square and often taken from the centre.\n\nAutomatic reframing tools will do this for you and will do it badly, because they track a face or a saliency estimate and have no idea which part of the frame carries the meaning.\n\nThe robust approach is to compose for the **intersection**: the region that survives every crop you will need is a tall-ish central box, and anything load-bearing goes in it. Shoot slightly wider than the tightest crop so there is material to give away, and decide the crops before you shoot rather than discovering them at export.\n\n> Figure: The crop chain, and the box that survives it. Shapes one shot must carry: 9:16 full screen, 1080 by 1920; 4:5 in a feed, 1080 by 1350; 1:1 square for grids; 16:9 for a site or a slide; A square thumbnail from the centre. What survives all five: A tall box near the centre; Nothing in the bottom fifth; Nothing in the right-hand strip; Text kept in the middle third; A wide master in the archive. Automatic reframing tracks a face or a saliency estimate and has no idea which part of the frame carries the meaning. Composing for the intersection is what makes a new shape an export rather than a reshoot.\n\n## Text is the first casualty\n\nText placed near an edge is the thing that gets cut, and cut text looks like incompetence rather than like a platform quirk. Two habits:\n\n1. **Keep on-screen text in the middle third vertically**, not at the bottom where captions and interface live.\n2. **Set it larger than you think.** A phone held at arm's length on a bus is not a monitor at 60 centimetres. If you cannot read it on your own phone at a glance, it is too small, and your eyes know the words already.\n\n## Doing it free\n\nDaVinci Resolve's free version, Kdenlive and Shotcut all handle multiple aspect ratios, safe-area guides and reframing on a modest laptop. CapCut runs on a phone and does vertical work competently. For stills, GIMP, Krita and the browser-based Photopea all let you set up guides once and save them as a template, which is the real time-saver, because the setup is the cost and you only pay it once.\n\n## The limitation\n\nEverything above is a moving target that you do not control and cannot appeal. A platform can change its interface overnight and turn a year of correctly composed work into work with a button on its subject. There is no specification you can hold them to.\n\nThe defence is structural rather than technical: **keep a master at the widest sensible framing**, so a new crop is an export rather than a reshoot. Archive the project file, not only the finished video. The people who get hurt by a layout change are the ones who only kept the delivered file."},"check":{"question":"Why does automatic reframing from 16:9 to 9:16 so often cut the wrong part of a shot?","options":[{"text":"It tracks faces or visual salience, which is not the same as knowing which part of the frame carries the meaning.","correct":true},{"text":"Reframing algorithms sample only the first frame, so they cannot follow a subject that moves during the shot.","correct":false,"tempting":"Understates what the tools do (most track across the shot) and blames a limitation that better tracking would solve, which it does not."},{"text":"Converting aspect ratios resamples the image, and the resulting softness makes the subject harder to identify.","correct":false,"tempting":"Confuses a resolution artefact with a compositional decision; the crop would land in the same wrong place at any quality."},{"text":"Platforms apply their own secondary crop after upload, so the reframing tool's output is cropped a second time before anyone sees it.","correct":false,"tempting":"Describes a real further crop that happens downstream, but it does not explain why the tool's own choice of region was wrong to begin with."}]},"prev":{"slug":"thumbnail-and-title","title":"The thumbnail and the title are one thing","url":"https://addaly.com/learn/visual-storytelling/thumbnail-and-title"},"next":{"slug":"the-first-frame-is-a-still","title":"The still is what recruits the play","url":"https://addaly.com/learn/visual-storytelling/the-first-frame-is-a-still"},"authorship":"Founder and series editor: Dr Mustafa Mun. Written by AI models to a written standard. Exam keys checked blind by a second model: 3,665 of 3,666 agreed. Academic review invited.","review":{"status":"Draft, open for academic review"},"cite":"Addaly (2026) 'Something is always sitting on top of your picture', in Making It Say Something. Edited by M. Mun. Addaly. Available at: https://addaly.com/learn/visual-storytelling/platform-shapes-and-safe-areas (Accessed: 13 October 2026).","licence":{"name":"CC BY-NC-SA 4.0","url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/"},"reader":{"schema":1,"title":"Something is always sitting on top of your picture","courseTitle":"Making It Say Something","module":{"index":7,"slug":"surface-and-distribution","title":"The surface and the system carrying it"},"answer":null,"keyIdea":"The visible frame is smaller than the exported one and its boundaries change without notice, so compose for the intersection of every crop you will need, keep text out of the bottom fifth, and archive a wide master so a new shape is an export rather than a reshoot.","hero":{"kind":"figure","figure":{"t":"figure","label":"Figure","figure":{"left":{"title":"Shapes one shot must carry","items":["9:16 full screen, 1080 by 1920","4:5 in a feed, 1080 by 1350","1:1 square for grids","16:9 for a site or a slide","A square thumbnail from the centre"]},"type":"compare","right":{"title":"What survives all five","items":["A tall box near the centre","Nothing in the bottom fifth","Nothing in the right-hand strip","Text kept in the middle third","A wide master in the archive"]},"title":"The crop chain, and the box that survives it","caption":"Automatic reframing tracks a face or a saliency estimate and has no idea which part of the frame carries the meaning. Composing for the intersection is what makes a new shape an export rather than a reshoot."},"alt":"Figure: The crop chain, and the box that survives it. Shapes one shot must carry: 9:16 full screen, 1080 by 1920; 4:5 in a feed, 1080 by 1350; 1:1 square for grids; 16:9 for a site or a slide; A square thumbnail from the centre. What survives all five: A tall box near the centre; Nothing in the bottom fifth; Nothing in the right-hand strip; Text kept in the middle third; A wide master in the archive. Automatic reframing tracks a face or a saliency estimate and has no idea which part of the frame carries the meaning. Composing for the intersection is what makes a new shape an export rather than a reshoot."}},"blocks":[{"t":"h2","id":"the-frame-you-export-is-not-the-frame-anyone-sees","runs":[{"text":"The frame you export is not the frame anyone sees"}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"You export a 1080 by 1920 vertical video with your subject beautifully centred. On the platform, a username, a caption of three lines, a follow button, a music credit and a column of icons are drawn over it. The bottom quarter and the right-hand strip are gone. Your subject’s chin is behind a share button."}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"Nothing has gone wrong technically. The file is correct. The "},{"text":"safe area","b":true},{"text":" (the part of the frame that is reliably visible) is much smaller than the frame, and it was never in your editing preview."}]},{"t":"h2","id":"the-numbers-held-loosely","runs":[{"text":"The numbers, held loosely"}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"As a working starting point for full-screen vertical video on the current crop of short-video apps: keep anything that matters out of roughly the "},{"text":"bottom 20 per cent","b":true},{"text":" and the "},{"text":"right-hand 10 to 15 per cent","b":true},{"text":", and leave a margin at the top for the status bar and any header."}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"These figures move. 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Every editor (DaVinci Resolve, Kdenlive, Shotcut, CapCut, Premiere) can draw these guides, and turning them on is a single setting."}]},{"t":"h2","id":"the-crop-chain-is-the-harder-problem","runs":[{"text":"The crop chain is the harder problem"}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"A single shot commonly has to survive several different crops of itself:"}]},{"t":"ul","items":[[{"text":"9:16","b":true},{"text":" full-screen vertical, 1080 × 1920."}],[{"text":"4:5","b":true},{"text":" in a feed, 1080 × 1350: the tallest shape most feeds allow, and therefore the one that occupies the most screen."}],[{"text":"1:1","b":true},{"text":" square, still used for grids and some previews."}],[{"text":"16:9","b":true},{"text":" landscape for a website, a slide or a television."}],[{"text":"A "},{"text":"thumbnail","b":true},{"text":" crop, often square and often taken from the centre."}]]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"Automatic reframing tools will do this for you and will do it badly, because they track a face or a saliency estimate and have no idea which part of the frame carries the meaning."}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"The robust approach is to compose for the "},{"text":"intersection","b":true},{"text":": the region that survives every crop you will need is a tall-ish central box, and anything load-bearing goes in it. 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If you cannot read it on your own phone at a glance, it is too small, and your eyes know the words already."}]]},{"t":"h2","id":"doing-it-free","runs":[{"text":"Doing it free"}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"DaVinci Resolve’s free version, Kdenlive and Shotcut all handle multiple aspect ratios, safe-area guides and reframing on a modest laptop. CapCut runs on a phone and does vertical work competently. For stills, GIMP, Krita and the browser-based Photopea all let you set up guides once and save them as a template, which is the real time-saver, because the setup is the cost and you only pay it once."}]},{"t":"h2","id":"the-limitation","runs":[{"text":"The limitation"}],"role":"limit"},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"Everything above is a moving target that you do not control and cannot appeal. A platform can change its interface overnight and turn a year of correctly composed work into work with a button on its subject. 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