Glad you found it helpful Tom!
It’s also nice to know I’m still the top search result after all these years

Hi Sergio, You are correct that SD is much smaller than HD video – about 1/6 the resolution. If I am understanding what you’re saying correctly, I think what you are seeing in photoshop is the difference in the number of pixels between SD and HD.
The title safe areas are using the aspect ratio of the video formats, not the number of pixels. The HD (16×9) aspect ratio is 33% wider than the SD (12×9) aspect ratio.
When HD video is played on an SD screen it isn’t a perfect pixel to pixel translation – the video is scaled down to vertically fit the SD screen, so only a small amount of information on the left and right are cropped from 16×9 to 12×9 aspect ratio. In your video editor you can replicate this by either scaling SD video up to fit vertically in an HD timeline, or scale HD video down to fit vertically on an SD timeline. Once the scaling is done, the safe guides will be accurate, but they will not reflect the actual size of the different video formats when measured in pixels.

I hope that helps.
One other thing to keep in mind… if you’re actually working with digital SD video, the pixels in some SD video formats are not square. I don’t remember the aspect ratio of the pixels, but you need to make sure that your software is compensating for this, and displaying the image correctly, otherwise everything will look slightly stretched. There used to be an option in photoshop to correct for non-square pixels… it’s probably still there, but you probably need to compensate for this when making your image size comparison in photoshop. If not, your SD frame’s aspect ratio won’t be 4×3 (12×9) when pasted into an HD image which has square pixels.

Thanks for sharing. It’s getting harder and harder to keep up with all the different device aspect ratios

Thanks for this article and especially the overlay image of all the ratios. To know exactly what safe area I need for an iPhone with a 19.5:1 ratio, I today tested an iPhone 12 by playing a YouTube clip shot natively in 19.5:1…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Go4a15GhK2k

…and found you cannot pinch to zoom to fill the screen with a native 19.5:1 video already taking up the screen. So I think it’s safe for me to consider that 19.5:1 needs no horizontal safe area. BUT I’ll be adding a vertical 90% safe area to the sides 1) to frame out that ugly iPhone notch, 2) to frame out the rounded iPhone corners, and 3) in case someone watches these clips on a TV that’s zoomed in.

Of course, I could push it to 2.2:1 in case phone makers keep competing in this one area. Seasons 3 & 4 of “Ozark” on Netflix was shot 2.2:1, so maybe they know the future.

As long as the main portion of the small “Picture in picture” video is within title safe you should be fine with placing it in the corner. Just be mindful of where the final video will wind up. For example if it goes on youtube there could potentially be the channel watermark in the lower right portion of the screen, or the playback controls across the entire bottom if a viewer leaves their mouse cursor over it.

I don’t really have any experience with twitch. There are overlays that display during ads which let the viewer know that an ad will end soon, so if you are uploading an ad you should factor those in. I’m not familiar enough with the other content on twitch, so I can’t really give an informed opinion on it.

Thanks, I am glad you found value in the article. I am not able to find the original image to make a png of the title safe graphic.