- [Instructor] When framing a camera composition,
we need to pay special attention
to the cropping in the Viewport.
It's actually trivially easy
to run into a situation
in which the framing we see in our Viewport,
does not match our final rendering.
That's because the Viewport aspect ratio is dynamic.
Aspect ratio is the proportion of screen width
divided by screen height.
And that proportion is dynamic for the Viewport.
We can change the shape of the Viewport really easily.
One way to do that is to click on the dividing line,
that's the vertical line
between the two Viewport panels on the top.
Click and drag on that, move that over,
and I can get a square aspect ratio in the Viewport.
But the renderer aspect ratio is fixed.
We set a numeric value for pixel resolution,
that in turn results in a particular aspect ratio
for the rendering.
And it's not affected by the Viewport aspect ratio,
they don't have to match, and usually they don't match.
That then leads to a situation of unpleasant surprises
when we frame something up in the Viewport
and then render it, the result we get is different.
So, to illustrate this,
I'm going to frame this physical camera Viewport
so that the top of the building
touches the top of the frame.
I can click and drag, move this around,
and just bring that over
so it's pretty much touching the top of the frame.
Now, that's not aesthetically beautiful.
We wouldn't actually do that,
but it's a good illustration of the issue
of the mismatch of the Viewport
versus the rendering aspect ratio.
With that set up,
I'll go ahead and initial a rendering.
That's done from the button on the very extreme far right
of the main toolbar.
It's called Render Production.
And it's a little teapot with a lightning bolt.
Click on that to initiate a new rendering.
That'll take a moment to initialize,
and we'll see we're getting a preview pass.
We're using the Arnold Render here,
so it's kind of filling in detail as it goes progressively.
But before it's finished
we can see that we've got an issue.
We've cropped off the top of the building here
in the rendering,
but we can see the top of the building here in the Viewport.
This tells us that we cannot trust
what we see in the Viewport.
It's not an accurate represent of what we'll get.
Let's cancel out of here,
close the render window.
And we can reset our panel,
right click in the center of the view ports
and choose Reset Layout.
Whenever setting up a camera framing
we'll want to enable a feature called Safe Frames.
That will crop the view port,
so that what we see is what we get.
And it's found in the Viewport label in the menus.
The name of the camera or Viewport is listed.
Click on FIS Camera 001 in this case,
and turn on Show Safe Frames.
And now we see some cropping on the left and right,
that's called pillar boxing.
So, it's telling me that the area out here
that's currently displayed in black,
is not going to be rendered.
Depending upon the aspect ratio of the Viewport,
we may get pillar boxing, or we may get letter boxing.
So, for example, if I drag downward
to create a taller Viewport,
then we'll get letter boxing.
This is the area that will not render.
So, now we can correctly frame our shot
so that what we see is what we get when we render.
I'll just use the Dolly camera, plus Target tool.
Dolly back a bit, and maybe frame this
by panning with the middle mouse button.
Move over and maybe go forward back a little bit.
Just frame that up for an aesthetically pleasing result.
And we can restore our layout again.
Right click in the center and choose Reset Layout.
And we'll do another rendering.
Click on Render Production once again.
Once that initializes and starts the progressive rendering,
we can see that indeed we have the correct framing.
What we see in the Viewport
does match what we get when we render.
Okay, very good. I'll cancel out of there.
One last thing, we can also Safe Areas within the frame.
Those will be guides to tell us
whether we're in a safe region for projection,
or maybe a safe region for displaying titles or credits
with an appropriate margin.
So, I'll go back to my Select Object tool,
and go into the Viewport Configuration.
Click on the plus sign in the Menus,
that's the general Viewport menu.
Click on that plus sign, go to Configure Viewports,
and then go to the Safe Frames tab.
We have the ability to enable different safe areas,
Action Safe, Title Safe, and User Safe.
When an image is printed or projected,
it's likely that some area on the edges of the frame
is going to get cropped off.
And that's what the Action Safe Area is.
Title Safe is an area in which titles or credits
are safely displayed,
that will allow some amount of margin around them
even after the image has been cropped.
Let's turn on Title Safe and click Apply.
And we get an orange box here
that corresponds to the Title Safe area.
And we can set the amount of reduction
in a percentage value here
for both the horizontal and vertical dimensions
if this Lock check box is on.
So, if Lock is on, we change this both parameter
for or Title Safe will affect the overall size
of the Title Safe Area.
Let's say I set that to 25% and click Apply,
now our Title Safe area is smaller.
Well, you'll notice if you look closely,
that we have different proportions
left to right versus top and bottom.
This percentage reduction amount
assumes a square aspect ratio to our image,
but our image is not square.
It has an aspect ratio of 16 by 9,
or 16 divided by 9, which is 1.78.
So, if we want to get a consistent outline amount here,
we'll need to turn Lock off,
and enter different values for horizontal and vertical.
If we're using a landscape aspect ratio,
which is wider than it is tall,
then in that case, the horizontal reduction amount
will directly correspond to the reduction
in the horizontal dimension.
In other words, 20% is actually really 20%.
We can click Apply here.
So, our horizontal reduction amount is accurate,
but the vertical reduction amount is not.
If we want to get a consistent outline, what we want to do,
is multiply our desired percentage reduction
by the current aspect ratio
to arrive at the correct value
for the vertical reduction amount.
Okay, so let's say we want a 10% reduction for Title Safe,
we'll plug in 10% for horizontal.
And for vertical, we'll plug in 10% times the aspect ratio,
which is 1.78
which will give us a percentage value of 17.8.
Go ahead and click Apply.
And now we have a consistent value.
Let's say we also want an Action Safe Area with a 5% margin.
Let's go up here and disable Lock,
and then enable Action Safe.
We'll plug in 5% for the horizontal reduction.
For the vertical, we want 5% times the current aspect ratio.
So, that's going to be 5 times 1.78,
gives us a value of 8.9.
All right, go ahead and click Apply.
And now we have a 5% reduction for the Action Safe
and a 10% reduction for the Title Safe.
We can click Okay to exit out of that.
That's how to use Safe Frames and set up Safe Area.