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Filed under: CS4 •Motion Graphics •Post Production •

Unsafe Areas

16:9 Center Cut

One the banes of our current existence is trying to shoot or create content that works in both 16:9 and 4:3 aspects. Unfortunately, most 16:9 content merely has its left and right sides cut off to create the 4:3 version (and even if it is letterboxed, different people use different letterboxing amounts - I discussed these issues in more detail in the archived articles Open Wide and The HD Checklist).

Fortunately, After Effects CS4 added a feature where center cut Action and Title Safe guides are automatically displayed alongside the other guides when you create a widescreen composition. Unfortunately, their default placement (based on a particular studio’s guidelines) don’t match up with the 4:3 center cut guides most others seem to use:

Our color-coded 4:3 safe area guide image placed in a widescreen composition. Note how the inset vertical lines - the center cut safe area guides in After Effects CS4 - don’t align with the traditional Action and Title Safe zones in the 4:3 image.

Fortunately, the placement of these guides can be changed in Preferences > Grids & Guides. Running the math using a 1080 line HD image as our model:

• 1080 x (4/3) = 1440 pixels wide for a 4:3 image
• 1440 x 90% = 1296 pixels for Action Safe; 1440 x 80% = 1152 for Title Safe
• 1296 / 1920 = 67.5%, putting center cut Action Safe at 32.5% (not the default of 30%)
• 1152 / 1920 = 60%, putting center cut Title Safe at 40% (not the default of 35%)

Entering our new numbers for the Center-cut Safe Margins in Preferences > Grids & Guides (above) results in these guides now aligning with the traditional 4:3 safe areas (below).

(For those who slogged through the Clean vs. Production Aperture discussion on the previous page, fortunately in HD these two sizes are the same. It is a slight issue for SD content, but even I have my limits of perfection…)

Safe Areas in HD

Now that we have the center cut guides sorted out, that leaves us with the safe areas for a high-def frame. After Effects uses the same safe area guide placement replacement of composition size, so it defaults to the standard 10% and 20% insets as commonly used for standard definition 4:3 compositions.

However, the safe area margins are not defined anywhere in the HD spec. Everyone I’ve spoken to says the safe area margins are “some, but less than SD.” In reality, the area cut off by an HD display’s bezel can be anywhere between 0% and 10% depending on the model of TV and how the user has the preferences set. (And of course, it’s 0% for web video where there is no bezel. That said, I think you should be cropping some image yourself when creating web video, in order to replicate the cropping that takes place on a normal TV. That’s a discussion for another time…)

More importantly, some clients (such as broadcasters, disc replicators, etc.) may still expect you to respect the full 10% and 20% guides, even though image distortion outside of the Title Safe area in particular is not a real issue any more. So - as stupid as it may seem - honor them for now.

This is all a long-winded way to say “change the center cut numbers in the Grids & Guides preferences to 32.5% and 40%” - but you know me; I always feel compelled to tell you why you should eat your spinach…

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To follow up on Nick’s comment, I gave same examples of the 16:9, 15:9, and 14:9 crops in this article:
http://provideocoalition.com/index.php/cmg_keyframes/story/open_wide/P2/

Also, after a conversation with one use who has ran afoul of the BBC’s guidelines, it seems that the BBC is adding an additional 0.5% insert to the center cut safe areas - so to be extra safe, set the center cut guide values to 33.0 & 40.5%, respectively.

As Nick noted above, you can view the BBC’s very thorough picture size documents - including downloadable templates - at:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/commissioning/tvbranding/picturesize.shtml

Posted by Chris Meyer  on  06/19  at  10:11 PM

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Another note, re: Nick Shaw’s comment above: BBC and EBU rules might still bite you…NTSC producers who have material they want to distribute internationally (i.e. convert to PAL at some point) should be looking at the worst case scenario and planning accordingly. For example, if applying the current conventions specified by the BBC and EBU (protecting a 14:9 area for action and a 4:3 area for titles), you must consider that BBC has the strictest 4:3 protection area (65% cut-out of clean aperture for titles), and that additionally, PAL’s clean aperture is only 702 out of 720—meaning any material that might one day end up in PAL SD broadcast has to deal with an effective center cut of 63.3333% relative to production aperture.

Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)  on  09/25  at  06:02 AM

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I made a chart noting these values:
http://pub.f11films.fastmail.fm/bbc+ebu-safeareas.html

Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)  on  09/25  at  06:04 AM

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Sorry, bad link
http://pub.f11films.fastmail.fm/bbcebu-safeareas.html

Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)  on  09/25  at  06:05 AM

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Just a quick note: The questionable defaults for widescreen center-cut safe areas in CS4 have been changed in CS5 to be the same as suggested in this article. (Still no tweak for production vs. clean aperture in those safe areas, but the difference is pretty small.)

I see a fair amount of material center-cut for 4:3 that has text chopped off on the sides; I suspect at least some of those designers may have used the questionable defaults in CS4.

- Chris

Posted by Chris Meyer  on  04/28  at  04:46 PM

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