Social video aspect ratios, and when each one is right
Aspect ratio is the first decision in a video project and the hardest to undo. Get it wrong and every platform crops you — usually through the middle of the thing you wanted people to see. This is what each ratio is for, what actually happens when you post the wrong one, and how to pick without guessing.
The four that matter
| Ratio | 1080p size | Where it belongs |
|---|---|---|
| 16:9 | 1920 × 1080 | YouTube, Vimeo, embeds, anything watched on a desktop |
| 9:16 | 1080 × 1920 | Reels, TikTok, Shorts, Stories — full-screen vertical |
| 1:1 | 1080 × 1080 | Square feed posts, LinkedIn, older Instagram grids |
| 4:5 | 1080 × 1350 | Instagram and Facebook feed — the tallest a feed post can go |
What actually happens when the ratio is wrong
16:9 posted to a vertical feed
It is not cropped — it is letterboxed. Your video shrinks into a horizontal band across the middle of the screen with black above and below, using roughly a third of the display. It still plays, which is why people keep doing it, but it reads instantly as repurposed content and it competes badly against full-screen video either side of it.
9:16 posted to the Instagram feed
The feed caps at 4:5. A 9:16 video gets centre-cropped to fit, so the top and bottom of your frame are cut away. If your text sat near the top, or your subject's head was high in frame, that is what disappears.
Vertical source into a horizontal project
This is the one that surprises people. Most tools fill the frame with your footage and discard the overflow — a "cover" fit. Put a 9:16 clip into a 16:9 project and the tool scales it up until it is wide enough, which means you are seeing a narrow vertical strip from the middle, massively enlarged. It looks like the video is zoomed in, because it is.
Audioframe avoids this: loading a video sets the project's aspect to whichever option is closest to that file's own shape, so a vertical clip opens a vertical project. If you have already chosen an aspect deliberately, that choice is kept.
How to choose
Work backwards from where the video is going, in this order:
- One destination? Use that platform's native ratio. Nothing else matters.
- Several destinations? Make the vertical version the master and cut a separate 16:9 for YouTube. Do not try to find a ratio that works everywhere — there isn't one, and the compromise is worse than either original.
- Unsure? 4:5 is the safest single choice for feed content. It is taller than square, so it takes more screen, and it survives being posted almost anywhere without catastrophic cropping.
Safe zones
Every vertical platform draws its own interface over your video. Treat these as unusable:
- Bottom ~20% — caption, username, audio credit, progress bar.
- Right ~15% — like, comment, share and profile buttons.
- Top ~10% — status bar and, in Stories, the progress segments.
Anything you care about belongs in the middle band. This is the most common reason text looks fine in an editor and is half-covered in the feed.
Resolution: pick 1080p
Every ratio above lists its 1080p dimensions, and that is almost always the right choice. Platforms re-encode everything you upload and most cap delivery at or below 1080p, so a 4K upload is mostly converted into a longer export and a bigger file for a result nobody sees.
The exception is footage you intend to crop or reframe later — extra pixels give you room to punch in. If you are exporting a finished post, 1080p is the answer.
A note on frame rate
30 fps is right for an audio visualizer. The motion is driven by a spectrum that updates smoothly at that rate, and doubling to 60 fps doubles both your export time and your file size for a difference almost nobody can see in a feed. Reserve 60 fps for gameplay or fast camera movement.
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