Cinema 4D Essentials: Stage Size and Movie Length

So if you've opened up Cinema 4D a few times you'll probably notice two things. One, your movie is always 90 frames long. And two, your stage is always a square aspect ratio. So how do we tweak these settings to get the desired effect? Let's dive in.
First we'll talk about the length of your movie and what that weird bar means between 0F and 90F when you open up Cinema 4D.
By default it sets your movie to be 90 frames long, so all we need to do to make it longer or short is change that second number above our materials window and beneath the stage.

That second number is the end frame for our animation, so if we change 90 F to 180 F our animation will last 180 frames rather than 90 frames. That first number is what the starting frame is, I rarely change this myself but if you are working on a project that is very precise that could come in handy.

You'll notice if you change the second number the bar between these two numbers will change. That bar is what part of your total animation is being shown in the timeline above it. If you click one of the arrows on the edge of this bar and drag, you'll see the timeline above it adjust accordingly. This bar is your zoom in and out of your timeline, much like the mountain icons and slider in Adobe After Effects.
This slider bar also determines what is played back when you watch your animation, so if you want to watch your whole animation, slide it all the way out until it won't go anymore.
Now that we've mastered that, let's make our stage 1920 by 1080 to be true HD. How do we do this? With the render settings.

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At the top of the Cinema 4D window you'll see the menu bar and a menu called "Render." That's where the render settings for the project live, and that's what controls the size of our stage.
Click that and third up from the bottom you should see Edit Render Settings.. next to an icon of a movie slate and a gear.

Click that guy.

This brings up the render settings and we can see right away that the first settings are width and height. By default they are set to 800 by 600, which is no good for our sweet HD animations. So we'll change these settings to be 1920 and 1080 respectively. You can keep the resolution at 72 DPI, and you'll notice that the Film Aspect changes to be 1.778, with the drop down bar next to it showing HDTV (16:9). That's what we're looking for.
Now when we close out of this window and head back to the regular Cinema 4D window you'll see that those greyed out vertical bars on either side of your stage are gone. Those were there to show you that when yo go to render you will not be seeing whatever is behind them, even though you can see it on the stage.
So there you have it, two quick solutions to two common issues with making a new Cinema 4D file. You can always adjust the timeline later as well without worrying about messing up your animation, as long as you don't make it shorter and start cutting stuff off. You can change the aspect ratio as well, but again, be careful to make sure you're not cutting off any of your hard work.