Film edges are cropped during TV playback

[willywonka]

Help!

When viewing my completed film on my pc the dvd shows correctly (the ratio is 4:3), however when I play the dvd on my dvd player and through my TV the edges of the film and menu are all missing, almost like the edges are all being cropped.

I have seen problems like this before with PAL v NTSC compatibility issues, but this should not be interfering since I have exported in PAL and my TV & DVD setup is PAL.

I am so close to a finished product now and this is throwing me!

Any ideas?

[NickLewis]

Hi, and welcome to the forum..... :)

I'm afraid that the issue you've run into is that TV's simply don't display the whole image presented to them. Some is lost at the edges. The phenomenon is called overscan, and isn't consistent between TVs. It doesn't happen with computer displays.

The only solution is to keep important content within the safe areas of the image, which will be displayed.

Since you're talking about a film, I assume you're using Premiere Elements. These safe areas can be shown by outlines in the Monitor panel in PE3 for precisely this reason.

Nick

[willywonka]

Many thanks for this Nick,

I had presumed as much but was obviously hoping for some way of correcting this, it seems like quite a sever issue not to be able to fix. I will try it on another TV and see if it is any better.

Cheers

Will

[cats4jan]

What's more annoying is that the safe zone is not displayed in Elements - where I like to compile my "movie."

Is this problem still present with the new "format" tv's?

[NickLewis]

I don't know - I don't have much practical experience of movie making.

It may not be - I believe the issue has its origins in the early days of TV when the picture was displayed on a cathode ray tube with a curved surface. The actual area of the tube was greater than the visible area, and was masked by the TV cabinet so that the sharply curved corners weren't on view. Overscanning the visible area ensured that the whole visible screen was filled with a picture.

(The aging nerds amongst us may remember that the visible area was less than the 21", 23" etc diagonal that was quoted in sales literature.)

Nick

[TonyW]

What's more annoying is that the safe zone is not displayed in Elements - where I like to compile my "movie."

Is this problem still present with the new "format" tv's?

What I find interesting is that although modern TV could do it (computer monitors actually underscan so you do see everything), they usually are still set to overscan and the reason according to the wiki is all the old TV programming around that has been formatted to work on old TV's. So maybe when all those old TV shows are finally put to rest you'll be able to forget about safe areas when making slideshows.

You would have thought that the TV/DVD player manufacturers would provide a way to turn it off and maybe there is but I get lost every time I get into all those menu things on my TV :)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overscan

Tony

[NickLewis]

Thanks, Tony. I am constantly amazed by the subjects that Wikipedia has articles on............

Nick:)