Captions that sit where a Reel leaves room
A Reel is 1080 by 1920 and about a fifth of it is covered by Instagram’s own interface. Captions that ignore that get read over the sound credit, the handle, or the stack of buttons up the right-hand side. Ymotion places them in the band that stays clear.
Placed where the platform is not
Ymotion sets the caption block so its bottom sits at seventy percent of the frame, below the face, above the furniture. A two or three line stack has its middle around three fifths of the way down, which is the band an editor placing a caption by hand tends to choose.
Not centred, and that is deliberate: a caption across the middle of a Reel is a caption across the speaker’s face.
Your Reel keeps its shape
The clip is measured before anything is drawn, and a clip that cannot be measured is refused rather than guessed at. Vertical stays vertical. A 16:9 clip you want to post as-is stays 16:9 rather than being squeezed into a phone-shaped box.
That sounds obvious and is the single most common thing that goes wrong: a per-axis fallback quietly turns 1920 by 1080 into 1080 by 1920, and nobody notices until the export.
Short lines, because a Reel is read sideways
Captions are grouped to about five words. At seven a caption regularly carries a whole sentence, which reads as a subtitle; five is roughly the length of a spoken phrase, which is the unit the eye takes in without stopping on it.
Questions
- Where should captions go on a Reel?
- In the lower-middle, below the speaker’s face and above Instagram’s caption bar, handle and button rail. Roughly sixty to seventy percent of the way down the frame. Ymotion places them there by default.
- Will my Reel be re-cropped or stretched?
- No. The clip is measured and kept at the shape it was shot in. Nothing is cropped to make captions fit.
- Are the captions burned in?
- Yes. The export is a finished MP4 with the captions rendered into the frames, so it looks the same wherever it is posted and needs no subtitle file.