Production · 11 August 2026

When one 9:16 master is enough

A rule for shipping one conservative 1080×1920 master versus separate TikTok, Reels, Shorts, and Stories cuts — based on chrome, not on brand guidelines theatre.

By the FramePad editorial desk · 12 min read · Updated 2026-08-28

The intersection rectangle

TikTok wants you out of the top 10%, bottom 20%, and right 14%. Reels is about 9 / 22 / 13. Shorts is about 9 / 18 / 14. Stories is about 14 / 16 with almost no right rail. The intersection of those organic players is roughly: keep essential picture and type inside x = 4–86% and y = 14–78%. A file that respects that box will not be elegant on every app. It will be readable on all of them.

If your type already lives in that box, stop. Do not version. Versioning is how a campaign drifts — a different pan, a different end card, a different first frame — until nobody can say which file is canonical.

Version when a control is the point

Version when the cut refers to a control that only exists on one app: “Remix this,” “Subscribe,” a Stories poll, a Snap swipe-up. Those lines are lies on the other apps. Swap the type, keep the picture.

Version when a paid placement is in the mix. Meta’s 14 / 20 hold-outs are stricter at the bottom than organic Stories. A price that is safe as an organic Story can fail as a Story ad. Paid versions are not vanity. They are review insurance. Use the Meta ad previewer.

Do not version the crop

A face that jumps between the TikTok cut and the Reels cut is a continuity error the viewer may never name and will still feel. Lock pan and zoom. Change type layers only. If a platform’s rail covers a product that cannot move, pad that version instead of recropping the face.

Store the pan as a number. FramePad’s view state is zoom plus panX / panY. Write those down in the edit log if you will recreate the convert in an NLE. Guessing the pan a second time is how ears reappear.

Captions are already a version

The native caption field is a per-platform version you are already making. Use it. Put the search sentence there. Put the hook in the picture. Do not burn a TikTok-length paragraph into a Reels file; Reels will also draw its own caption on top.

Hashtags are not a safe-zone problem until they wrap the caption well into four lines. Then they are. Keep the field short. The rest can live in a comment if the app still surfaces it.

A naming scheme that survives a handoff

project_1080x1920_v03_clean.mp4 is the canonical picture. project_1080x1920_v03_tiktok_type.mp4 is a type version. project_1080x1920_v03_proof_tiktok.png is the overlay burn-in. Never publish a proof. Never hand a buyer a file named final_FINAL2.

If you only have one file, name it clean. The overlay lives in FramePad, not in the master. The proof-sheet guide is how a reviewer who will not open the studio still sees the collision.

Open the matching tool

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