Placing still images inside the safe area

[Danny Hays]

I believe the overscanning on an LCD TV is from the player and not the TV. I can connect a computer via VGA with media player full screen and there’s no overscan, while if I use other sources they sometimes will overscan. Hope this helps. Danny Hays

[David Shirey]

[Danny Hays] “I believe the overscanning on an LCD TV is from the player and not the TV. I can connect a computer via VGA with media player full screen and there’s no overscan, while if I use other sources they sometimes will overscan. Hope this helps. Danny Hays”

Cropping the video signal shouldn’t really be seen as a flaw in a television set, it’s actually supposed to be able to cut the edges. TV channels would often broadcast signals that would have things you don’t want the viewer to see on the edges. For example the timecode data at the top of a beta tape, or if you used a fisheye lens on a shot and the corner of the screen has the edge in there. It’s actually not a bad thing to have the image cropped by 3% or so.

LCD’s and Plasma’s that have VGA or DVI inputs for computers aren’t going to crop those inputs unless you go into the menu and expand the image so they are cropped. Computer screens don’t crop so there would be no reason to do this on those inputs. It’s not something a dvd player is doing on the way to the television, because if you were to capture that same signal in the Vegas capture window you’d see everything right to the edge.

With the HDTV’s nowadays the cropped area is smaller than what you might get with old CRT’s. I’m also told that CRT’s can actually get worse over time, expanding the image and cropping more. I had an old toshiba that cropped the right side so much that it would often hit the edge of the station watermark that tv stations stick in the bottom right side, which is normally inside the title safe zone.

I don’t know if I’ve done a good job explaining this or not, but the long and short of it is this: despite this new era of high def, we still need to be wary of the action and title safe zones. Especially those of us using a vga or dvi monitor as a viewing device from Vegas that isn’t cropping the image at all. It’s easy to forget just how much of the picture might go missing on some people’s sets.