Know Your Ratios
We love seeing brands play in all of the social media sandboxes, but unfortunately the platforms aren’t above p*ssing in each other’s sandboxes. They do not always play well together. More specifically: they all have their own preferences for image and video dimensions.
For example, Zuckbook loves 1×1, 4×5, 9×16 and 1.91×1(?), and all of that can change depending on where on the feed you intend to deploy the video. Point is: there are a range of “recommended” video aspect ratios for each according to popular social platforms and they are constantly creating new ones.
Okay, so why can’t you just get one video, designed and rendered to one aspect ratio and use it across all of the platforms you want? Well, you’ve probably tried to upload an image to one of these sites and run into it not cropping the way you wanted. The same goes for video.
Here’s a quick visual aid of how chaotic a crop would be.
The beauty of animation is that we’re building every piece of your video. It is fully customizable. We can make your video for whatever aspect ratio best suits your needs and we may even be able to design it in a way that it will crop appropriately for a slightly different ratio (e.g. 16:9 and 1:1, not ideal but doable).
The trick is planning and communication.
One of the first questions we ask all prospective clients when discussing a project is: how do you intend to use this video? Where will it be seen? Your business’ intranet, YouTube, TV, social media, looping on a large screen at a live event? This seemingly simple question helps us make all sorts of creative and technical recommendations and decisions. A big one being: what are the appropriate aspect ratios for your video?
Let’s say you plan to leverage your new video marketing tool on your brand’s website and Instagram feed and we’ve designed and produced your video at 16:9 (1920×1080)—the most standard ratio and dimensions. If later you decide you’d also like to deploy it on Instagram Stories, that isn’t simply an additional output…it’s a whole new video. Can we make it for you? Absolutely. But it may not have been part of the original scope of work.
To be clear, we do not hate vertical, 9:16 video. We are happy to create the custom social media animation of your dreams be it for TikTok, Facebook or, heck, even Friendster if that is where your audience is. Vertical video is not the enemy. The enemy is, as always: surprises.
We’ve said it before, and we’re saying it again: proper planning is the key to making and sticking to a budget.
So let’s have a conversation about where you want to deploy that video, and let’s make a plan that eliminates those pesky surprises.