The Short-Form Video Spec Sheet: What Every Platform Actually Wants
Resolutions, bitrates, frame rates, and file formats for TikTok, Reels, and Shorts — the numbers that matter, plus the ones the platforms won't tell you.
Every platform publishes “recommended upload specs,” and every platform’s recommendations are quietly optimistic — they’re written to cover the lowest common denominator, not to tell you what actually produces a clean result. After a year of A/B uploading the same clips at different settings, here’s the spec sheet we work from.
The Numbers That Matter
Platform │ Resolution │ Max length │ Frame rate │ Sweet-spot bitrate
────────────────┼────────────┼────────────┼────────────┼────────────────────
TikTok │ 1080×1920 │ 10 min │ 30 or 60 │ 10–12 Mbps upload
Reels │ 1080×1920 │ 90 s │ 30 │ 8–10 Mbps upload
YouTube Shorts │ 1080×1920 │ 3 min │ any │ 12–15 Mbps upload
A few notes on the table:
Bitrate is the column people get wrong. All three platforms recompress everything you upload — that’s unavoidable. What you control is the quality of the source they compress. Uploading a 4 Mbps file gives their encoder nothing to work with; uploading 12 Mbps gives it headroom. The file size difference is trivial on modern connections.
Frame rate: stay at 30 unless you shot 60. A 60fps upload is only worth it if your footage was actually captured at 60 — upsampling 30→60 invents frames and often looks worse after recompression.
YouTube Shorts is the most forgiving on bitrate and the least forgiving on aspect ratio. Feed it a 1:1 or letterboxed clip and it’ll serve it with ugly pillarboxing to most viewers.
Audio, Quietly Important
Everyone obsesses over video specs and then uploads audio at 96 kbps. All three platforms target roughly 128–160 kbps AAC on their end. Upload at 256 kbps AAC or higher so their transcode has headroom — muddy audio is the fastest way to make a clip feel amateur even when the picture is clean.
The Specs Nobody Publishes
- Safe zones: UI overlays eat the bottom ~15% and right edge of every vertical video. Keep captions and faces inside the center 1080×1420 region or they’ll sit under the caption text and buttons.
- HDR: Shorts accepts HDR, TikTok partially, Reels converts it unpredictably. Unless you’re specifically grading for HDR, export SDR and control the look yourself.
- File naming doesn’t matter. Metadata inside the file matters even less. Stop optimizing things the platform never reads.
We keep updated versions of these numbers — plus the export presets we actually use — on the Clips2VIP export recipes page.
The One-Line Version
1080×1920, 30fps (or native 60), 10–15 Mbps H.264, 256 kbps AAC audio, subject inside the safe zone. That’s the recipe; everything else is garnish.