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Short video formats and specs

How long a clip can run, what size to export it at and where words stay clear of the buttons, for each place a vertical clip goes. Every guide quotes the platform's own help pages and says when they were checked.

Every platform that shows vertical video publishes its own limits, and they move. YouTube has counted a square or vertical video of up to 3 minutes as a Short since October 15, 2024, and Instagram lets a reel run to 20 minutes but says it will not recommend one over 3 minutes to people who do not follow you yet. A length or a size copied from a roundup can be out of date by the time you export.

So each guide on this shelf quotes the platform's own help pages, lists them under its sources and prints the day they were checked. Where a platform publishes no figure, as Instagram does not for the safe zone of an ordinary reel, the guide says so and gives the nearest official one rather than a guess.

Start with the length limits when you are deciding where a clip should go, and with the reel size guide when you are about to export. Snipri renders every vertical clip at 1080 × 1920, the full 9:16 frame, and its auto reframe keeps the speaker in that frame when the recording is wide. Shorts made from a long recording are on the YouTube Shorts maker page.

Try it on your own footage

Snipri is AI video clipping that explains why each moment deserves to be a clip. It turns one long video into captioned vertical clips for TikTok, Reels and Shorts, and you pay by the video, not by the clip. Your first 2 videos are free, up to 1 hour each, no credit card needed.

Clip a video
  • A scene from Meridian, reframed to vertical and captioned word by word by Snipri: a young detective at his desk says "Well, in that case, maybe you don't want to go out there, boss." and smiles.
  • A scene from Tears of Steel, reframed to vertical and captioned by Snipri in condensed capitals: a grey-haired man in a plaid shirt on a balcony, captioned "Last night."
  • A scene from Tears of Steel, reframed to vertical and captioned by Snipri on a dark panel: a man with a mechanical eye points ahead and calls "Action!" into a radio.
  • A scene from Meridian, reframed to vertical and captioned by Snipri with an orange highlight: an older detective in suspenders at his desk, captioned "Nah, not this time."

Scenes from “Meridian” by Netflix (Netflix Open Content, CC BY 4.0) and “Tears of Steel” by Blender Foundation (mango.blender.org, CC BY 3.0), cut, then reframed and captioned by Snipri, without sound.