Safe Zones: Why Your Text Keeps Getting Covered Up
Your captions looked fine when you exported them and are hidden behind the interface on the phone. Here is the layout every vertical platform quietly imposes.
You export a vertical clip, the captions sit neatly near the bottom, and on the phone half of them are behind the username, the description and a row of buttons. Nothing went wrong in the export. The platform simply draws its own interface on top of your video, and it never asked.
What is covered
- The bottom fifth or so, taken by the account name, the caption text and the audio strip.
- A vertical column down one side, holding like, comment, share and the profile picture.
- The top strip, which carries navigation, a search control or a following tab depending on the app.
- On some apps, an extra band at the very bottom for a call to action or a shopping link.
The exact numbers differ per platform and change without notice, which is why chasing one app's precise measurements is a losing game. Design for the overlap instead.
The practical rule
Keep anything that must be read inside the middle band of the frame: roughly the central sixty percent vertically, and clear of the side column. It is a smaller area than it sounds, and it is the only region you can rely on across every app.
Once you clear the bottom and the side, the readable region is the middle of the frame, which is also where the speaker's face wants to be. Deciding which one owns the centre, and reframing so the other sits off to the side, is most of the work.
Reframing is not just cropping
Turning a wide shot into a vertical one by cropping the centre works only when the subject happens to stand in the middle and stay there. In an interview, a two-person conversation or anything with movement, a fixed centre crop cuts people in half. The frame has to follow the subject, and where two people alternate, it has to move between them.
Check it on a phone, not on your monitor
A vertical clip on a desktop preview is a small rectangle with no interface over it, which is the one context in which it will never actually be watched. Post one clip privately or as a draft, open it on your phone, and look at what the app covers. It takes a minute and it is the only reliable test.
SpikeReel reframes to vertical by following the speaker rather than cropping the centre, and places captions inside the safe area so the platform's own interface does not sit on top of them.
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