Seemingly simple question regarding safe areas

Question

I can't seem to find a simple fix to this anywhere, though it seems to me like
there should be one.
When I shoot, I compose my shots in camera so that they look the same when played on a TV. Because of the nature of television, some portion is always cut off.
Is there an easy way to size the image down to fit the title safe grid so the entire IMAGE is safe on screen?
Please help me I am freaking out!

Answer 1

downtownjunkie wrote:
is there no happy medium for those of us who just want to make one
disc that will play well and will show the proper image on a range
of televisions as well as projector screens?
The use of safe areas is that happy medium.
Because I'm in a verbose mood, let's talk about movies for just a second. If you've ever had the chance to look at a strip of 35mm film, you'll notice that the exposed area isn't actually the same shape as a movie screen. Theatrical features are shown in a variety of aspect ratios, but they're almost always of a shape that's wider than a 35mm frame. Many movies are shot "full frame," meaning the whole 35mm film area is exposed when the camera rolls. Some of these movies are "soft-matted" in the projector at your local cinema; the film print actually has the whole exposed image on it, but it's projected through a rectangular plate that obscures the top and bottom.
(Not all movies are done this way. Some are hard-matted, and some are printed to be shown through anamorphic lenses, and so forth. I'm just drawing an analogy here, so don't harsh my mellow.)
Because you're showing the film through a little piece of metal with a hole cut in it, +no two projections of the same soft-matted spherical-lensed film will ever be framed exactly the same way.+
Not only that, but next time you go to the movies, look really closely at the edges of the screen. Odds are you'll see that the projected image actually spills over slightly, by up to a foot or so. Between soft matting and differences in projection, the extreme edges of a motion-picture frame are basically a no-man's-land. Anything right at the edge of the image is not guaranteed to be visible on the screen.
TV works the same way. Different sets handle overscan different ways. The solution — that happy medium you asked for — is to compose your shots with a "safe area" in mind. As noted above, a lot of cameras will show you safe-area guides right in the viewfinder; use them.
But the dirty little secret is that there are actually two "safe areas." There's "action safe," which is that area of the frame in which you can reasonably expect your audience to see +stuff happening.+ And then there's "title safe," which is the area of the frame which you can reasonably expect won't butt right up against the edge of the screen. That's why when you turn on safe areas in Final Cut, for example, you see two rectangles. The outer one is action safe; the inner one is title safe. On-screen titles, as the name implies, should always be kept entirely inside the title-safe area.
If you have any experience with print at all, consider the area outside action safe to be your "bleed." It's there to ensure that the image extends all the way to the edge of the screen, but you can never be sure precisely where the edge is going to fall.
In this particular case, maybe you should go back and look at your show while asking yourself if it really matters all that much whether what you see on the TV is precisely what you tried to film. Losing a little bit on the sides might offend your artistic sensibilities — that's not sarcasm; we're all here because we have artistic sensibilities — but it really might not make that much difference.