Safe Action Zone?

[fredfillis]

I'm struggling to understand the impact of the Safe Action Zone.

Lets say I have a video that is 720 x 480 NTSC 4:3 and I want to author a DVD using GUI for DVDAuthor.

I make my menu 720 x 480 in photoshop and bring that in to GfD. I can see the safe action zones and safe title zones and adjust my menu accordingly. Based on a little searching, it seems that the safe action zone is about 5% on each side, so to ensure all of my menu is seen, the effective size of the menu is 648 x 432. Now I have to worry about the positioning of titles. The safe title zone lops off another 5%. All straightforward so far.

What confuses me is that I'm messing with my menu and keeping everything inside a 648 x 432 box but my video is 720 x 480. Given that the video spills outside the safe action zone, am I losing some video here or am I overthinking this?

[adam]

Some video will always be lost on the edges when viewed on a tv due to overscanning. The amount lost varies depending on the tv. Anything in the safe action zone could potentially be lost, so you should not put anything important in the area. The information in the safe title zone should not ever be cut off but the idea is that you need to be mindful of text in this area because you probably don't want your text to extend all of the way to the outer edges of the screen, which is what would happen if the entire safe action zone got cut off on a particular tv.

So basically you should structure your menu so that it would still be functional and well designed if you lost all of the video in the safe action area. Then just move your text in a little bit from the safe title area to ensure it doesn't extend too far to the edges on any given tv.