Reference
Glossary
Words we use on the tool pages and in the guides. If a definition here disagrees with a platform’s marketing site, this site is describing the reconstruction we measured — see methodology.
- 1080×1920
- The interchange size for 9:16 social video. Not the phone panel. Design overlays and type in this canvas so a pixel in a spec table is a pixel in the file.
- Safe zone
- The part of the 1080×1920 frame that is not covered by the app’s own interface — captions, like buttons, tab bars, progress segments, reply fields, CTAs. It is geometry, not a taste preference.
- Hold-out
- A band the platform is allowed to draw on, especially in ads. Meta’s Stories and Reels ads use a 14% top and 20% bottom hold-out. Type in a hold-out can fail text-overlap review.
- Chrome
- The player’s interface: tabs, rails, captions, CTAs. FramePad reconstructs chrome as an overlay. Icons are stand-ins for position.
- Cover crop
- Scale the source until the 9:16 frame has no empty pixels, then pan. A 16:9 file loses the sides. Use it when the subject survives a punch-in.
- Contain / pad
- Fit the entire source in the 9:16 frame and fill leftover bands. Blur pad fills those bands with a blurred copy of the same picture. Colour pad fills them with a flat swatch.
- Native caption
- The app’s own caption or title field, composited at play time. Separate from burned-in type, which is pixels in the file. When they occupy the same coordinates, the UI wins.
- Burn-in
- Type or a logo encoded into the picture. Use it for a three-to-six-word hook. Leave the transcript to the native caption.
- Proof sheet
- A still with the overlay burned in, for a reviewer who will not open the studio. Never publish the proof. Publish the clean master.
- Second encode
- The transcode TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube run on every upload. Your job is to give them a clean 1080×1920 SDR H.264 file with enough bitrate that their encoder has something to work with.
- Title-safe
- A conservative inner rectangle for essential type and faces. On this site it is often about 72% of width and 64% of height, which is the intersection of several players’ overlays.
- Client-side / no upload
- Decode, overlay, crop, pad, and export run in the browser tab (Canvas 2D and, optionally, WebAssembly). The media file is not posted to FramePad. Page views may still be recorded by analytics. See the privacy policy.