The 1080×1920 canvas, explained

Interchange size, not native panel size

No flagship phone is 1080×1920 anymore. iPhone 15 and 16 Pro Max panels are denser and taller. Android flagships vary. Social apps still treat 1080×1920 as the interchange size for 9:16 video: it is large enough to look sharp on a phone, small enough to compress, and identical across TikTok, Reels, Shorts, and Stories. Design in that canvas. Let the app scale to the panel.

Percentages are more stable than pixels when chrome changes, but pixels are how you talk to an editor. FramePad’s specification tables list both. A top 10% inset is 192 pixels on 1920 height. A right 14% inset is 151 pixels on 1080 width. Those numbers are in every platform table on this site.

Millimetres are a teaching aid

At 460 ppi (a Pro Max class panel) a 192-pixel band is about 10.6 mm. At 505 ppi it is about 9.6 mm. We print millimetres in the spec tables so a designer who thinks in physical thumb reach can see that the tab bar is not a rounding error — it is a finger. Do not treat millimetres as a print spec. They are an equivalent if the 1080×1920 canvas is shown full screen on that panel.

Frame rate, bitrate, colour

24, 25, and 30 fps all work. 60 fps is accepted on most players and costs file size. Colour: rec.709 / sRGB. HDR masters will be tone-mapped by the app in ways you will not like; export SDR. Audio: AAC, stereo, −14 LUFS integrated is a reasonable social target. None of this is overlay work, but a crushed SDR export will make your safe-zone type unreadable for a different reason.

If you need a device-specific check, load the file in FramePad, then play the export on the phone with the overlay off. The overlay is a map. The phone is the territory.

What 1080×1920 is not

It is not a print size. It is not the panel. It is not a requirement that your camera record 9:16 natively — a 4K 16:9 file can become a correct 1080×1920 master if you crop or pad on purpose. It is also not a license to ignore chrome. A perfect 1080×1920 file with a lower-third in the bottom 20% is still a collision.

Square 1080×1080 is a different product. Feeds will pad or crop it. If you must ship square, do it as a feed post, not as a Reels or Shorts master. Convert square to 9:16 only when you can pad with a blur of the same frame; a square punch-in to 9:16 is a 1.78× upscale of nothing.

How to read a spec table on this site

Each tool page publishes a table with pixels, percentages, and millimetre equivalents at 460 ppi and 505 ppi. Pixels are for editors. Percentages are for overlays that must survive a chrome tweak. Millimetres are so a print-trained art director can feel the tab bar as a thumb. The methodology page is the protocol behind those numbers.

When a row says “recommended safe rectangle,” that is our conservative box, not an official SDK value. Official values, when they exist, describe ads or desktop more often than the consumer For You player. We say that in the editorial policy because it is the honest limit of a reconstruction.