Covers and thumbnails

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You get a cover for every platform you post to, at that platform’s exact size, with a preview of how its feed crops it. The same cover can replace the dead first second of your video, so the thumbnail and frame 0 match.

Before you start

The cut video, and optionally a face photo or a few slide images.
A headline. The cover headline works best as the same sentence as the hook of your script.
./install.sh done: it downloads the fonts and the MediaPipe face and segmentation models the cover tools use.
Chrome, Chromium or Edge for the HTML templates (or pip install playwright && playwright install chromium).

Pick a layout

Layout	Use it when	What it looks like
Collage	You want to show the range of the content; the face isn’t the point	Four stills in a diagonal collage, headline and tags
Face on quadrants	Personal brand: your face drives the click	Your cut-out face over a 2×2 grid of slides
Split cover	A horizontal post (小红书 4:3, YouTube 16:9) with a quote or a “tested it myself” angle	Retouched photo on the left, a dark panel with quote, title, thumbnail and chips on the right
Notes cover	Notes-style talking heads and course clips	A 16:9 notes board, plus a 4:3 centre crop
Framed cover	Screen-heavy content	Dark plate, big text, a tilted framed screenshot

A new channel usually gets more from a face. An established one can lean on the collage.

In the Mac app

Covers come with most video projects: talking-head and vlog projects stop at Pick the cover in your Inbox with ranked frame candidates and the cover text.
For a cover on its own, describe it on Home: which video, which platforms, which layout.
Pick a frame and edit the text. Each platform gets its own cover file next to its video, and the feed-crop preview shows what survives in the grid.

With the Claude Code skill

Ask for a cover and the skill follows workflows/cover:

Frame picking. For a talking head, Claude ranks frames by smile, open eyes and a centred face (cover.score_frames) and shows you the top picks on a contact sheet. A talking frame (mid-word, eyes on camera) reads better than an idle, posed one.
Retouch before the cover is built: slimming, eye size and a light makeup preset.
Terminal window
```
python3 -m vstudio.retouch face.png face_retouched.png --slim .05 --eye .04 --preset natural
```
Presets are none, natural, daily and glam. --faces all handles group shots.
Cut-out face for the quadrant layout, with a halo check against a checkerboard.

Render at every platform size in one go:

python3 workflows/cover/scripts/render_cover.py work/cover.html -o work/cover.png \
    --platform xiaohongshu --platform douyin --platform youtube

The cover on the first frame

workflows/polish puts the cover on the first second of picture. The audio is untouched and the length doesn’t change:

python3 workflows/polish/scripts/polish.py export.mp4 -o final.mp4 --cover cover.png --check

--check writes the first frame as a PNG so you can confirm frame 0 is the cover. If your first second already carries a hook shot, pick a frame from the hook as the cover instead.

Sizes per platform

Platform	Cover	What the feed shows
小红书 (3:4 or 9:16 post)	1080×1440	the whole cover
小红书 horizontal	1920×1080	the centre 4:3
抖音, TikTok	1080×1920	profile grid: the centre 3:4
YouTube Shorts	1080×1920	the whole cover
YouTube	1280×720, up to 2 MB	the whole cover; keep text left of the timestamp
B站	1146×717 (16:10)	also cropped to 4:3 and 16:9

Covers for the other platforms are in the platform reference. Wherever a feed crops the cover, the export writes a .feed.jpg preview and warns when the headline is probably cut.

Options worth knowing

Option	Default	What it does
Cover accent	teal `#2dd4bf`	Colour of the collage and quadrant templates (persona `cover.accent`). The split cover follows your brand colours instead.
Retouch preset	`natural`	`none`, `natural`, `daily`, `glam`.
Matting engine	MediaPipe	`--engine rvm` gives cleaner hair; it is GPL-3.0 and downloaded only if you choose it.
Cover length on video	1.0 s	How much of the opening picture the cover replaces (`--cover-sec`).

Example prompts

“Make a cover for this video for Xiaohongshu and Douyin. Use my face, pick a frame where I’m mid-sentence and looking at the camera.”
“Collage cover with four different moments from the talk. Headline: ‘RAG isn’t the hard part.’”
“Split cover for a horizontal Xiaohongshu post: retouched photo on the left, the quote on the right, a ‘tested’ stamp.”
“Put the cover on the first frame and give me a YouTube thumbnail under 2 MB.”