Pinterest Pin safe zone: 270 px top, 790 px bottom for captions

Pinterest's Pin specs page gives one safe zone for Image Pins and Video Pins: keep text and logos out of the top 270 px, left 65 px, right 195 px and bottom 790 px. On the recommended 9:16 size of 1080x1920, that leaves a box 820 px wide and 860 px tall, so burned-in captions have to sit in the upper half of the frame.

The bottom margin is the surprise. 790 px is about 41 percent of a 1920 px frame, far larger than the bottom margin most Reels or Shorts guides ask for, so a caption placed where a TikTok-style caption normally sits would be covered.

The numbers on a 1080x1920 Pin

The page lists margins in pixels. Converting them to fractions of the frame makes them reusable at other resolutions, though the page states the zone for the recommended size, so treat other sizes as an approximation and check the page.

Place a caption inside the box with Sume

The video captions endpoint burns authored lines when you pass cues, each with text, start and end. Cues skip speech-to-text, so they also work on a silent clip, which fails as caption_no_speech without them. The design.placement.anchor_ratio field sets the line centre as a fraction of frame height.

The docs describe the ratio as the line centre but do not say which edge it counts from here, so do not trust a number blindly. Pick a value that should land the line between y 270 and y 1130, which is roughly 0.14 to 0.59 of the height, render, and look at the result before you scale up.

curl -X POST https://api.sume.com/v1/video-captions \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $SUME_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -H "Idempotency-Key: pin-caption-001" \
  -d '{"video_url":"https://media.sume.com/artifacts/artf_demo/pin.mp4","style":"black-outline","cues":[{"text":"Three-step shelf build","start":0.5,"end":3}],"design":{"placement":{"anchor_ratio":0.36}}}'

Check the burned frame

Pull stills with video frames, which returns exact frames at source size, and measure where the text sits. A 1080x1920 still lets you read pixel rows directly: text above row 270 or below row 1130 is outside the zone.

Pinterest also limits text outside the video: 100 characters for the title, 250 for the textbox and 800 for the description on the same page. Burned-in lines are separate from those fields, so keep them short and write the searchable wording in the description.

curl -X POST https://api.sume.com/v1/video-frames \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $SUME_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -H "Idempotency-Key: frames-check-001" \
  -d '{"video_url":"https://media.sume.com/artifacts/artf_demo/out.mp4","at":[1,3,5]}'