YouTube Shorts Safe Zone Viewer

When you edit a vertical video in Adobe Premiere, Final Cut, or CapCut desktop, you are looking at a clean 9:16 canvas. However, when that video is uploaded to YouTube Shorts, the platform overlays a massive amount of user interface elements directly on top of your video.

The Danger Zones Explained

• The Right Side: YouTube places the Like, Dislike, Comment, Share, and Remix buttons in a vertical stack on the right side of the screen. This covers approximately the bottom 40% of the right edge. Never put faces, text, or crucial visual information here.
• The Bottom: The channel name, subscribe button, video title, and the scrolling audio track take up the bottom 15-20% of the screen. If you put your subtitles here, they will be completely unreadable.
• The Top: The very top edge is often obscured by the viewer's phone status bar (battery, time) or the app's internal search bar.

Best Practices for Subtitles

Because the bottom is blocked by the description and the right is blocked by buttons, the ideal placement for hardcoded captions (like the Alex Hormozi style) is the center of the screen, slightly elevated above the midway line. This ensures that no matter what phone aspect ratio the user has, your text will be perfectly legible.