-
Safe Area?
The scene,—a reception of 400 plus high tech and manufacturing types.
And a great chance to impress with the 5 minute promotional video of the region our company had work so hard to perfect.
Event stager tells me it will be shown on a half dozen large screen TVs throughout the hall.
I arrive to find one large projection screen on a wall that not everyone could clearly see.
Responsibility for the video has been handed off to the guy doing sound for the jazz band.
My DVD is in a laptop sitting on a chair beside the band.
The lights dim and my masterpiece opens with all the periferal flaws I thought were safely hidden outside of the “safe area” cause it was going to be shown on TVs!
Images were poor,—substandard projector.
Sound was poor.
A nightmare in never want to relive!
My responsibility in this project was to deliver the proeject,—and nothing more.
It was a mediocre showing to polite applause,—but could have been so much better.
What do we learn.
Do no more projects like this without complete control over staging.
Also,—safe area really means nothing if a finished project is going to be views on a computer and not a stand alone DVD player,—right.
So,—if you don’t know how it’s going to be viewed,—-what is the safe area really? -
3 Replies
-
[Peabody] “what is the safe area really?”
The safe area is the zone which you can be fairly certain will be seen on all display devices. It does NOT mean that areas outside the safe zone will not be seen (as you now have learned).
Gary Kleiner
Learn Vegas and DVD Architect
http://www.VegasTrainingAndTools.com
-
I sympathise with your experience, but to be honest you have been mis-understanding the term safe area.
It has never been intended as a place to hide things you don’t want people to see. It is a place where it would be unwise to place important visual information that you want everyone to see. TV design has always been a variable so we never had control of what sets would be used, so by keeping the important stuff inside the area we knew that everyone would see it.
Nowadays quite a bit of viewing is done where the whole frame is visible, but that needn’t be a problem, more a bonus …
The reason title safe area is inside view safe area is to prevent captions from going right to the very edge of what may be visible to some.
Peter Wright
Perth, Western Oz
http://www.allroundvision.com.au -
This ‘safe area’ problem is now far more of an issue with the advent of widescreen plasma and lcd monitors and tv’s. A lot of these sets show action well outside of what was considered the 10% safe action for general overscanned tv’s. Most plasma and lcd sets are much closer to the traditional underscan settings for CRT monitors. Make it clean all the way to the edge of the vision raster and you are safe. The sad thing here in Aussie is that for broadcast we are shooting full 16:9 anamorphic yet framing vision safe as 14:9 and graphic safe as 4:3. Roll on the days of all true 16:9.
Chris Young
CYV Productions
Sydney
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up