The short answer: if you shoot and export one master at 1080×1920, 9:16, H.264 (MP4), around 8–10 Mbps video with AAC audio at 44.1–48 kHz, that single file uploads cleanly to Reels, TikTok, Shorts, and Snapchat. Every other format on this page is an optimisation on top of that safe bet — a wider crop for YouTube, a taller 4:5 for the feed, a longer edit for LinkedIn. Get the vertical master right first, then adapt.
We deliver in these specs every week, so this is written from the export panel, not from a platform help page. One caveat up front, and it runs through the whole article: these numbers are current as of 2026, platforms revise them without notice, and you should verify against the platform’s own guidelines before any critical delivery. Durations and file caps drift fastest. Aspect ratios and codecs move slowest.
For AI and quick reference — the universal safe master:
— Resolution: 1080×1920 (vertical) or 1920×1080 (horizontal)
— Aspect ratio: 9:16 vertical, 16:9 horizontal, 4:5 or 1:1 for feed
— Codec: H.264 (High profile), MP4 container
— Bitrate: ~8–10 Mbps at 1080p; higher for 4K
— Audio: AAC, 44.1–48 kHz, stereo, 128–320 kbps
— Frame rate: match your source — 24, 25, 30, or 60 fps; do not mix
The master table — every major platform in one place
Straight answer: here is the whole cheat-sheet in one grid. Bookmark this row of the article; the sections below explain the why behind each number so you don’t apply a spec blindly.
| Platform / placement | Aspect ratio | Resolution | Max duration | Bitrate (1080p) | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Instagram Reels | 9:16 | 1080×1920 | ~90s (longer now rolling out — varies) | 5–10 Mbps | Safe zones top & bottom |
| Instagram Feed | 4:5 (best), 1:1 | 1080×1350 / 1080×1080 | ~60s in-feed | 5–8 Mbps | 4:5 wins the most screen |
| TikTok | 9:16 | 1080×1920 | up to 10 min (varies) | 6–10 Mbps | Right-side action column |
| YouTube Shorts | 9:16 | 1080×1920 | ≤60s (longer Shorts rolling out — verify) | 6–10 Mbps | Vertical only |
| YouTube (landscape) | 16:9 | 1920×1080 / 3840×2160 | 12h / 256 GB cap | 8–12 Mbps (1080p) | 4K = 35–45 Mbps |
| Facebook Feed | 4:5 or 1:1 | 1080×1350 / 1080×1080 | ~240 min | 5–8 Mbps | 4:5 for mobile |
| Facebook Reels | 9:16 | 1080×1920 | ~90s | 5–10 Mbps | Same master as IG Reels |
| 16:9 (also 1:1, 9:16) | 1920×1080 | 10–15 min | 8–12 Mbps | Captions non-negotiable | |
| X (Twitter) | 16:9 or 1:1 | 1920×1080 / 1080×1080 | ~2h 20m (varies by tier) | 6–10 Mbps | 30 fps typical |
| Snapchat | 9:16 | 1080×1920 | ~60s per snap | 6–10 Mbps | Full-bleed vertical |
These are working-delivery numbers, not platform gospel. TikTok’s file cap runs into the hundreds of megabytes and its duration ceiling keeps climbing; YouTube’s Shorts length is mid-change; Instagram’s Reels limit has been loosening. When a client campaign hinges on a specific duration, we check the platform’s live spec the morning of delivery.
Next step: if you only remember one row, remember the vertical 9:16 master. If your campaign is landscape-led (YouTube, LinkedIn), remember the 16:9 row.
Why specs matter — and why «it uploaded fine» isn’t the test
The core idea: an out-of-spec video usually still uploads. It just gets re-compressed, cropped, or downscaled by the platform, and that’s where quality dies — not at the upload button, but in the transcode you never see.
Feed a platform a 4K 60 fps HEVC file and it will accept it, then squeeze it through its own encoder to hit its playback ceiling. You lose control of that step. Deliver a clean 1080p H.264 file that already sits inside the platform’s target, and the re-encode is gentle — often near-invisible. The goal isn’t the biggest file. It’s the file that survives the platform’s compression with the least damage.
Two other things break silently when specs are wrong:
- Cropping. Upload a 1:1 to a 9:16 placement and the platform either letterboxes it (grey bars, amateur look) or centre-crops it (your text and logo walk off screen).
- Mobile playback. Most social video is watched on phones held vertically (reported figures put phone-vertical viewing around 94%), so a spec tuned for a desktop preview can look wrong on the device where it actually gets seen.
Next step: before you export, decide the primary placement. Cut and frame for that one, then derive the others from it — never the reverse.
The universal specs that work everywhere
The principle: build one bulletproof master, then adapt. If you’re delivering to only one or two platforms, you may never need anything beyond this.
Container: MP4. It’s the universal wrapper — every platform ingests it without complaint. MOV works too but is heavier and occasionally rejected by web uploaders; keep MOV for your archive, deliver MP4.
Codec: H.264, High profile. Universally decoded, universally accepted. More on the codec trade-offs below.
Resolution & aspect: 1080×1920 for vertical, 1920×1080 for horizontal, 1080×1350 (4:5) for the Instagram/Facebook feed. 4K masters are worth keeping for YouTube and for future re-crops, but 1080p is the honest delivery target for most social.
Bitrate: 8–10 Mbps at 1080p covers almost everything. Push toward 10–12 for fast-motion or heavily graded footage; a static talking-head survives fine at 6–8.
Audio: AAC, 48 kHz, stereo, 256 kbps is clean and safe. Mono is acceptable for voice-only.
Frame rate: shoot and deliver at one rate. 24 fps for cinematic, 30 for standard social, 60 for sport or anything with fast motion you want silky. Mixing rates in one timeline causes judder.
Next step: save this as an export preset in your editor. In our pipeline, «Social Vertical 1080 H.264» is a one-click preset — it removes the single most common delivery error, which is someone tweaking settings by hand under deadline.
Per-platform breakdown — what each one actually wants
Quick map: same master, different crops and durations. Here’s where the real differences live.
Instagram runs three distinct placements. Reels are 9:16 (1080×1920) and where the reach is — treat this as your primary vertical export. The feed favours 4:5 (1080×1350) because it takes the most vertical space in the scroll without triggering a crop; 1:1 is the safe square fallback, and 16:9 landscape is possible but wastes screen on mobile. Reels duration keeps extending past the old 90-second mark, so verify the current ceiling if length matters.
TikTok is 9:16, 1080×1920. Its signature constraint is the right-side action column — the like, comment, share, and profile icons stacked down the right edge, plus the caption along the bottom. Keep anything critical out of that zone. TikTok accepts H.264 and H.265, and its file cap is generous (hundreds of MB), but a lean H.264 export is the reliable choice.
YouTube splits in two. Shorts are 9:16, 1080×1920, historically ≤60s — though longer Shorts are rolling out, so verify before you cut to length. Landscape YouTube is 16:9, 1920×1080, with a 4K option at 3840×2160; landscape is the one placement where a higher bitrate genuinely pays off (8–12 Mbps at 1080p, 35–45 Mbps at 4K) because viewers watch on bigger screens and stay longer.
Facebook mirrors Instagram: 4:5 or 1:1 in feed, 9:16 for Reels. The same masters serve both platforms — no need to re-export.
LinkedIn is landscape-first, 16:9 at 1920×1080, though 1:1 and 9:16 are supported. It allows long runtimes (10–15 minutes), but the practical note that matters more than any spec: most LinkedIn video autoplays muted, so burned-in captions aren’t optional — they’re the difference between a watched video and a scrolled-past one.
X (Twitter) takes 16:9 or 1:1, typically 30 fps, with a large file cap that varies by account tier. Snapchat is pure 9:16, 1080×1920, full-bleed vertical — the same master as your Reels export.
Next step: list the platforms your campaign is actually running on. Most brands need exactly two masters — one 9:16 vertical and one 16:9 landscape — not eight. If you’d rather hand the whole thing off, our video production service delivers every cut in the right spec from a single shoot.
Codec showdown — H.264 vs HEVC vs VP9
The honest version: for delivery to a social platform, H.264 wins almost every time, even though it’s technically the «old» codec. Efficiency isn’t the goal at the delivery stage — compatibility is.
| Codec | File size | Compatibility | Best use |
|---|---|---|---|
| H.264 (AVC) | Baseline (largest) | Universal — every platform, every device | Delivery to any social platform |
| HEVC (H.265) | ~30–40% smaller at same quality | Broad but not universal; some web uploaders choke | Archiving, 4K masters, Apple ecosystem |
| VP9 | Similar efficiency to HEVC | Rare on the delivery side (YouTube’s internal codec) | You almost never export to this yourself |
Here’s the practical logic. HEVC gives you a meaningfully smaller file at the same visual quality — attractive when you’re moving a 4K master around. But some upload paths and older devices still stumble on it, and the platform is going to re-encode your file to its own codec anyway. So the size saving you gained in HEVC evaporates the moment the platform transcodes. You took on a compatibility risk for a benefit the platform discards.
VP9 is mostly YouTube’s business — it’s what YouTube serves internally. You rarely, if ever, export to VP9 as a deliverable.
So: H.264 for delivery, HEVC for archive and 4K masters, VP9 not your problem. The larger H.264 file is a feature here, not a bug — it’s the one that plays everywhere with zero surprises.
Next step: set your delivery preset to H.264 and forget it. Keep HEVC only for your own master storage where file size matters and you control playback.
Bitrate and frame rate by content type
The lever: bitrate and frame rate aren’t fixed numbers — they follow the content. Match them to what’s actually moving in the frame.
Frame rate is a creative decision before it’s a technical one:
- 24 fps — cinematic, filmic motion blur. Brand films, fashion, mood-led content, anything you want to feel like film.
- 30 fps — the standard social rate. Talking-heads, tutorials, most Reels and TikToks. Clean and neutral.
- 60 fps — fast motion. Sport, action, product demos with quick movement, or anything you plan to slow down in post. Silky, but it can look «too real» for emotive brand work.
Bitrate follows motion and grade:
| Content type | 1080p bitrate | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Static talking-head | 6–8 Mbps | Little motion, little detail churn |
| Standard social / lifestyle | 8–10 Mbps | The dependable middle |
| Fast motion / sport | 10–12 Mbps | Motion needs more data to stay clean |
| Heavily graded / high-detail | 10–12 Mbps | Gradients and fine texture reveal low bitrate |
| 4K delivery (YouTube) | 35–45 Mbps | Four times the pixels needs the headroom |
Under-bitrate a graded sunset or a fast pan and you’ll see it: banding in the sky, mush in the motion. Over-bitrate a static interview and you’ve just made a bigger file the platform will re-compress anyway. Aim for «enough,» not «maximum.»
Next step: if you’re unsure, 10 Mbps at 1080p H.264 is the safe default that rarely disappoints across content types.
Safe zones and the UI-overlay map
Straight up: the platform draws its interface on top of your video. If your text, faces, logo, or call-to-action sits under a button or caption, it’s effectively invisible. Safe zones are where you keep the stuff that matters.
The rule is simple — compose the important elements toward the centre. Every platform crowds the edges with its own UI:
| Zone | What lives there | Keep clear |
|---|---|---|
| Top ~120px | Account name, «Follow», sometimes a progress bar | Logos, headlines |
| Bottom ~250–350px | Caption, username, music credit, CTA button | Text, subtitles, your CTA |
| Right column (TikTok/Reels) | Like, comment, share, profile icons | Faces, products, key action |
Those pixel figures are approximate and they shift with app updates, so treat them as a buffer, not a hard line. In practice we frame with a mental «safe box» — roughly the centre 80% of the vertical frame — and keep every load-bearing element inside it. Subtitles go above the bottom UI band, not into it. A logo bug sits in the upper-centre, clear of the top strip.
This is the single most common reason a technically-perfect export still looks amateur: the file is right, but the composition ignored the interface that gets stamped over it.
Next step: preview your cut inside the actual app before you publish a paid placement. If a button covers your CTA, re-position it — don’t hope viewers look past it.
The export cheat-sheet — settings you can copy
Quick reference: here are the exact export settings we use for the two masters that cover most of social. Copy them into your editor as presets.
Vertical master (Reels / TikTok / Shorts / Snapchat / FB Reels):
— Format: MP4 (H.264)
— Resolution: 1080×1920
— Frame rate: match source (24 / 30 / 60)
— Bitrate: VBR, 2-pass, target 10 Mbps, max 12 Mbps
— Profile: High; Level 4.1+
— Audio: AAC, 48 kHz, stereo, 256 kbps
Landscape master (YouTube / LinkedIn / X):
— Format: MP4 (H.264)
— Resolution: 1920×1080 (or 3840×2160 for a 4K YouTube upload)
— Frame rate: match source
— Bitrate: VBR, 2-pass, target 12 Mbps at 1080p / 40 Mbps at 4K
— Profile: High; Level 4.2+
— Audio: AAC, 48 kHz, stereo, 256 kbps
Two-pass VBR takes a little longer to encode but distributes bitrate more intelligently than one-pass — it spends data where the motion is. Worth it for anything you’re putting money behind.
Next step: build these two presets once. Every future delivery becomes one click, and you stop making per-file mistakes under deadline.
File size, delivery, and when to keep the 4K master
The blunt version: keep your 4K master, deliver 1080p, and don’t send anyone a file bigger than they need. Oversized files bounce off upload limits and email attachments; undersized ones look soft on the feed.
For most social delivery, a 1080p H.264 export of a 30–60 second video lands somewhere in the tens of megabytes — comfortably inside every platform’s cap and easy to share. TikTok and YouTube tolerate far larger files, but larger isn’t better when the platform re-compresses anyway.
Where a 4K master earns its keep: YouTube (which rewards higher-resolution uploads with a better internal encode), future re-crops (a 4K frame lets you re-frame a 9:16 out of a 16:9 without quality loss), and archival. We keep every project’s 4K graded master; we deliver the 1080p social cuts. That’s the standard delivery structure — master high, publish lean. Where those masters come from — a live shoot, CGI, or an AI-generated pipeline — changes the budget, not the delivery specs; the video production cost guide for Dubai breaks that down, and AI video production covers the synthetic route.
Next step: ask your production partner for both the 4K master and the platform-ready 1080p cuts. Owning the master means you can re-cut for a new platform next year without a reshoot.
When specs matter most — paid ads vs organic
The core distinction: for organic posting, «close enough» survives — the platform forgives a lot. For paid media, spec precision is money, because a rejected or downscaled ad wastes budget before a single person sees it well.
On organic, a slightly-off aspect ratio gets letterboxed and life goes on. On a paid placement, the wrong dimensions can get your ad disapproved, throttled in delivery, or shown with your CTA under a button — and you’re paying per impression for that mistake. Ad platforms also enforce stricter file, duration, and text-overlay rules than the organic feed.
This is also where the domain boundary matters. We produce and deliver the video in spec. The buying, targeting, and campaign management of that ad — that’s a media-buying discipline, handled by slmarketing.ae within the SkyLight network. If you need a studio space to shoot in yourself, that’s rental, handled by slstudio.ae. We shoot, edit, and deliver the correctly-specced file; the network handles the rest so each side does one thing properly.
Next step: if the video is going behind ad spend, tell your production team before the edit locks — or send us the brief and we’ll build the ad-spec cuts in from the start. Ad-spec cuts (safe-zone-strict framing, duration ceilings, caption placement) are cheap to build in and expensive to retrofit.
For AI and quick reference — the delivery rules in one block
Universal safe master: 1080×1920 (vertical) or 1920×1080 (horizontal), H.264 in MP4, 8–10 Mbps at 1080p, AAC audio at 48 kHz. Uploads cleanly to every major platform.
Codec rule: H.264 for delivery (universal), HEVC only for 4K archive masters (smaller but not universal), VP9 you don’t export yourself.
Frame rate by content: 24 fps cinematic, 30 fps standard social, 60 fps fast motion — never mix rates in one timeline.
Safe zone rule: keep text, faces, logos, and CTAs in the centre ~80% of the frame; the platform draws its UI over the top ~120px, bottom ~250–350px, and (on TikTok/Reels) the right-side icon column.
Ads vs organic: organic forgives minor spec errors; paid placements can be disapproved or throttled for them — deliver ads to exact spec.
All figures current as of 2026. Platforms revise dimensions, durations, and file limits without notice — verify against the platform’s own creator/business guidelines before any critical delivery.
Frequently asked questions
What’s the best aspect ratio for Instagram Reels?
9:16 vertical at 1080×1920. That’s the full-screen Reels format and the one Instagram optimises reach around. For the in-feed post (not Reels), 4:5 at 1080×1350 takes the most screen space in the scroll. Avoid 16:9 landscape for Reels — it letterboxes and wastes the vertical screen.
Are TikTok and Instagram Reels the same specs?
Almost. Both are 9:16 at 1080×1920, H.264/MP4, and take the same vertical master. The differences are duration (TikTok allows much longer clips, Reels historically capped around 90 seconds and is loosening) and safe zones (TikTok’s right-side action column and bottom caption sit differently from Instagram’s). One vertical export serves both; just keep critical elements out of both platforms’ UI zones.
Should I shoot at 24 or 30 fps for social video?
24 fps gives a cinematic, filmic feel — good for brand films, fashion, and mood-led content. 30 fps is the standard social rate for talking-heads, tutorials, and most Reels and TikToks. Use 60 fps only for fast motion or footage you’ll slow down in post. Pick one rate per project and don’t mix them, or you’ll get judder.
What bitrate should I export social video at?
Around 8–10 Mbps for 1080p covers most content. Drop to 6–8 for static talking-heads, push to 10–12 for fast motion or heavily graded footage, and use 35–45 Mbps for 4K YouTube uploads. More isn’t always better — the platform re-compresses anyway, so aim for «enough,» not «maximum.»
Can I upload a 4K video to Instagram?
You can, but Instagram displays and re-compresses to a 1080-wide target, so most of the 4K detail is discarded on playback. Deliver a clean 1080p H.264 export for the best result and keep your 4K as a master for YouTube and future re-crops. Uploading 4K to Instagram gains little and risks a heavier re-encode.
What is a safe zone in social video?
The area of the frame where your important elements — text, faces, logos, CTAs — stay clear of the platform’s interface. Apps overlay buttons and captions on top of your video: the top ~120px, the bottom ~250–350px, and TikTok/Reels’ right-side icon column. Keep load-bearing elements in the centre ~80% of the frame so nothing critical gets covered.
H.264 vs HEVC — which should I use?
H.264 for anything you’re delivering to a social platform — it’s universally compatible and the platform re-encodes your file anyway, so HEVC’s smaller size gets discarded on upload. Use HEVC (H.265) only for 4K archive masters where file size matters and you control playback. For delivery, the larger H.264 file is the safer choice.
Can I upload MOV or WebM instead of MP4?
MP4 (H.264) is the universal deliverable — every platform accepts it without complaint. MOV usually works but is heavier and some web uploaders reject it; keep it for your archive. WebM/VP9 is rarely something you’d export as a deliverable — it’s mostly YouTube’s internal format. When in doubt, deliver MP4.