Center Cut Protection

Here's another good term to learn for all you aspiring television/commercial editors. It's a pretty simple thing to remember, but a valuable term none the less. I had one of the stations ask me to make sure my file was Center Cut Protected before uploading it to their FTP site...and thank goodness for the internet and it's ease of defining terms for me, otherwise I'd have made a fool of myself!

Center Cut Protection is a term that applies to SD footage that was shot in HD. Even more specifically it applies to commercials/spots edited in HD but being output in SD. This is very common as SD televisions and channels still exist... so the commercials need to be down converted to SD in order to air on said places!

The term itself is referring to any graphics/text put into the commercial or spot... in HD, the title and action safe are different from the SD title and action safe.

(To those who don't know the safe boundaries, Action safe is a line in the screen that guarantees what is within the bounds will be 100% viewable on the screen... if you're outside, there is a higher risk of it being cut off when viewed. The determining factor that decides if it gets cut off or not solely rested with the viewer... it depends on what type of tv they are watching it on and how they have their tv configured.)

Anyway... here's an example. The blue thin lines are the safe boundaries. Action Safe is the outer line, Title Safe is the inner.

The reason for two different ones is simply put: If you have text/graphics on the screen, it's pretty much assumed that the information in them is important, so to be EXTRA safe the title safe is smaller... meaning absolutely NO chance of it being cut off... the action on scene will most likely be happening in the center anyways (unless you are Danny Cohen, and you're filming "The King's Speech") so there is more room for the action to happen.

What you CAN see in these safe boundaries are small little lines appearing closer in from the left and right. These are you're Center Cut Protection lines... since SD is a 4:3 aspect ration, and HD is a 16:9, the safe boundaries change.

Here is a 4:3 safe bound (with the HD footage in it)

You can see the black bars appearing to keep the HD in a 16:9 aspect, whilst being in a 4:3 frame. But some channels will want to rid themselves of this black bar (even though the footage was meant to be viewed in 16:9) and they'll adjust the picture to fit in a 4:3. (see below)

You can see they enlarged the picture... meaning you lose that extra space on the left and right and the black bars on the top and bottom. The blue lines in the 4:3 frame, line up with the small dashes in the 16:9 frame from the picture up above.

So to condense all this down... for HD outputs, you can follow the HD safe boundaries to your hearts content... but when making an SD version it's a good idea to keep everything in Center Cut Protection... the 4:3 boundaries. Even if you are working in the HD, just follow the small dashes as your guide, no need to create a WHOLE new 4:3 project... just follow the dashes from that HD one. The only pain is you have to make a 2nd commercial basically, since you need to readjust the text/graphics from your HD version to make it fit.

Center Cut Protection is not always the case... more than not they will request it be this way... other wise just leave it be!

So there it is... another new term to add to the list!