How to "shrink" video to "safe area" ?

will-3 wrote on 3/20/2008, 2:48 PM
OK, the top of the head of my subject is going to be cut off if I beleive Sony Vegas 5 preview monitor "safe area" markers.

When I turn on the "safe area" outline for the preview monitor I see two boxes drawn with dotted lines... a larger box and a smaller box.

1 - Must my video be inside the small box or risk being "cut off" ???
(This video is going to be on regular commercial TV)

2 - Can I "shrink" the video to get the subjects head back inthe video and frame the video on a black background?

3 - If so a quick tutorial would be very helpful.

Thanks for any help !

Comments

jrazz wrote on 3/20/2008, 3:07 PM
The safe areas are there as a guide. They are not accurate for every viewing screen. Some will take a lot of the picture and cut it off and some will take hardly none (this varies widely due to the popularity of LCD and Plasma screens and tube tv's still being on the market).

1. The small box is for text. usually if you keep your text within these parameters you will be "safe" in the regard of everyone being able to see it on their screen. You want to allow for "bleed" when you shoot your footage as there will always be parts that are cut off.

2. You can shrink it but some will see a black box around the picture (from you shrinking it). You can also put another piece of media in the background and shrink your footage so that it shows up like picture in picture (that will ensure your entire clip will be seen but it will be smaller). You can do this by using the Pan/Crop tool (a shortcut is located at the end of the clip/event that is on the timeline). You can also do this at the track level.

3. Just do a search in the help file for pan crop.

j razz
goodtimej wrote on 3/20/2008, 9:19 PM
You can adjust the size of the entire video track by using the "Track Motion" feature.
Goji wrote on 3/20/2008, 9:25 PM
I'm working on a project that shows the different behaviors of using pan/crop on the event v. track levels

I want a THIN border on the pan/cropped clip, against a generated solid color background:

Adding a border effect on the clip results in a FAT border

Adding a SHADOW (slightly larger than the clip) on the TRACK level, and setting BLUR to 0 results in a nice THIN border.

Cheers,

G.
rmack350 wrote on 3/20/2008, 11:37 PM
Vegas' default safe area is very conservative at 10% for action safe and 20% for title safe. That outer box is the action safe guide to keep your action inside of. Many people feel that half of that is just fine.

Traditionally, you don't frame things on the edge of frame for video. Analog TV has always been notoriously inconsistant and individual TVs would often mask off arbitrary amounts of the edge of frame. Of course it was much worse in the 1950s than it is today, but you still don't frame on the edges.

Digital TV will be much more constistant and in about 10 years when most anolog TVs have gone to landfill you can forget all about this.

Rob Mack
Grazie wrote on 3/21/2008, 1:13 AM
Yeah . . you can also forget about subtle blacks, soft whites and meaningful colours too. I hate digital screens. Sorry .. am I alone on this?

Grazie
farss wrote on 3/21/2008, 2:16 AM
"Sorry .. am I alone on this?"

No, but they're getting better. Just at the moment the good stuff is very expensive. At least we don't have to worry about problems with geometry anymore.
jaegersing wrote on 3/21/2008, 1:38 PM
Yeah I hated those circular screens.
Steve Mann wrote on 3/21/2008, 6:18 PM
My first TV was a 4-inch, 48-line console model. You watched the program through a mirror in the lid.

The OP didn't say why, which is the first thing I would ask. As others have said, you want the titles in the smaller rectangle (Title Safe) and the action inside the outer rectangle (Action Safe). You want the remaining screen as part of your background, but when you shoot, try to keep all the action in the safe area. This way, the titles will look good on any TV, the action in the action safe area will show up on virtually all tube TV's, and for those using digital displays, they will see most if not all of everything in your viewfinder.

One thing that I find missing in my HDV cameras is the ability to put SD action safe lines on the LCD. This way I can frame and shoot for all modes.
rmack350 wrote on 3/21/2008, 8:53 PM
"...they will see most if not all of everything in your viewfinder."

Sometimes they'll see more than you saw in your viewfinder.

Rob
riredale wrote on 3/22/2008, 12:56 PM
Nearly all TV sets today cut off part of the picture, but not quite to the extent of the 10% dotted line. Our 62" Mitsubishi DLP rear-projection set cuts off about 7%, I recall. Keep in mind that if you are viewing video on a PC using a program such as WinDVD or PowerDVD then there is no cutoff at all.

I don't shrink my videos at all because that usually means a loss of sharpness due to the re-sampling. I often, however, mask the video with a 4% cookiecutter outline, because I often use DeShaker and the mask blocks any odd edge effects that arise from that process.
John_Cline wrote on 3/22/2008, 3:04 PM
All televisions will continue to overscan to some degree in the forseeable future. There will still be a significant amount of analog material used and a lot of it has a bunch of "grunge" near the borders, not to mention vertical interval time code as well as head switching noise on old VHS and 3/4" stuff.
Chienworks wrote on 3/22/2008, 3:40 PM
I think a lot of folks panic when they compare the finished render viewed on the TV with what they saw in Vegas' preview window. They see a lot more in the preview window that doesn't show up on the TV and assume that Vegas is doing something to their video to make it bigger on the TV and lose part of the image. What they don't realize is that if they were to plug the camcorder into the TV and watch the original tape they would see exactly the same amount cut off as they do with the final render. It's not that they see less on the screen from the Vegas render, it's that they see more in the preview window than they ever knew was included to begin with. Had they not edited the video on the computer they never would have realized there was more to the image than they see on the TV.

Ideally one should never shrink the video to fit in the safe areas. The original video should be shot so that nothing important gets too close to the edges in the first place.