Version 7

Working Out Your TVs Safe Zone

Noticed some of your picture or titles missing on the TV? Some TVs crop the picture to chop out the rough edges (you will see those rough edges on a captured VHS video, for example). My CRT TV crops about 8% off.

First off, work out how much your TV crops. If you don't want to do follow the procedure below, simply set 10% in each box and see how that goes.

Another issue is that individual DVD players can affect TV screen cropping. For example, one of mine crops more than 10% off, whereas another only drops 4%.

Steps

In summary, we burn onto a DVD a still image project which has the grid showing the percentages of the screen that are cropped off by the TV, play it in your DVD player and note the cropping amounts.

• Set up your movie settings for the type of TV you have; File>Movie Settings, then set the Video Settings to either 16:9 or 4:3.

• Open the TV Anticropping project (DIP file) in the "_TV Anti Cropping" folder (this may be named differently in MEP 12) located in the MEP installation folder as shown for MEP14 Plus. If you changed the installation folder, then the Anti Cropping folder will be in the main MEP install folder.

• For a 16:9 TV, right-click on the "tv anti cropping.bmp" image on track 1 and choose Object Properties. Change the Aspect Ratio to 16:9.

• Burn the project onto a DVD (ensure that your DVD burn is set to 4:3 or 16:9 as appropriate: on the Burn screen, Encoder Settings>Advanced>Video tab: make sure the aspect ratio is set to the correct value).

• Play your DVD on your DVD player/TV. Note the percentages that are chopped off on each of the 4 sides.

• After you have noted the percentage of cropping on all sides, go to MEP 10: Effects>Effect Settings Movies>Deinterlace Tab, MEP11:  Effects>Effect Settings Movies>TV Cropping tab; MEP 14: Tasks, Opitimise, Optimise Display for TV and insert the four percentages that were just visible on your TV.

• Tick “Mark TV screen area in preview mode” and a white box will appear on the preview window showing your TV safe zone.

To put your already-captured video inside the white TV-safe box, click the “Apply TV Image Size (for photos)” check box (the All Videos and All Tracks tick boxes are only in MEP 14; I'm not sure what they do). Your video and still image objects will be shrunk to fit the TV Safe white box (you may have some letterboxing if your settings are not symmetrical).

If you want to apply the shrinking-to-fit-the-box selectively, right-click on the object, then choose Video Cleaning, then click the TV Picture tab and finally, tick Border Cropping Adjustment at the bottom.

Titles

To see how to fit your titles into the TV-safe area, see the Titles Tips on the Tips and Tricks page.

Tips and Tricks

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