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Title Safe Area: Margins, Sizes and Lower Thirds

Title Safe Area: Margins, Sizes and Lower Thirds

Monitor showing lower third inside safe guides

The title safe area is the rectangle inside your frame where text and graphics are guaranteed to stay visible, even on a screen that crops the edges. Under the current SMPTE guidance it is the inner 90% of the picture’s width and height, and the action safe area is the inner 93%. Older workflows still use 80% and 90%, and the difference matters when you build lower thirds. Below you will find the numbers, the pixel margins for common frame sizes, how to switch the guides on in your editor, and where a lower third should sit.

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TL;DR

  • Title safe is where text and logos must live. Action safe is a slightly larger zone for important motion and picture content.
  • The modern SMPTE figures are 90% (title) and 93% (action). The legacy figures are 80% and 90%.
  • Many TVs and streaming boxes still ship with overscan on, so treating safe areas as a real constraint is still the professional default.
  • For a 1920×1080 frame, 90% title safe leaves 96 pixels of margin left and right and 54 pixels top and bottom.
  • Safe guides are editor overlays only. Turn them off before you export.

Table of Contents

What the title safe area is, and where it came from

Old cathode ray tube televisions deflected the picture beyond the edges of the screen, so the outer part of the transmitted image was never visible to viewers. How much was lost varied from set to set. Broadcasters needed a rule that kept text readable on every set, so they defined two rectangles inside the frame.

The title-safe area) (also called the graphics-safe area) is the inner rectangle far enough from every edge that text will not be cut off. The action-safe area sits a little further out and covers anything the viewer needs to see happening, such as a speaker’s hands or a product.

The reasoning is simple: the closer something sits to the edge, the higher the odds that some screen will crop it. Text is the first thing to break, because half a phone number or a clipped name is useless. A partly cropped background is merely untidy.

Action safe vs title safe

The two areas answer different questions.

Title safe Action safe
What goes inside Text, names, logos, titles, subtitles Key action and important picture content
Modern SMPTE size 90% of width and height 93% of width and height
Legacy size 80% 90%
Consequence of crossing it Text can be clipped Subjects can look cropped

The modern values come from the SMPTE recommended practice for digital and fixed-pixel displays. Netflix’s partner guidance recommends following those SMPTE guidelines. It has no strict rejection rule, but it asks creative partners to confirm when text or graphics fall outside the 93% action safe area. That tells you how a major distributor treats the numbers: as the default benchmark for quality control.

A common mix-up is that editors read the legacy 80/90 grid and the modern 90/93 grid as the same thing. Many editing programs still show the older, more conservative margins by default, so check which grid your overlay is drawing before you judge a layout.

Title safe on a 16:9 frame in pixels

Percentages are hard to place by eye, so here are the margins converted for the frame sizes most people deliver. These are my own calculations from the percentages above, rounded to the nearest pixel.

Frame Title safe 90% (modern) Margin per side (L/R, T/B) Title safe 80% (legacy) Margin per side (L/R, T/B)
1280×720 1152×648 64, 36 px 1024×576 128, 72 px
1920×1080 1728×972 96, 54 px 1536×864 192, 108 px
3840×2160 3456×1944 192, 108 px 3072×1728 384, 216 px

For action safe at 93% on 1920×1080, the margins are about 67 pixels left and right and 38 pixels top and bottom.

The percentages apply to the whole frame, so each side gives up half of the remaining share. At 90% that is 5% per side, which is why 1080p loses 96 pixels horizontally (5% of 1920) and 54 vertically (5% of 1080).

1080p frame with title-safe margins measured

Does it still matter with flat screens and streaming?

Short answer: yes. A flat panel does not need overscan, but that does not mean overscan is off. As Allan Tépper explains at ProVideo Coalition, many consumer TVs and streaming devices, including Roku, Fire TV and Apple TV setups, still ship with overscan enabled, and many viewers do not know the setting exists. Anything you place outside the 90% title safe area can be cropped for a real share of your audience.

There is also a comfort argument. Larry Jordan points out that content touching the screen edge creates a sense of tension for the viewer, which is one reason safe margins stay useful even for web-first video.

Phones add a further twist. Some phones offer a zoom-to-fill option that crops widescreen video, a case that one production blog on online video uses to argue for the older, tighter 80% margin on web delivery. If you publish the same file to broadcast, a TV app and social platforms, the cautious choice is to keep text inside 90% at the very least, and inside 80% when the video will be seen on devices you do not control.

Does it still matter with flat screens and streaming? — overview diagram

Which number should you pick?

Use this as a working rule:

  1. Broadcast or streaming delivery to TV: keep text inside 90%, and check your distributor’s spec sheet for anything stricter.
  2. Mixed delivery (TV, web, phone): keep text inside 90% and logos or small type inside 80% if you can afford the space.
  3. Web only, phone-first: the platform’s own interface covers parts of the frame, so check the platform’s safe zone guide as well as the television margins.
  4. Unknown destination: use 80%. It costs some space and removes the risk.

How to show safe margins in your editor

Professional editors include non-destructive overlays that draw the safe rectangles over your viewer. They are reference lines, not part of the picture.

Two habits save headaches. First, turn the overlay off before you export. The guides are for you, and a screen capture of the interface with guides showing is a classic mistake in exported drafts. Second, look at the grid and ask whether it is the 80/90 or 90/93 version, so you do not squeeze your layout into a smaller box than the delivery spec demands.

Safe areas and lower thirds

A lower third is the graphic in the lower part of the frame that names a speaker or gives context. It is also the graphic most likely to be placed too close to an edge, because it naturally hugs the bottom left or bottom right corner.

The rule is that the whole lower third, including its background bar, accent shapes and the text, sits inside title safe. In practice:

  • Text: keep every character inside the title safe rectangle, with a little breathing room.
  • Background bars and shapes: a bar that runs to the screen edge as a design choice is fine, but the text on it must stay in the safe area. Decorative edge bleed should extend beyond the frame so no gap appears if the picture is scaled.
  • Animation: check the whole move, not just the resting position. A slide-in or an overshoot can briefly push text past the line. Look at the first and last frames and the extremes of the motion.
  • Logos and bugs: station logos in corners are the usual victims. Keep them inside title safe, not in the corner of the frame.
  • Left and bottom alignment: align the lower third’s left edge to the title safe left boundary, and its bottom to the title safe bottom boundary, so repeated graphics line up from one interview to the next.

A worked example on a 1080p timeline: with 90% title safe, the lower third’s left edge goes at x = 96 and its lowest text line must end above y = 1026 (1080 minus 54). If you adopt 80% for mixed delivery, those numbers become x = 192 and y = 972.

Our perspective

We build lower thirds for a living, and the most common support question we hear in spirit is: why does my graphic look fine in the editor but cut off on the client’s TV? The answer is nearly always placement, not software.

Our view is that safe areas are a layout decision you make once, at the design stage, not a fix you apply at the end. If you design the lower third on a timeline with the margins in mind, every layer and keyframe is already placed where it should be, and you never have to nudge a finished animation. That is why we focus on a timeline editor with layer and keyframe control and a live preview: you can scrub through the full animation and check the extremes of the motion against your margin before anything is exported.

We also think the choice between 80% and 90% should be explicit. Agree on it with your client or distributor at the start, write it on the brief, and use the same value for every graphic in the project. Consistency looks more professional than a theoretically perfect number.

Finally, export for the tool that will use the file. A graphic with clean alpha on a ProRes 4444 or PNG file drops onto a video track in your editor or a live production setup without a matte, so the position you designed is the position the viewer sees.

— Jean

Designing safe lower thirds in Titlo

Titlo is a browser-based editor for animated lower thirds, so there is nothing to install. You build the graphic on a timeline with layers and keyframes, preview it in real time, upload your own fonts and images, and export as MOV ProRes 4444 or PNG with straight or premultiplied alpha. The files work in DaVinci Resolve, OBS Studio, vMix, ATEM switchers, Premiere Pro and Final Cut Pro.

You can start on the Free plan to test the workflow. Pro is €9 per month and Team is €39 per month, with collaboration features, a shared workspace and rolling end credits. See the plans on Titlo and try a lower third built to your margins.

A quick safe area check before you export

  1. Confirm the delivery spec: 90/93, 80/90, or a platform-specific guide.
  2. Turn on the matching overlay in your editor and check that it is the grid you meant.
  3. Play every lower third from its first frame to its last, watching the extremes of the motion.
  4. Look at the text in its smallest likely display size, such as a phone, to confirm it is still readable.
  5. Check logos and bugs, which tend to drift toward corners.
  6. Turn the overlays off and export.

If you can, view the result on a real TV with overscan left on. A thirty-second test on an actual living-room device shows problems faster than any guide.

FAQ

What does “title safe area” mean?

It is the central part of the frame where text and key graphics will not be cropped by a display. Under current SMPTE guidance it is 90% of the frame’s width and height. Anything outside it is at risk on screens that use overscan.

Is title safe still a thing?

Yes. Many TVs and streaming devices still ship with overscan on, and viewers often do not know how to turn it off, according to ProVideo Coalition. Distributors such as Netflix also still point to the SMPTE margins as a quality benchmark. For broadcast and TV-app delivery, treat it as a requirement.

What is the difference between action safe and title safe?

Action safe (93% in the modern standard) covers important picture content, while title safe (90%) is for text and logos. Title safe is the smaller box, so text has a larger margin than action. If you are unsure, put text inside title safe and subjects inside action safe.

Should I use 80% or 90% for 16:9 video?

Use 90% when you deliver to modern TV or streaming specs that follow SMPTE. Use 80% when the destination is unknown or mixed, because it is the more conservative legacy margin. Always check the delivery spec first, since it overrides any rule of thumb.

Do safe area guides appear in my exported video?

No. They are overlays in the editor interface and are not part of the exported file, as Apple’s Final Cut Pro documentation describes. The risk is only that you screen-capture the interface with guides showing, so hide them before you share a draft.

Sources

Written with BabyLoveGrowth to rank higher on Google