Problem with Safe Space for tv commercial

[John Rofrano]

[Serena Pick] “I can’t scale the video back to fit important information into the ad. It cuts people’s heads off and cuts off text at the end with viable contact information. “

This really needs to be fixed in the edit. If you are editing for broadcast, you should always have your safe areas turned on in Vegas. There is an Action Safe within which all action must be contained. There is a tighter Title Safe are within which all titles should be contained. If you didn’t know this, and your titles are within the action safe area but not the title safe area, they may still get cut off by some TV’s. The real solution here is to re-edit the video properly.

BTW, your colors and luminance needs to be broadcast safe as well although the TV station could place a clamp on the video but it may remove details in overblown areas and not look as you intended.

[Serena Pick] “How can I move the video back to fit it all in?”

As a “quick & dirty” fix (and it really is dirty because it’s going to look bad on some TV’s) you could drop the project into another project and then use Track Motion on the event that’s created to resize the entire video smaller. Like I said, the “real” fix is to edit the footage properly to start with.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[Serena Pick]

I can’t find anything in Edit that even has the word “safe”. I don’t know where to find it. I have researched all over the internet and can’t find any info. I am using Platinum 10.

[Dave Haynie]

In Vegas Pro, the action safe and other guides are found on the Video Preview window. Looking across the top of the window (easier to see if you de-dock it from the main Vegas window), on the left, there are a series of icons. Moving left from the rightmost icon, you have “Save Snapshot to file…” (looks like a floppy disc), “Copy Snapshot to clipboard” (look like two tiny windows) and then “Overlays”. Select “Safe Areas”, and you’ll the outer area, usually about 90% of the image, as the “Action Safe” boundary, and the inner area, which marks the “Title Safe” boundary. I can only guess it might be similar in Vegas Studio Platinum.

You can always scale your video to fit within the safe region… zoom out a little in an “Event Pan/Crop” dialog, and you’ll be able to make it fit. The question is, did you shoot it so tight that you’re now left with empty space in the video?

You might actually tweak that with something like a displacement map plug-in… this lets you distort the video in various ways to move parts around without cropping or shrinking (but stretching and bending) the rest of the video. The one I use is part of Boris BCC7, though, not compatible with Vegas Studio, and expensive. Not sure if there’s a free displacement mapping plug-in around.

On a good camera, you generally have the option of setting up some of these overlays while shooting. For example, my Panny HMC40 can show an action safe 90% guide, a 4:3 guide (not likely, but I used to still occasionally shoot 4:3 a few years ago, based on project requirements), things like that. And in general, just be careful about shooting too close.

The other option… just cut people’s heads off, add some artificial camera shake, and pretend you’re copying that evil hand-held camera style that was popular some years back. Ok… maybe a reshoot… but only as a last resort.

-Dave

[John Rofrano]

[Serena Pick] “I can’t find anything in Edit that even has the word “safe”. I don’t know where to find it. I have researched all over the internet and can’t find any info. I am using Platinum 10.”

The safe areas can be enabled in the preview window with the overlays:

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[Rex Polanis]

This may seem like a stupid question but you said that using track motion to “compress” the track is a dirty way to make everything fit on a TV screen because it will look bad on some TV’s. My question is, how we supposed to fix this in editing? Should we make our shots wider during production or is there a way that Sony can handle the footage so there are not black bars around the footage when we render out so everything shows up? Thanks.

One man with courage makes a majority.

Canon 7D
Sony Vegas 10
Adobe PhotoShop

[Mike Kujbida]

Ideally this is taken care of when you’re shooting, not in the edit suite.
Most pro video cameras have the ability to overlay safe action area markers in the viewfinder so that you know where to keep your material.
If your camera doesn’t have this option, then it’s a matter of practice.
Shoot something, bring it into Vegas, see where it gets cut off and adjust your shooting accordingly.
Head shots of people are something that should be easy to do.
Frame the shot so that the top of the head is at the top of the frame and the chin is at the bottom.
Bring this into Vegas, see how much gets cut off and try it again but zoom out a bit.
Go back and forth a few times until you learn how much your particular camera’s viewfinder cuts things off.

[John Rofrano]

Pro/Prosumer cameras have an overscan so they take care of this for you. On my Sony cameras there is an option to turn this off but why would you? This way regardless of how tight you frame, there is always more. Just don’t frame your shots too tight and you should be fine.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com