A video shot for TikTok and dropped unchanged into a 4:5 feed slot can lose its opening line to the crop, its subtitles to a button and its product to a progress bar. We’ve seen all three in one ad. It was a good ad. Nobody had told it where it was going.
Adapting a video for each placement is unglamorous work, and it protects everything you’ve already spent on the creator, the edit and the media. Here’s how we do it.
Know which shapes you need
- 9:16, full-screen vertical. TikTok, Instagram Reels and Stories, YouTube Shorts. This should be your master.
- 4:5, tall feed. Instagram and Facebook feeds, where it fills more of the screen than a square.
- 1:1, square. A fallback for feed placements that crop or shrink anything taller.
- 16:9, landscape. Standard YouTube and connected TV. UGC rarely suits it without a proper re-edit.
Specs and placement names move around, so check each platform’s current guidance before a big launch. Then compare the list with where your media plan spends. If nothing of yours runs in landscape, don’t pay anyone to make landscape.
Film for the crop
Resizing starts at the shoot. Crop a 9:16 video to 4:5 and you lose nearly a third of its height. Crop it to 1:1 and you lose closer to half. That’s geometry, and it’s why a product held at waist height can vanish. Ask creators to keep their face and the product near the middle of the frame, with some spare room above and below.
Then resize from the editing project, never from the exported file. In the project, an editor can reframe each shot and move the text. In an export, the subtitles are baked in and get chopped with everything else.
Mind the safe zones
Every app lays its own interface over your video: captions and the handle along the bottom, buttons down the right, account details at the top. As a rule of thumb, keep text and product shots out of the bottom fifth of the frame and away from the right edge. Each platform publishes its own safe-zone guides, and they change, so lay the current one over a frame of your edit before you export.
Subtitles people can read
Plenty of people watch on a bus, or in bed next to someone asleep. Assume the sound is off and the subtitles are carrying your message alone.
- Burn them into the video. Platform auto-captions don’t appear everywhere, and viewers can switch them off.
- Stick to two lines at most, with a few words on each.
- Break lines at natural pauses. “I used to buy / the cheap ones” reads better than “I used to buy the / cheap ones”.
- Use a heavy font with a solid background or thick outline. UGC is shot in real rooms, and white text over a white kitchen disappears.
- Time them to the speech, and leave each one up long enough to read.
- Proofread by hand. Auto-transcription will turn “retinal” into “retinol” or “rental”, and one of those is a compliance problem.
Name files so a stranger could find them
Resizing multiplies your file count quickly. Three hooks in three ratios, with and without subtitles, is already eighteen files. Agree on a naming pattern before anyone exports, something like concept_hook_ratio_subs_v2, so your media buyer can upload the right one at six on a Friday without ringing anybody.
All of this is easy to skip when a video looks good on the editor’s screen, which is how a button ends up sitting on top of your offer. If you’d rather hand it over, this is most of what our video studio does all day.