Title-safe is dead

[Rhett Robinson]

There’s one more thing to consider, and coming from the printing production side of things, I’ve seen the abuse. In our field, it’s “Don’t hate the white space!”, meaning if you have too much activity at the very outside of your area of view (the “golden section” of people’s primary focus), it’s really not a good plan. There are certainly artisic exceptions, but in general, there are places where you want focused attention, and you can fill in the rest with less important background material – necessary, but not to the point of detracting from the primary focus points. Although you can put your advertiser’s phone number all the way at the bottom of the screen, I bet it would make everyone happier if the audience didn’t have to look for it, but was reasonably inset from the edge. That said, hopefully the world realizes that “centered” is not the best…

[Nicholas Toth]

Woah — lots of talk about title safe.

Even TV’s today are messed up. I did an impulse buy (we all do sometimes…) on some low-end flat screen TV for my bedroom. I figured hey, who cares, its my bedroom and I don’t watch a lot of Tv in there, so it doesn’t matter if it isn’t high quality.

This frickin tv cuts off at title safe — yes TITLE SAFE. I did a test — technology isn’t all its hyped out to be.

[Adolfo Rozenfeld]

I think there’s an in interesting twist to what J. Hofius said:
Action Safe is still completely relevant in terms of making sure something’s going to be “inside”.
But it’s becoming less and less reliable and relevant as a means to know if something will be “outside”. It used to be almost like a guarantee. Not anymore.

Think about it. There must be thousands of productions with little mistakes outside the safe area. They were left uncorrected because they thought nobody was going to see them. Now millions watch DVDs in flat panel TVs and even computer monitors. So it’s a more complex argument than just saying title/action safe is alive or dead, I guess. It’s alive, of course, but you can’t think about it like you used to five years ago, right?

[Majorasshole]

Title-save is only dead for WEB video, or the movie theater.

[Grant Lovering]

I would disagree on that one, I’d say it is even more relevant for the movie theatre. Having seen the wide variation in 3 screenings of a title sequence we recently finished I would say you safely can bank on loosing up to 20% top and bottom. Particularly when you are talking cinemascope where every projector is setup differently by someone who doesn’t really give to much consideration to accuracy. I think the mentality doesn’t go much further than checking focus and that it is pointed at the screen 🙂