Questions on safe/title areas on 16X9 televisions

tfc wrote on 2/26/2005, 2:05 AM

I only have a standard definition 4 X 3 television (NTSC). On all of my Vegas projects so far, I have not been too worried about occasional lapses of images, or borders from pan/crop or track motion showing up on the screen outside of the "action safe area". If one were to take these projects (burnt at standard 4 X 3) and show them on a 16 X 9 television, would these "trangressions" outside of the safe area but in the frame suddenly show up on the 16 X 9 televsion? Is there such a thing as "safe areas" on 16 x 9 televisions? Does the fact that a 16 x 9 television is standard, enhanced or high definition have any bearing at all? Keep in mind I am only talking about originally produced 4 X 3 projects (720 by 480). Can anyone shed any light? Thanks!

Comments

farss wrote on 2/26/2005, 2:48 AM

Yes,
they will almost certainly be seen. Bear in mind a lot of plasma and LCD displays show every pixel. Even our 16:9 glass TV shows a lot more of the 4:3 frame than a 4:3 TV.
Bob.

Orcatek wrote on 2/26/2005, 5:47 AM

Some may be seeing it on their 4x3 sets too. I know I've adjusted my rear projection unit to show very near the full frame. It was amazing how much of the frame was missing until I had the set adjusted.

riredale wrote on 2/26/2005, 10:14 AM

I've always been surprised some TV manufacturer doesn't make the edges user-adjustable and then tout (accurately)-- "New! 10% higher resolution!"--which is what you get if you bring the borders to the edge of the bezel, compared to a typical set with 10% overscan.

As for the aesthetics of the work you've already done, you might want to think about putting in keyframed cookie cutter outlines. I do this whenever I use SteadyHand, since that process has the option of either (a) zooming the steadied frame to eliminate the moving borders, or (b) leaving the image as it is, but with moving borders. I don't like to lose resolution by zooming, so I tell SteadyHand to leave the zoom alone, and then I mask the border (hopefully by no more than a 5% mask) in Vegas. If you keyframe the mask in slowly before the clip where it's needed, and then slowly keyframe it back out, I've found that no one ever notices. Of course, on a typical TV set no one is going to see it anyway, but I'm assuming that my brilliant Works Of Art will be seen on non-overscanned devices in the future.