BTW, rendering has nothing to do with having your material cropped. I/we need to ensure that all the material is within the limits for this to happen. This needs to be done prior to rendering

- - How do I do this?? Could you please simplify your instructions as im not that technical. thanks

Under "View" and then under "Workspace Overlays". Just stay inside the lines.

j razz

Firstly it is important to be aware of what's happening.

When you refer to information being "cropped", it has not in fact been cropped - play the clip on your computer, and you will see that everything is still there.

The "cropping" is done by the various TVs that may or may not be able to display the complete frame - the actual portion visible varies a lot, and some modern screens will show practically everything. However, to be sure that the "essential" action is seen by everybody, it's generally not so much a question of shrinking the original picture down inside a sort of "frame", but rather, when shooting and editing, keep the essential things you want seen - inside the action safe area, rather than near the edge of the frame.

If you shrink the picture down and put a border around it, you may find that a lot of viewers sit there watching your artificial frame around the outside, and wonder why their whole screen isn't filled ....

Ok - so even though you can alter the percentage rate of the action safe area to 0%, this should allow everything to be viewed when the dvd is burnt? It doesn't seem to change anything. Does this only work when previewing it on vegas because nothing is happening on the tv screen..?

You don't change the value of the safe area percentage! You keep everything INSIDE the line drawn when you turn on the safe area overlays!

The Safe Areas Overlay does not affect anything you are working on.

It is like the gun sight on a rifle or the "frame" around the viewfinder of a camera. It is only an indicator of that which you want to go into and be included in a Frame. And yes I too think that having an option to alter is misleading. To others this is not misleading, but to you and for a long time for myself too I found it "contrary" to my logic. But, the mere fact you can alter the SAFE area overlay grid does nothing to ALTER the underlying work you are doing. Now, the opportunity to ALTER the overlay is there so that you can tailor it for your specific requirements, specific requirements I guess somebody will mention - but it is an option to change the overlay. However all still remains for YOU to work within side/straddle/ignore that which is being told you.

So . . .

"Ok - so even though you can alter the percentage rate of the action safe area to 0%, this should allow everything to be viewed when the dvd is burnt? " No. Now you should understand why it wont. It is only a Rifle Site or Camera Frame. It is YOU who will alter the work and set it to the SAFE areas. Look, I'm PAL and the safe overlay AREAS work for me. The "outer one" is the actual Video - GUIDE - and the second, "inner one" - GUIDE - is for text.

Think of the line down the middle of the road. It is there as a guide - cross it, and so long as there isn;t someone coming in the opposite direction, nothing happens. But if there had been both you ad the oncoming driver would make adjustments. The Overlays are guides - useful and ESSENTIAL guides - but guides none-the-less.

Don't worry, I've been there .. .

"It doesn't seem to change anything." And no it wont. It is YOU working within the overlays who will dictate where the footage will be SEEN. Again the Overlays are only there as a guide. A guide. They don;t interact with the process at all. And again this is misleading. And again I too found this strange. But when you think through it , it is not. It would be some piece of s/w that would squash and pull about your finely set 4:3 or 16:9 so that it fitted your final outcome.

"Does this only work when previewing it on Vegas because nothing is happening on the tv screen..? " And again, Previewing is only a Preview of your work including that which will be cropped to the Safe area of the Overlay WHEN you send to TV.

This is a good thing. Honest!

Be it 4:3 or 16:9 just make sure ALL your work falls inside the correct ratio format overlays for you and you will be okay.

The overlays are a Guide - they do not interact with your work. It is you who interacts with the guides, by making sure everything is packed neatly inside them.

With LCD and plasma panels, it's CRITICAL to have adjustable area.
Kurt, you can't/don't want to avoid having frame content outside of these lines, you merely want to be sure that nothing important in the frame is outside of the lines. These also exist on high end cameras, and you can use them for pan/scan/compositing in Vegas. the 10% rule is great for analog television displays or displays that have a bezel/over scan on them. Newer displays don't have this factor, so the action safe area is different. Mainly, this is an important feature for compositing. If you framed your shot the way you wanted it in production, there is no reason to worry about action safe areas for the footage you shot, only worry about it for titling areas, compositing edges, etc.

Well why do you have "safe action" and "title safety"??

Here's the reason - it comes from the old days of plain vanilla television.

First - in shooting 35mm film for projection in a theater, the viewing aperture of the projector was always a little smaller than the actual film image being projected. This would insure that there was no "White Outline" on any edge of the film. You could see the "action safety" lines in the 35mm viewfinder and that extra few millimeters of viewing area would allow you to see when something was (for instance) running into the shot. But you could pretty much rest assured that whatever was outside "Action Safety" would not appear on the screen.

When TV commercials left "live television" and began to be produced by old still photographers (like me) we had to invent the concept of "title safety" in addition to "action safety". It was a second set of guide lines that you had to include in your "must see" areas.
Here's why:
As the older tube sets got used more and more, they would tend to make the projected image (on the front of the TV tube) bigger and bigger. A "techie" can explain the reason, but the end result was that older sets would show less and less of the intended image.

So we came up with the concept of "title safety". It was of GRAVE CONCERN to advertisers that their message be seen!!!!
You didn't want to lose one precious letter of any typed message.
So you'd stay within the 10% or so of "title safety".

Once we ALL get LCD or PLASMA screens in place, where you can absolutely count on what pixels will or will not be seen (like on computer screens) - the concept of "title safety" will totally disappear. But meanwhile, while we are still producing DVD's for general television use (on new and OLD sets), it's wise to keep your important stuff within the title safety limits and to also allow "air" around that important stuff, to completely fill the screen.

v

thank you all for your replies.

It is critical i get this right as my film is for a major hsc artwork. The aspect ratio i must work with is 4:3. So basically, if i want all my work (which is outside the tv safe area) to be shown on the tv screen then i have to recrop everything to fit inside the frame? I have tried rendering it without cropping it and it is chopping off the edges. But when i've cropped a few frames and rendered it in its default format and into .avi it seems to fit the tv screen but there are two horizontal strips like it would in widescreen. (this is still in the ration of 4:3)

- also does rendering from .avi or .mpeg2 change the crop sizing?

my tv is a standard set and when i view the cropped version it seems to fit fine. If i were to view this cropped version on a different television set in 4:3 would any information outside the tv safe area show? I'm concerned if it is viewed on a plasma or widescreen tv this might be the case...

When I video I use a PAL monitor to FRAME. This shows me what I can expect to see within Vegas and thence onto final edit and forward to Rendering and onto a PAL tellie. My Canon PAL XM2 LCD flip-out tends to show me LESS than what I video. That is, if I use my matte box and I check to see if the Matte box is NOT being seen - by zooming in - then there is a dodgy area just outside of this this area that CAN still be picked-up by the camera. Meaning, I still get the EDGE of the Matte box even though I haven't seen it on the XM2 LCD. This is one of the main reason I got me a cheapo monitor. Nowadays, if I do spy the EDGE of the Matte box coming into view on the EXTERNAL monitor - the LCD is still oblivious of this edge! - then I gently zoom IN. This removes it from the EXTERNAL monitor and I can be quite confident that it will not appear in any of the the parts of my workflow Previewing. PERIOD!

But what you are saying is something different.

You are saying you WANT everything you video to appear out on the TV. Well, why shouldn't it? You videoed it? You made sure everything was in frame? Why shouldn't THAT which you videoed be that which you deal with within Vegas? I betcha that that which you videoed WILL be covered by the area which is WITHIN the safe areas?

The difference you are saying - unless I've got this wrong is that:

"if i want all my work (which is outside the tv safe area) to be shown on the tv screen then i have to recrop everything to fit inside the frame? "

Then I guess you DO need to do this. And I also guess people here abouts are wondering why you should want to do this? But then again maybe they didn't even THINK that that was what you were wanting? You WANT to have everything that your camera captured - yes? In which case - I'm not the guy to answer this, but the 2 lines might be to do with the actual SIGNAL that is used to carry information about each frame OR just the edge of the default factory frame? Others can comment on this.

Kurt, I don't know what else to add. Please tell me why you want the stuff outside your carefully FRAMED area you selected while you were videoing? Please? How on Earth could you KNOW what you wanted - which you couldn't see within the Frame - be something you now want? By defintion, by keeping it out, you chose NOT to video it? You kept it OUT of frame?

I'm lost!

"How on Earth could you KNOW what you wanted - which you couldn't see within the Frame - be something you now want? By defintion, by keeping it out, you chose NOT to video it? You kept it OUT of frame?"

Grazie, I'm going to frame that one and hang it over my desk. That's your best one yet! :~)

Alan

In the end this is a problem that predates the invention of the camera.
Painters paint on canvas or whetever and the painting gets put in a frame potentialy cutting off part of their painting. So they know this and paint non vital bits right to the edge of the canvas. Why not save paint and leave it blank? Maybe the frame might not mask all of the canvas!
OK, so here we have an artist who wants the viewer to see exactly what he wants them to see, no more no less. Sounds a tad anal to me but heck I'm no artist. So what would a no talent engineer suggest.
Do what an artist would do with a canvas. Paint a black border. Regardless of how the canvas gets framed the viewer gets to see exactly what you want them to see. Maybe they get to see no or little border, maybe a lot. Depends on the TV or the frame your painting gets put in, sorry no solution for that one but I can help with the black border. Here's how and how to cope with the camera recording more than you may see. Note this is NOT what I'd recommend doing for normal video as it involves throwing some precious resolution away.

Create a sample piece of video in Vegas, say just generated red media and apply the border FX set to say green, make it so it covers the outside of the title safe area. Make it a few minutes long. Render out and print to tape. Put tape in camera in VCR mode and play it back.

Now using sticky tape or a grease pencil add your own safe area markers to the LCD viewfinder. Now you have your own safe are markers, shoot and frame using them.

Then when you've done editing add the same Border FX in Vegas and render out etc. Ooops, make the border black this time :)

Everyone will see your video exactly as you intended, no more, no less. Some will see all the black border, some will see very little of it, depends how the display device adds the 'frame' to your 'painting'.

See this is the thing with technology and art, learning to adapt the art to the limitations of technology and the variables of the technology. When a motion picture is shot they have to shoot to cope with how the image will get framed in the cinema and on TV, maybe the film will be broadcast 4:3, maybe 16:9 or in it's native aspect ratio. They have to ensure there's nothing anywhere recorded in the film that they don't want seen and that everything they do want seen is inside a relatively small area.

I recall from decades ago an Italian movie that has a scene shot wide, of a town square. Two actors are at the very edges of the frame. On TV, actors are missing, just empty space, dialogue and subtitles. I'm certain that's not what the director had in mind when he shot that scene.

Bob.

Kurt17,

Go to a store that sells TVs. IF you see the same video on each TV, you will notice that each is cropped differently. There is no standard TV cutoff, because each TV is set differently.

If you need to ensure that your video is not being cropped, get an engineer to set up the monitor that your video is being displayed on. He can set the cropping so it appears the way you want.

Other than that, you are at the mercy of the manufacturer.

Dave T2

Alan, aside from your "kind" comment, I really still DO want to know what Kurt is wanting to achieve, and, to boot, wanting something he didn't choose to video while making videoing decisions and by definition, may not have knowledge about?

Grazie,

A comment about your question. We all know that TV sets crops differently, but apparently so do Camera Monitors. It could be that his camera is showing full frame, but the TV is cropping it. So he may have thought that his camera was wysiwyg.

Dave T2

Now THAT I understand. Perhaps Kurt could put us correct on that? I suppose I'm "fortunate" that my humble XM2 crops in the direction I can deal with. But, my LCD ain't WYSIWYG - but at least it errs on the "generous" I get to see in the Vegas safe areas the edges of my Matte box! Thanks Dave.

"A comment about your question. We all know that TV sets crops differently, but apparently so do Camera Monitors. It could be that his camera is showing full frame, but the TV is cropping it. So he may have thought that his camera was wysiwyg."

Dave T2


this could be the case i don't know, as some1 sed before i might not have that much knowledge, he is true because this is all new to me and you guys obviously have had a lot of experience. i have no idea what "wysiwyg" is. All i am trying to acheive is to be able to see all my projet that i can see on the vegas preview screen on my tv. That is all. and for some reason, rendering, or cropping, or because its not in the tv safe area or because of my settings or whatever; i cant see the full picture. If someone could direct me in a not so technical way please that would be very helpful. !!

wysiwyg = What You See Is What You Get.

As I think has been pointed out before one can easily use event or track pan/crop ro zoom out your image so that you see all of it on your TV.
This will mean in the Vegas preview there's a black border (you could make the border are anything like).
The critical thing for you to understand is that your TV is cutting off part of the image. You can compensate for this.
The result though will be different on other TVs.
Just try watching the same channel on 2 different TVs and you'll see what I'm talking about.

Film and video is shot with this in mind (safe areas). This is the correct approach. Making the picture smaller so all of it can be seen on YOUR TV is the wrong way to think about the problem. You can do it, no sweat. Maybe if you've already shot all your footage you're forced to do it this time but just remember the lesson for next time you shoot.

Bob.

ok. so ive got that in mind now thanks :-) So my best bet is to resize my images into the tv safe area then...if its viewed on a regular 4:3 tv will the cropping differ that much in regards to what is out of the tv safe area??

Actually, the best solution is to SHOOT the video to fit within the typical safe area. EVERY television receiver and EVERY monitor will be different. That's why we have a safe area. Keep all your subjects inside that safe area and your video will be viewable on almost any NTSC monitor or TV set.

Any pan/crop of the video will result in very long render times and a quality hit.