Social Frame Guide

What is Social Frame?

A plugin to help visualize and render your scenes for different social media platforms.

Remember Safe Frames? Protecting the edges of your frames for those old 4:3 TV screens? Well times have changed and now we have to protect for MANY different croppings. Square, vertical, poster, etc. Social Frame helps you visualize all your social media croppings AND makes it easy to output for them!

User Interface

Guides

You can enable vertical, or horizontal, guides to show how your scene would look if it was cropped to different aspect ratios for other social media platforms.

The guides that are enabled/disabled depend on the current Aspect Ratio of your scene. Any guides that are disabled are out of bounds of your current view in C4D. IE they may be above or below the viewport, or to the left and right of what the viewport is showing. You can switch on these out of bounds guides from the Advanced tab if you need them.

Vertical Guides

These let you visualize what your scene will look like if it is cropped on the left and right.

Horizontal Guides

These let you visualize what your scene will look like if it is cropped from the top and bottom.

Square Mode

If the render settings for your scene is set to a 1:1 ratio then you can enable this special mode.

This allows you to view all the different guides on your square image. However in this mode you can not create Takes or use the "Set Output" options for the guides.

This is purely a visualization mode only. This is useful if you wish to, for example, render out an animation that you may then crop in After Effects to share on other social media platforms.

If your image is square, ie 1:1, then the "Activate Square Mode" checkbox will become active.

After enabling the checkbox you will see the guides in the viewport in both the vertical and horizontal directions.

Create Takes

Pressing the "Create Takes" button will add a new take for every guide that you have enabled.

Each take will override the Focal Length (if the camera is perspective mode) or the Zoom factor (if in a different camera projection such as Left/Right etc...).

A copy of the Render Settings will also be created for each Take with the Width and Height of the Output being set accordingly for each social media output type.

If in the Advanced Tab you have the "Use Recommended Image Sizes" checked then the output size will be the exact dimensions recommended for each specific social media output type.

If "Use Recommended Image Sizes" is unchecked then it will adjust the Width of the output size for Vertical Guides, or the Height of the output size for Horizontal guides, to get the correct Aspect Ratio.

Set Output

Pressing "Set Output" will set the Width and Height of your main Render Settings to the chosen social media output type.

If in the Advanced Tab you have the "Use Recommended Image Sizes" checked then the output size will be the exact dimensions recommended for each specific social media output type.

Enable All

Enables all guides.

Disable All

Disables all the guides.

Default Mask Aspect Ratio

Sets the Mask back to the aspect ratio as defined in the main Render Settings for your document.

Advanced Tab

Mask Color

Adjust the color of the mask borders displayed in the viewport for the guide that has the "mask" checkbox enabled.

Mask Opacity

Change the opacity of the mask borders displayed in the viewport for the guide that has the "mask" checkbox enabled.

Line Width

Adjust the line width of the guides. Note that this will always push the guide out away from the guide line, so neither the lines, or the mask, will every be over the top of your actual content in the viewport.

Hide Out Of Bounds Guides

When this option is enabled the guides that fall outside the current aspect ratio will be disabled on the Social Frame tag.

If you uncheck this option then you will be able to see, and use, the other guides.

In the following image you can see that the output image of the current document is set to a 16:9 image ratio. The 3 guides that are now enabled, which would previously be hidden, are outside of this aspect ratio.

You can only see these 3 aspect ratios if you were to make your viewport into a shape as shown in the image below. So to avoid confusion the options that are not visible within the current aspect ratio are disabled by default.

A better way to use the guides that are hidden is to switch to "Horizontal Guides". This will then let you crop your viewport from the top and bottom.

Use Recommended Image Sizes

When this option is enabled it will use the recommended image resolutions when using the 'Create Takes' or 'Set Output' options.

When this option is unchecked it will set the image resolution by multiplying the main render settings Width and Height by the aspect ratio. When using 'Vertical Guides' it will adjust the Width and when using 'Horizontal Guides' it will adjust the Height.

Social Image Resolutions

The following is the list of image resolutions that are currently being set. These are the recommended resolutions as defined by each social media platform.

When using the Create Takes option it will set the values in a new Render Setting that gets used by the take of the same name.

Append Name To Take Render

This option works with the 'Create Takes' button. If enabled it will append the name of the social media type to the end of the Save→File name specified in the Render Settings when the takes are created. There will be a new Render Setting for each individual Take.

For this to work you must also have a valid file path in the main render settings. If this path is empty then no path will be set.

If you wish to change the original name of all the paths you will need to delete the takes and then press the 'Create Takes' button again for them to be updated. However you can of course adjust them manually if you so wish.