Crop the video while you are editing it to make sure none of the garbage is there, and at the same time make sure you are within the title/safe area for all your video and text. You always need to think about that when doing DVD's, tons of people play them in their computers and will see any garbage if it is there.

Whole lot of rendering, think I'm almost done cleaning it up.

I am still wondering why it is your Hollywood big motion picture types don't seem to suffer from this. Play it on tv, looks fine, play it on computer, looks fine ...

Guess I'd have to do a side by side to see whats getting cut off where. Do they just shoot knowing their going to loose that much ? Guess it shows what an amature I am. Wish I had guidlines in my viewfinder.

- Ray

www.undergroundplanet.com

"Wish I had guidlines in my viewfinder"

3 possible solutions:

1. Buy a professional field monitor with an underscan/overscan switch, and compose your shot appropriately to take both into account. This is what the big boys do. An expensive solution, but probably the best.

2. If you have a camera with a memory card and still overlay capacity (my PD-150 does, I'm not sure about other cameras), you can create underscan guidelines in Photoshop. Leave the center pure white, pure black, or bluescreen blue to use as an alpha channel. Then in the field, you can overlay the image over the camera image to check underscan. Just remember to turn off the overlay feature before you start shooting. Cheap and effective.

3. Paint guidelines on your LCD monitor on your camera. Something likeZip-A-Tone, the old adhesive graphic design materials, might work, too. Or a very thin grease pencil. Actually, now that I think about it, you'd probably want to draw it out on a sheet of mylar and overlay it on top of the LCD screen, rather than drawing it directly on the LCD.

I use option 2 myself.

Ray;
You didn't say what kind of camera you're using or what kind of "junk" you're seeing so I'll address this issue in generic terms.

You can make it look right on both TV & computer- but only if you know exactly what you're shooting. Because the viewfinders on most lower end camcorders are horribly overscanned, it's very difficult to do this.

Film pros don't worry about it because they're shooting for a movie screen, not a TV screen. They do know what will (hopefully) get cut off. I say hopefully because, if the theatre projector is misaligned, it's possible to see things like a microphone at the top of the frame.

Better video cameras (ie. industrial/broadcast) have the option of having the "safe action markers" displayed in their viewfinder, just like in the Vegas preview window. BTW, these markers should be set to 5% & 10%, not the 10% & 20% which I think is default. Experienced shooters are aware of the 5% safe area range and always compensate for it. Having a larger (1.5") viewfinder helps a lot here.

In an attempt to "calibrate" your viewfinder, try this. Take a 9" X 12" card (3X4 ratio) and make 2 sets of bold lines around the outer edges at the 8" & 8.5" and 11" & 11.5" marks. Frame it using your viewfinder so that you see the inner-most marks. Record 30 sec. or so. Then zoom out to the next set of marks and repeat. Finally, frame up the whole card and repeat again. Capture this into Vegas and, using the preview window markings, see where things actually end up. In theory, the outer-most marks will be the safe action area. What you want to do is to mark your camera viewfinder so that you know where these marks are supposed to be.

I hope I haven't further confused you. Feel free to ask for further clarification if I have.

Mike

Well, I've become used to shooting without having to think about these things. It's as if I "feel" when it's right. The same with title safe areas when I edit. BUT, if shooting a project with an ok budget I will defenitely rent a field monitor. Nothing beats having that on set to check the lighting, composition and of course the edges.

And Ray, I would not call you an amateur. You defenitely "have it". Just mix your talent with some other semi-pros and you'll be making magic.
Best/Tommy

BTW, different TV screens have different edges. Some show more, some show less.

"BTW, different TV screens have different edges. Some show more, some show less."

Exactly why SMPTE (Society of Motion Picture & Televison Engineers) came up with the 5% Safe Action/10% Safe Title border standard many years ago. TVs have gotten better over the years at not overscanning as they age but a lot still depends on the quality of the electronics & CRT. I've got a 15 yr. old 27" Sony that's as correct today as the day I bought it. OTOH, I've seen cheap sets less than 1 yr. old that are horribly overscanned.

Mike

When I did my last big project, it involved the use of 3 DV cameras. My friend's D8 camera had a quirk where it would intermittently turn off the very top line. At first I rationalized that this artifact was easily covered up by the typical 5% overscan on a typical TV set. But I could notice it on my preview window, since it shows the entire DV image, and the effect also showed up when I used some of his shots for a motion menu (the video from his camcorder being shrunk about 75% next to the menu text).

Given those situations, and also realizing that, in the future, a viewer might be watching the video on a PC with WinDVD or PowerDVD, I decided to bite the bullet and put a Cookie Cutter mask exactly 1 pixel wide on all four sides, thereby permanently hiding the intermittent line artifact from his camera. No one notices a mask of 1 pixel's width, anyway, and this way my project will look good no matter how it's seen.

I also am an occasional user of steadying utilities like SteadyHand. When I run a clip through SteadyHand, I don't have that program zoom the image up to hide the changing black borders, since that costs dearly in resolution; instead, I use the Cookie Cutter tool within Vegas to apply just enough black border to hide the moving borders. By using keyframes I gradually enlarge and shrink the black borders as needed. On a conventional TV set, the black border is never seen anyway, and even on a PC or other full-frame display the effect is unnoticeable since the black frame changes in size so slowly, and the video inside stays as sharp as the original.