Using 4:3 title safe while in widescreen project.

I work for a news network and often times, we'll mix standard definition video with HD content. Is there a way to get the title safe to 4:3 while in the widescreen HD project? Whenever I choose title safe, it comes up as widescreen and I can't change it anywhere. If this isn't available in the current version of FCP, can it be made one please!?

Unfortunatly, FCP can't show a 4:3 title/action safe on a 16:9 frame.
The only work-around is to make one yourself in photoshop and plonk it over your clips when needed... not ideal, but does the job.

Similar Messages

Is there a way to display 4x3 title safe on a 16x9 project?

I can display 16x9 title safe overlays in FCP X, but I can't find the really handy 4x3 title safe overlays that exist in FCP 7. A lot of broadcasters are still center-cutting HD video, so everything we produce has to be center-cut friendly. Any idea how to make this work without just making my own tiff file to put over the video?

http://www.fcp.co/forum/6-motion-5/596-a-little-help#602
Put it in your "Movies/Motion Templates/Titles" folder. You can find it in FCPX under titles.
I put the request in for you, and it was done in half-an-hour. Hopefully this board begins to thrive, because it's full of great people.
Hope to see you there.

Action/Title Safe Areas

I am having problems setting up guides for safe areas and I wondered if
anyone else had some advice or tips.
In the Preferences under Grids & Guides the Action Safe and Title Safe are
preset to 10% and 20% respectively. But this relates to the size of the
comp, I am working in HD so my comp is 1920 x 1080 and the Title/Action safe
guides are set proportional to that. However in reality I have to set my
Title Safe area to be Title Safe for 4:3 within a 16:9 HD comp for
international sales to countries still using 4:3 TV.
If I change the value for the Title Safe area in the Preferences to say 30%
to show a guide closer to the 4:3 safe area I need to adhere to it changes
BOTH the width and the height so the width might be accurate but the height
is way out. On top of that I also have to work with 14:9 Title Safe areas
for some projects too so I'd like to see those.
I can drag guidelines to sit over the correct areas but this a pain as the
guides are just for each individual comp not all the nested comps I work
with when making the animation so I have to make them anew for every comp
and project to make sure text is safe, I can't just click on the Action/Safe
when I want to see it.
I downloaded a Photoshop comp from the BBC in the UK and have been importing
that as an overlay to check my Title safe but I really wanted to know if I
am missing something. Avid Media Composer for example shows guides for
widescreen comps 14:9 Action Safe, 14:9 Title Safe, 4:3 Action Safe and 4:3
Title Safe, is there nothing I can do in After Effects to have the guides
permanently set to multiple safe areas or even just the correct height and
width for 4:3 safe within a 16:9 comp?
Thanks in advance.
BBC links if anyone is interested:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/commissioning/tvbranding/picturesize.shtml
http://www.bbc.co.uk/commissioning/tvbranding/artwork1.shtml

Many thanks for those links silversurfer. When I compare them to the ones I
got from the BBC they don't match up though; your Action Safe is their 3:4
picture area and your Title Safe is wider than their Action Safe. This is
the other issue I have run into, that different broadcasters have different
specifications.
The guides the BBC give as safe margins for 4:3 Title Safe within a 16:9
widescreen frame are 10% top and bottom and 20.5% left and right. Doing the
math for an HD 16:9 frame makes a box 1132 pixels wide by 864 high with the
margins set at 394px left, 1526px right, 108px bottom and 972px top. (Their
4:3 Action Safe is 5% top and bottom and 17% left and right.)
It would be great in CS4 to be able to set templates that can quickly be
called up across comps and projects, the single percentage option they have
right now for both width and height is pretty useless. I have been importing
a Photoshop template but it's an inelegant kludge.
I was hoping I was being dumb and had missed a vital feature, but it seems
not! :-(

Title Safe/Quicktime Margins

What happened to the Quicktime Margins Checkbox in iMovie 4? What can I use as a title safe area for my titles?
G4 1.25 DP Mac OS X (10.2.x)

Hi -
You toggle what you want displayed by selecting it. If all you want is the safe guides, toggle the Show Timecode Overlays and Show Excess Luma so that they do not have check marks by them.
!http://www.spotsbeforeyoureyes.com/Overlays.jpg!
Hope this helps.

Anamporphic & title safe

We've just started working with projects in anamorphic (DV, not HD). My question is should we still use a 4x3 title safe area or can we trust FCP & Motions 16x9 Title safe areas? The reason I ask is I never see any titles on ESPN or other 16x9 TV stations have titles outside the 4x3 title safe area. We have alot of long names for Lower Thirds and I'd like to be able to utilize the entire width of the screen.

Some 16:9 programs are setup to simply crop the left and right to make a 4:3 program. But in most cases, 16:9 programming is displayed letterboxed on a 4:3 screen. What is the end use of your program? If it's for broadcast or cablecast, the enduser will have specifications for you. If it's for DVD, a properly authored 16:9 dvdvideo will display either fullscreen 16:9 or letterboxed if it's correctly configured (if that's what you want to do).

Using 4:3 guides and title safe in 16:9 sequence.

Does anyone know if its possible to apply 4:3 guides and title safe to a 16:9 timeline sequence?
thanks

I'm not aware of being able to do it within the programme with regards using the canvas/viewer guides but it wouldn't take much to knock one up using opaque blocks in a shape generator and then just having those as the uppermost layer in your sequence for checking. You could also make a PSD file with lines on a transparent background in photoshop and employ the same way.
I take it your creating graphics etc as shot material would have hopefully taken this into consideration at the time of filming!

What is outside the Title Safe Area?

I am a bit confused b y the explanation (in the manual) of the Title Safe Area and Action Safe Area (p.215). The manual states that these settings indicate, "... portions of the menu that may not be viewable on most consumer monitors." Is there any way to determine that on the computer screen, or is it pot luck depending on the individual TV? Does it also depend on whether the TV is a rear projection, plasma, or LCD?
Since I am using one of my images as the background for the menu, I'd like to know how much of the image might be cropped.
Barry

My experience is confined to PAL. Image sizes for NTSC are different. As I understand it, Title Safe and Action Safe areas do not exist in, and are irrelevant to, the widescreen (16:9) format when displayed on a 16:9 TV. This is because every pixel of a widescreen video is always shown on a widescreen TV (assuming that the DVD player has been set to 16:9, see below). Title/Action Safe areas are only necessary for displaying widescreen video on 4:3 format TVs. This is because the Powers That Be decided that widescreem video should be shown slightly enlarged on a 4:3 TV. This gives a larger and therefore clearer image compared to full Letterboxing where the full width of the widescreen image is shown but with inevitably wider black bars at top and bottom. However, this enlargement causes parts of the widescreen image at left and right to be cropped on most TVs, which is usually no great loss.
On the display settings, for movies in widescreen (16:9), I set the display options in the following places:
1. DVD SP > Preferences > Encoding Set "Aspect Ratio" to 16:9
2. DVD SP > Preferences > Simulator Set "Aspect" to 16:9
3. In the Menu Inspector for each menu, Menu Tab, set "Aspect Ratio" to 16:9, and do this before setting the Menu Background image and its Overlay file (otherwise the Overlay file will not register accurately with the Menu Background image, at least that is the case with my outfit - DVD SP 3.0
4. Set each Video Track to 16:9 To do that, activate the Graphical Tab in the window at top left of the screen, select the track, and in the now-visible Track Inspector (General Tab) I set "Mode" to "16:9 (Letterbox)" because my TV is 4:3. (It is tempting to assume that if the TV is widescreen, you would set it to "16:9", but with my setting of "16:9 (Letterbox)" the DVD also displayed correctly on two widescreen TVs available to me (ie., it filled the whole screen). I don't know what display setting the owners had on their DVD players.
5. Finally, the DVD player needs to be set to 16:9 (if the TV is physically 16:9), or to 4:3L if the TV is 4:3 (at least, that works for me).
So there is quite a lot of setting to do to get the correct display. I am surprised that Apple did not offer a single setting in Preferences to cover all this. Perhaps DVD SP 4 or 5 does.
G5/2.0 GHz Mac OS X (10.3.9) 1 GB RAM, 150 GB HD, Sony DCR-HC96 mini DV, FCE HD 3.0 DVD SP 3

Title safe for widesceen

I am doing a show in widescreen now for the first time and was wondering if I should still use the title safe for the top and bottom. very stupid ? just wanted to know

Yes indeed. Only in the rarest of instances will a TV - even a 16:9 HD one - not use overscan to crop out some of the image.
Even if you are talking about shooting/editing in 16:9 but delivering a letterboxed (in 4:3) version for TV (so that there is no danger of overscan cropping from the top/bottom), it's still a good idea not to have text get too close to the edge.

16x9 project_Can Title Safe grid be 4x3

Without having to key a grid over my timeline, is it possible to adjust the 16 x 9 title safe grid to 4x3, while still working in the 16 x 9 world?
I want my titles to be safe for 4x3 viewing in case I just crop my whole 16x9 project somewhere down the road.
Thanks,
Paul

Andy's plugin does the trick. Thanks for the info. I also downloaded some of his other plugins I will certainly use at some point down the road.
Its great that Apple allows this sort of thing. AVID would have had a coronary if this stuff was going on.

4.3 title safe in 16.9 frame

Hi everyone. I have just started producing TV commercials in FCP Studio and using the latest JVC HD camera. I am shooting and editing 16.9 but got caught today with the title just out of the 4.3 zone. As 80% of viewers in Australia dont have 16.9 sets this is important. How can i create a 4.3 title safe zone to put on top of my 16.9 canvas window as a guide.

Here is a free one...http://www.digital-heaven.co.uk/fcplugins/dh_widesafe.php
tim
just double-checked...it's NOT free
Message was edited by: ADCNR_Tim

Title Safe for video..

So I just looked at a sample of my project on a TV and its cut off. What I'm doing now is exporting, re importing to FCE, turning on title safe, and scaling the entire video down to that first border (in between the 2 lines). Will that solve the problem or will it give me a black line around the video on a TV?
To illustrate what I'm talking about: If this is a segment of title safe (the tv safe and title safe lines)
| v | + | v | The v is where I'm scaling my video boarder to.

The approach is correct, but the amount of scaling is very dependent on the TV. If you scale it to the second internal blue rectangle in the canvas (title safe) for sure you'll also have a black border around your video. In my experience it is sufficient to think of a rectangle slightly larger than the larger rectangle. But as I said it depends on the TV.
In my opinion the best approach is to avoid titles to exceed the title safe area, and important action to be close to the borders.
If you can connect your Mac to your TV using firewire (and a A/D converter - your camcorder might be used for that), you may monitor the effect of scaling directly on the TV during editing.
Piero

Crop marks for Center Cut in Title Safe?

I have recently picked up Premiere Pro 5.5 after the whole Final Cut Pro X fiasco, and a feature I loved and used all the time in Final Cut Pro 7 which was missing in Final Cut Pro X was crop marks for Center Cut in the title safe. I often have to do HD Projects that are broadcast on 4:3 TV center cut, so you need to make all the graphics for the center cut for SD, and then leave safe space for the HD version.
From what I can see I don't see these marks in Premiere Pro 5.5. Is there a place for feature requests for Premiere Pro, so I can put in a request as this is something that is really necessary in our production workflow.

Well, PrPro's Titler has the Center Align for both Vertical & Horizontal, but for guides, etc., it is lacking.
I use the tips in this ARTICLE to create alignment guides, as per my needs.
I have been filing Feature Requests for years, and have also asked for many of the element Alignment functions from PS.
Good luck,
Hunt
PS - I also create custom guides/grids for PiP, where I need to match the Scale & Position for the PiP footage.
PPS - I assume that you have looked at Title & Action Safe marks, and they just do not do it for what you need.

Title Safe Doesn't Appear . . .

In the Canvas, I click the Title Safe option and it doesn't appear . . . (it used to)!
I'm sure it's something simple - but I can't sort it out - help!
Andy

Open your Displays Preferences and change your display ( or both displays, if you have two) to Millions of Colors.

Flag for overriding TV zoom function? Or title-safe settings for zoomed video...

Here's the problem: I've got SD spots with correctly set up title-safe graphics. However, I keep seeing the spots playing on HD TV's where the picture has been set to zoom/stretch, and consequently the title graphics are stretching off-screen.
So the question's actually a two-parter: Is there a flag I can set in my video that will override an HD set's zoom function and force my spots to play unstretched on these TV's? Or (part two), what graphics boundary settings would I have to use to keep my title graphics on-screen even it the video is zoomed?
Regarding part two, yeah, I could experiment and find out the settings that will work, but I figure someone's run into this before and has an answer, which would save me a bunch of time...
Thanks in advance...

Is there a flag I can set in my video that will override an HD set's zoom function
Thank God, no! It's bad enough that disk authors can take away our right to skip FBI warnings and all the other BS on a DVD before we actually get to the movie.

4:3 title safe on 1920x1080

Hi all
How do I call up a 4x3 grid so I can do titles within 4x3 title safe, on a 1920x1080 timeline ?
thank in advance
Stop corruption in Africa

Cheers James.
rottendotapple, if you are using FCP 7x then you will see tick marks in the 16:9 guides ... those tick marks are there to indicate the 4:3 title and action safe marks, so if you just need a simple indicator then that'll probably suffice. If you need something more then you can try my Safe Guides generator, or have a look about for some others, like DH_WideSafe from Digital Heaven or maybe just create an overlay guide in Photoshop (or download something to the same effect). Lots out there.
Best
Andy

Using 4:3 title safe while in widescreen project.

Similar Messages

Maybe you are looking for