Safe Margins

[mikayd]

Hey I was wondering what exacly are safe margins I mean can u give me and I deal as to what it means. I'm using premiere 2.0 ( works great by the way ) my ideal is that what ever is in the lines that’s what the TV will pick up and what’s on the out side the TV will not am I wrong please help me

[devlynh]

Safe areas are as follows; Action safe is 10% and Title safe is 20%. This means that on a 640 X 480 screen the lines for action safe are 64 pixels from the left and right edges and 48 pixels from the top and bottom. I'll leave it to you for the title safe.
Action safe means that on most TV's you will not see anything outside of the action safe area. Some show more and some show less.

[redwudz]

It varies by TV. You could figure at least 5% of the image will be in the overscan area. Generally this is not important unless you are doing subtitles. Those you need to move to the 'safe area' to avoid cutting off the bottoms of the subtitles.

For a definition, This one from our Glossary is about good as any:

Overscan
The area at the edges of a television tube that is covered to hide possible video distortion. Overscan typically covers about 4 or 5 percent of the picture.

[jagabo]

Keep in mind that the picture often isn't centered properly either. So it could be 2 percent on one side and 8 percent on the other. Stick with the normal title safe and action safe areas to be... well, safe.