Aspect Ratio Cheat Sheet v3

Get ratioed with this handy aspect ratio cheat sheet explicitly made for video editors and post-production professionals. If you edit videos on the daily, you need to bookmark this page. Press cmd+D if you are on a mac, and ctrl+D if you are on a PC.

To prevent frame blanking or pixels getting cut off halfway, we have rounded any odd integers down to the nearest even number.

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The aspect ratios you’ll use most

Most days you don’t need the whole chart. You need the four or five ratios clients and platforms keep asking for, at the exact pixels to export them in. Here you go. The full tables below cover everything else, all the way down to DCP.

Got your number? Good. Two things tend to bite people right after this step. First, your export looking different than it did on your timeline. That’s almost always a color space and monitor thing, not a ratio thing, and I broke down why your exports look different (and the monitors that fix it). Second, butchering the final file on the way out. If you’re delivering something that matters, here’s how to export it properly so none of this matching work goes to waste.

DCI 4K vs UHD: two different 4Ks

You’ll notice the tables below list both a 4K and a 4K UHD, and they don’t match. That’s because there are two 4Ks. UHD is the consumer one: 3840 x 2160, plain 16:9, and it’s what your TV, your client’s laptop, and every streaming platform mean when they say 4K. DCI 4K is the cinema one: 4096 x 2160, the full container of the DCP standard. The same split exists one tier down: broadcast HD is 1920 x 1080, cinema 2K is 2048 x 1080.

So when a client just says “deliver in 4K”: if it plays on a screen with a remote or a scroll wheel, they mean UHD. If it plays through a projector at a festival, ask for a DCP spec sheet, then use the Cinema DCP tables below.

List of Aspect Ratios for Video Editors

3K UHD

Title safe and action safe areas

Safe areas started as a CRT problem. Old tube TVs cropped the edges of the picture, so broadcast graphics stayed inside a margin. The tubes are gone, but the margins survived: broadcast delivery specs still call for them, and they’re still where your lower thirds belong. The current broadcast standard (SMPTE ST 2046-1) puts action safe at 93% of the frame and title safe at 90%.

One gotcha: Premiere’s safe-margin overlay still defaults to the old standard-definition numbers, 90% action and 80% title, which are tighter than anything a modern spec asks for. Fine for paranoia, but if a broadcast spec sheet gives you numbers, the spec sheet wins.

Safe zones for Reels, TikTok, and Shorts (9:16)

Vertical is a different problem. Nothing crops your frame; the app draws its interface on top of it. The caption, the music ticker, and the like/comment rail all sit inside your 1080 x 1920, and whatever you put under them is gone. None of the three platforms publishes a fixed pixel spec. Meta’s official guidance is a toggle: turn on the Safe Zone guardrail in Ads Manager and it draws the zone on your creative (and if your ad carries a disclaimer, Meta says keep the bottom 40% empty). TikTok’s zone changes with caption length, so its Business Help Center ships downloadable overlay files instead of one number. YouTube publishes nothing for Shorts. So here are the working margins I hold text to. They clear the interface on all three:

And if one graphic has to survive all three apps, keep it inside the middle of the frame: nothing in the bottom third, nothing in the top 270 pixels, and nothing within about 120 pixels of the right edge.

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