Where your captions get covered on Reels and Shorts

A caption can be perfectly set and still be unreadable, because the app draws its own interface on top of your video after you post it. The username, the post text, the audio line and the action buttons do not exist while you are editing, and all of them exist when someone watches.

What the platforms publish

Most safe zone numbers you find online are somebody’s guess. These two come from the companies themselves, both in their advice to advertisers.

Sources: Meta ads guide for Instagram Reels and Google on YouTube Shorts ads.

What those numbers are not

They are figures for ads, and an ad carries a call to action button that an ordinary post does not, which is a big part of why Meta’s bottom figure is so large. Neither company publishes a separate figure for ordinary posts that we could find. Google also says overlays and buttons can sit in different places depending on the format and the screen. So treat them as the careful end of the range, not a measurement of any one phone.

Captik’s own editor guide is looser, at 12% off the top and 20% off the bottom, and it is a convention rather than a measured figure. A caption that clears Meta’s 35% clears that too, so if you only want one rule, use the stricter one.

Why low captions are the usual mistake

Subtitles go at the bottom on television, and most tools copied that. Television does not draw a comment button over the picture. Captik’s own new projects start with the caption low in the frame too, so this is something to do on purpose in any tool: turn on the guide, and drag the caption up.

If you post the same clip to more than one app, place the caption for the tightest one on each edge. It will still read correctly on the others.

Check your own frame

The safe zone checker draws these bands over your own frame in the browser, tells you which edge your caption crosses, and gives you an overlay PNG to drop above your timeline in any editor. Nothing is uploaded.