How to Set Safe Area?

VegasVideo wrote on 5/28/2008, 2:40 PM

I have an old video that I imported that has an edge of black only on the left side. I checked prefrences for enlarging the safe area or centering it, but havent had any luck in findding it. I find when I render it to avi the black bar present in the prview panel also appears in the finished movie.

Comments

Chienworks wrote on 5/28/2008, 2:51 PM

The safe area is determined by the television that you watch the finished video on, not by anything in Vegas. This is because the safe area is different on every TV, so there's no way for Vegas to know what it will be. The safe area guides in the preview window are simply best-guess guides to help you decide if the important parts of your images and titles will be visible on most screens.

If you're going to be playing the video back on a TV, don't worry about it at all. Leave it just the way it is. Your Vegas-rendered file will look the same on the TV as the original video did.

If you're going to be playing the video back on a computer screen and want to eliminate the black edge use Pan/Crop to crop it out.

SCS PBC wrote on 5/28/2008, 2:59 PM

Safe areas are guides that help to compensate for overscan in TV sets. Adjusting the safe areas in Vegas is possible in Options>Preferences>Video, but it will not have any effect on the black bar in your video.

It sounds like you'll want to use track motion to enlarge and/or center your video clip within the preview window. For instructions on how to use Track Motion, check out the Vegas Pro 8 training videos.

johnmeyer wrote on 5/28/2008, 3:19 PM

Safe area has nothing to do with what gets rendered: Your final video will always contain exactly what was in your original video, regardless of the safe area settings. As already stated, use pan/crop of you want to eliminate borders, but remember that you are going to diminish the quality of the video by doing so because you are now spreading out the original number of pixels, so things will begin to look a little fuzzy.

Unless the borders are distracting, just leave them alone.

VegasVideo wrote on 5/28/2008, 4:08 PM

I just noticed that most of my old home videoes (40+) I imported (converted from analog to SD) have the black bar on the left side of the video. Using pan and crop I can remove the side bar with no problem. Problem is.. is there a "batch" way to do it to all of the clips? Otherwise I'll be spending a ton of time doing each individual clip and probably wouldnt bother.

johnmeyer wrote on 5/28/2008, 4:13 PM

1. Just to reiterate: you don't need to get rid of the black bar. It is there in the original video (that's the way analog video looks); you just don't see it on a TV monitor because, by design, the TV monitor doesn't display all the way to the edge of the TV. Why? Because analog signals all have the black bars (extra scan lines, retrace, etc.) ...

2. If, however, you really, really want to get rid of these (which I don't think you should, but what do I know), you can make the change on one event using pan/crop. Then, copy that event. Next, select all events and then select "Paste Attributes" from the Edit menu. Done.

VegasVideo wrote on 5/28/2008, 8:57 PM

John.. thanks for the help. I am going to leave it alone and render to a DVD to test it as you suggest. In worse case, I'll use the pan and crop to adjust if necessary. Thanks again.

gordyboy wrote on 5/29/2008, 4:58 PM

Alternatively to avoid zooming in, which degrades the video source to a degree (to the extent that it starts to look more pixellated), I prefer adding a black border using the border plugin, setting the width to eliminate the visible VHS border.

gb