On the pointlessness of the safe area

H

hermmermferm

Well-known member
Here's a link to a blog post by David O'Reilly about current TV standards. With all this new chatter about 30p vs 24p, 16:9 Anamorphic adapters, weird new conforming tools..etc..etc.. I believe his philosophy is dead-on. Film, video and animation is entering a whole new world of formats and venues, hence a new set of rules (or lack thereof). At such an innovative time in the industry, why are we filmmakers so married to old aspect ratios and standards? Nowadays it feels as if the manufacturers are being more innovative than the artists! As David says "you can do anything."

http://www.davidoreilly.com/2008/07/on-the-pointlessness-of-the-safe-area

Thoughts?
 
Learning just HOW MUCH is cut off by my old Panasonic CRTV only this year, yeah, this pisses me off. I film in often exacting compositions (with the DVX100 in 4:3 mode), which, on a computer screen, obviously are destroyed.

I've had the same gripes as this guy. The only thing to do is film using the entire space and cringe as it's hacked up on old TVs. Not much you can do. Musicians probably feel the same when they record layered compositions that are destroyed via .mp3 on someone's ear buds.

It has less to do with "thinking in old ways" and more with old technology still lying around. Don't forget, films projected in theaters- are regrettably, often cut off or framed wrong as well (take a look at the curtain placement at your local megaplex next time you go). You can't control all of the people and things who will present your work WRONG.
 
When I saw Public Enemies in theaters half-way through the film the film exploded. We were ushered into another showing of the film where the aspect ratio was COMPLETELY different.
 
Safe area and overscan have no sense for digital video. But many HDTVs still use 3-5% overscan. On the other hand, more and more TVs have 100% "dot-by-dot" mode.

Without overscan 1.85 movies will be letterboxed on a 16:9 screen, I personally prefer a very sight overscan to letterboxing.
 
Be very careful. I've been ignoring safe areas since my projects were either projected or shown on large plasma or LCD displays, and was burned at a major presentation when they showed the film on an older giant plasma that had quite a large overscan (and no zoom settings), resulting in the bug, titles, and subtitles running off the screen (and they weren't very close to the edge either.)

As with everything, you need to think of the minimum and plan for that.
 
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