The philosophy followed by most people in the Vegas world is you create the video to fill the entire frame, but don't put anything important in the overscan area so that if it does get cropped off nobody will notice. That way if a different TV with less overscan is used you don't end up with black borders all around.

In Vegas you can have a "safe area" grid overlay the preview screen. In the preview pane click on the Overlays drop-down list (the icon with hash marks) and enable safe areas -- there is a more restrictive "title" frame and a less restrictive "action" frame.

You can change the sizes of the safe area frames by going to the preferences menu, selecting the Video tab, and adjusting the percentages to suit your taste.

Is there a button that automatically adjusts the movie to fit in the safe area? (A la MEP 11?)

You can use the pan/crop feature to do this, but you shouldn't. It's better to shoot your video knowing that you have to deal with overscan. The drawback with using pan/crop is that displays that don't overscan will show black borders around the edges if you pull things in.

--Scott

Jeff, are you using a camcorder to shoot your original video? If so, keep in mind that if you connected your camcorder to your television and played back your video without editing, you'd be losing material to the overscan area and you wouldn't think about it or even know it was happening!

The ONLY reason most folks using Vegas or other NLEs ever think about overscan is because it's the first time they see the edges of the image that they've never seen before. So, if you ignore overscan issues completely, pretend it's not even happening, capture your video, edit, print it back to tape or burn it to a DVD, then watch it on your TV, you'll have exactly what you would have had if you had connected the camcorder straight to the TV. You don't lose anything during the editing process. The only difference is that when you edit the video, you become aware that overscan exists.

Thanks for all the replies. The two things that I used the overscan compensation for in MEP 11 was to make sure my titles and overlays were not cut off, and also because many of my projects require me to import various MPGs, WMVs, and AVIs to mix in with footage shot on my camcorder. In fact, sometimes I have to edit entire videos in which I'm putting together various pieces of mixed footage, in which case I have no control of how it was shot.

There is a grid/measurement screen in the Magix program that you can burn and then use that disc to see, on the grid, where the specific television cuts off. In many cases the projects that I make will only/primarily be seen on one specific TV. The program that I'm used to, Magix Movie Edit Pro 11, has a function in which you can set the vertical and horizontal limits, then you can click on an "effect" that effectively shrinks the video to fit entirely in that framing. I see that there is a "safe" grid I can use to check, but it only allows me to set the top/bottom overscan, and not the edges (unless I'm missing how to do that?)

Thanks - made my first test DVD last night, and this is MUCH faster at rendering than the other packages I've used.