scenario-formats

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---
name: scenario-formats
description: "Use when one approved visual, image or video, must ship at many sizes or placements through Scenario: adapting a master to 1:1, 4:5, 9:16, or 16:9, social formats for feeds and stories, YouTube thumbnails, storefront capsules and app store graphics, marketplace product images, link previews, display banners, a website hero, or choosing between crop, resize, expand, and generative reframe. Keywords: aspect ratio, resize, reframe, outpaint, expand, derivative, safe zone, thumbnail, banner."
license: MIT
---

# Scenario Formats

## Overview

Format adaptation is derivation, not regeneration: re-prompting the concept per placement makes five cousins, not five formats of one approved master. The failure modes are picking the wrong operation (a resize where canvas needed inventing, a crop that beheads the subject) and deriving in the wrong order. The canvas tools' exact contracts live in `scenario-image-editing`; this skill is the decision ladder and the order of operations around them, with per-placement ratios, pixel targets, and safe zones in [references/placement-specs.md](references/placement-specs.md). A video master climbs the same ladder: video resize versus generative reframe lives in `scenario-video-editing`, and far ratios recompose per `scenario-video`. Connection and the core loop: see the `scenario` skill. Lettering per format: `scenario-text-overlay`. If a sibling skill named here is missing from your available skills, ask the user to install it (`npx skills add scenario-labs/skills --skill <name>`); unattended, proceed from tool schemas and flag the gap.

## The decision ladder

Per target format, take the first rung that fits. Each rung is a `model_run` on a model found with `search` (`target="models"`, `public=true`), never a dedicated MCP tool of its own:

| The target needs                             | Operation                                                                                                                           |
| -------------------------------------------- | ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| Same ratio, other pixels                     | Resize: exact, scales pixels, invents nothing                                                                                       |
| A tighter ratio, edges expendable            | Resize with `fit: "cover"`: exact, center-crops the overflow; only when the subject clears the cut                                  |
| More canvas, composition intact              | Expand or uncrop: exact pixels, fills outward                                                                                       |
| Another ratio, recomposed around the subject | Generative reframe; the text-protecting variant when lettering or marks are on the plate                                            |
| A far ratio or a new visual hierarchy        | Recompose natively: a fresh run per `scenario-image` with the master as reference (`scenario-consistency`), composed for that ratio |

The last rung applies more often than it looks: 16:9 key art seldom survives to 9:16 by any amount of outpainting, which is why the director siblings (`scenario-video-ads`) design each delivery ratio as its own composition.

## Order of operations

1. Approve one master first, at the largest clean size available, on a text-free plate (unattended, the task's named master or the brief's own description stands in for the approval).
2. Derive every format from that master, never from another derivative: derivative-of-derivative compounds re-rendering artifacts.
3. Reframe and expand before grading and grain: generative canvas work re-renders the image, so finishing passes applied first come back partly reinterpreted (`scenario-image-editing` holds the pipeline order). A video reframe also precedes any upscale: it renders at its own resolution tier whatever the input ca