But apparently due to all those emoji overlays and whatnot… ( i am such a boomer) there are about 4000 different social media safety areas.
Now with TV mastering I felt like I was the technician that was responsible for reminding people of the holy title safes but with social media…
I never get information to where its to be used only spec is “we need a 9:16 version” …
Every platform and post-type has different safety margins, how the hell are we ever going to crop this from a 16:9 master anyhow? its just a lost cause
I dont really care if there is a swipe up link over their legals (and its really not my problem?) just … I dont feel anything when doing social versions, its like going to the dentist.
Should I care? do you care? are you all complete boss in all social media safety margins? Should the agency/client send safety they want with specs? how are we going to handle this?
-How do businesses handle uploading to social apps? they can just zoom around and add stickers or dog ears or whatever manually right? I have no idea…
How does this even work across all the different apsect rartio devices? iphone for reels and stories just cuts of a part on top because of the notch for example
Not like this bs is going away anytime soon. (sadly)
I have a morbid fascination with this and all things social. It baffles me more than it excites.
You are right that more often than not I just get asked to make a particular ratio. 9:16 or 1:1.
If I do get told to make a specific social media deliverable then I will make an effort to consult a spec page. Not specs that the agency thinks they need (4096 x 2304 for LinkedIn!)
I am just waiting to see one of my ads getting completely trashed on one of these social media sites.
I did a tonne of social spots yesterday. Complete with subtitles and legals in the corner.
No mention of what platform they plan on uploading them to. No special safety margins where followed. Well no one told me of any particular destination.
I predict a shit storm coming. Or maybe no one will care
No worries but naybe they should be merged? dont know dont want to spam
i just saw a spot of mine on instagram and it was all motiongraphics
main titlte on the top is cut off by the iphone notch and overlayed with a “reels” overlay by instagram… even though I allready look for low hanging titles because of “swipe up” and stuff, story post had been fine as they are padded in the app. This was a “reel” (whoch is basically a tiktok)
and i have done many many legals and cornerlogos that would have all been cut off.
(never gotten specs so I dont feel guilty) but its one of those skills that is good to have I guess, just to have a bunch of social overlays ready for approval sessions…
I didn’t do any commercial work between 2018 and 2020, so when I found myself mastering socials last year I was surprised by how involved it had become in the interim. I remember chumming around on the internet for advice and stumbled across some editor’s blog(can’t find it now of course…). My main take away was that the whole thing is a crapshoot.
There are of course the issues you mentioned about overlays and additional in-app graphics and such, but the part that convinced me I wouldn’t bother myself with it too much was the discussion about phone screen aspect ratio. Up until that point I’d honestly never thought about it, but with the proliferation of so many different phone and tablet models over the last few years, the manufacturers have introduced 19:9, 18:9, 16:10, 5:3, 4:3, and probably a half dozen other screen aspect ratios.
How 16:9, or if you prefer 9:16, content gets scaled into these new ratios is dependent on the phone’s OS and settings as well as the individual app settings. Some of these settings are adjustable on the user’s end so ultimately we don’t have any control over what the margin for title/action safety should be. My understanding is that a not insignificant percentage of the time the image is being cropped to fill the screen instead of letterboxed. So even if you follow all the guidelines and best practices for adding titles, there isn’t really any way to ensure title/action safety.
In the end, I decided to just do what I thought looked good and put the onus on the client to specify any changes they want.
