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A Short that looks perfect in your editor can lose its subtitle behind a row of buttons the moment it reaches the app. The dimensions are not the hard part — the interface sitting on top of them is.
A Short is 1080 × 1920 pixels, a 9:16 vertical frame. Anything squarer than 9:16 is treated as a regular video rather than a Short, so the ratio is a qualifying condition, not a preference.
Exporting larger — 1440 × 2560, for instance — gains nothing. YouTube re-encodes everything on upload, so the extra pixels are discarded. 1080 × 1920 at a decent bitrate is the target.
This is what catches people out. The Shorts player draws its controls over the video, not beside it:
The practical safe zone is therefore a column down the middle, roughly the central 80% horizontally and the middle 60% vertically. Subtitles, captions and any on-screen text belong inside it. Burned-in subtitles placed at the very bottom — the natural position in a landscape video — are exactly where the title bar goes.
Shorts can run up to three minutes. Beyond that the upload becomes a regular video, which changes where it is shown and how it is recommended.
For the file itself, MP4 with H.264 video and AAC audio is the safest combination — it is what every phone produces and what YouTube handles with the least re-encoding damage. There is no benefit in uploading a 200 MB file; YouTube will compress it anyway, and a bloated upload only costs you time.
A Short’s thumbnail matters less than a regular video’s, because in the Shorts feed people arrive mid-playback rather than choosing from a grid. But the thumbnail still appears on your channel page and in search, where it is cropped to a vertical tile. Pick a frame where the subject is centred and no text is near the edges.
Taking a 16:9 video and making it vertical is the most common Shorts task, and there are two honest approaches.
Crop to 9:16. You keep full-screen impact but lose the sides. This works when the subject is centred — a talking head, a single product. It fails on anything with action across the frame.
Fit with padding. The whole frame survives, sitting in a horizontal band with space above and below. Less immersive, but nothing is lost, and the empty space is usable for a caption — placed in the safe zone, not at the bottom edge.
Either way, crop or pad first, then trim the length, then export. Trimming last means re-encoding the whole clip again.