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YouTube Shorts

A stylised Shorts screen with the action rail, where a tap flips the subscribe pill and the rail badge follows.

Duration
4s
Frame
1080 × 1920
Export
MP4, GIF, MOV (alpha)
Resolution
Up to 4K

About the YouTube Shorts animation

YouTube Shorts is a vertical full-frame comp for cross-posting, tutorials and anything aimed at a phone. There is no cursor. The press is a tap ripple, which is what the surface actually gets. Set the caption, handle and rail counts to your own; the numbers are what make a mock screen believable.

Where it fits

  • As a vertical tutorial frame showing where the subscribe pill sits on a Short.
  • In a cross-post to Instagram or TikTok, pointing people to your Shorts.
  • As an onboarding clip for a phone-first audience.

Filling it in

Set the handle, the caption and the sound line to your own, and put real-looking like and comment counts on the rail. Those numbers are what make a mock screen believable. The button goes from Subscribe to Subscribed in sentence case, which is how Shorts writes it.

Format and timing

YouTube Shorts is built at 1080 × 1920, a 9:16 portrait frame, the shape Reels, TikTok, Shorts and Stories fill from edge to edge, and runs 4 seconds at 30 frames per second. It arrives in 1.0 seconds, holds for 1.8 and clears in 1.2, so cue it a beat before the moment it labels. Export it as an MP4 for a timeline or a feed, a GIF where video will not embed, or a MOV with an alpha channel to lay it over footage with nothing behind it. Renders go up to 4K, and the free plan exports at 720p with a watermark.

What you can edit

  • Handletext
  • Captiontext
  • Soundtext
  • Likestext
  • Commentstext
  • Button beforetext
  • Button aftertext
  • Button colourcolor

Questions about YouTube Shorts

Why is there no cursor?

Because a phone has no pointer. The press is a tap ripple on the pill, which is what the real surface shows, and the rail badge flips to follow it.

Does the vertical frame fit Reels as well as Shorts?

Yes. It is 1080 by 1920, which is the frame both use. The layout imitates Shorts, so on Instagram it reads as a screenshot of YouTube, which is often the point of a cross-post.

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