Tip #892: The Little Known Overlay Menu
… for Adobe Premiere Pro CC
Tip #892: The Little Known Overlay Menu
Larry Jordan – LarryJordan.com
Custom Settings enable you to display timecode data in an easy-to-access format.
At the bottom of the Wrench menu in both the Program and Source Monitors are the Overlay and Overlay Settings menus. These provide very useful information about your clips during editing.
- Overlay. This toggles the overlay menu (see screen shot) on or off. It is off by default.
- Overlay Settings. This allows you to select between Editing overlays (screen shot), V1/A1 timecode, or create your own custom settings.
These custom settings are extensive. Displaying data in four quadrants, you can select from:
- File names
- Video timecode
- Audio timecode
- Markers
- Project clip names
- and much more
This window also allows customizing where Action Safe and Title Safe are displayed on your screen. The default is 5% and 10% in from all edges, but you can change this.
Do Action Safe and Title Safe matter if you’re just doing web work? And does it even matter on television anymore, since they’re digital? (Televisions aren’t still set to overscan, are they?)
Ron:
Action Safe and Title Safe are critical for broadcast, cable and digital cinema. You won’t get your program past QA if you ignore these.
And, yes, Action Safe is still needed for the web. I saw this with a video on YouTube recently where text was set too close to the edge of the frame and was cropped. Because you don’t control how your movies will be viewed, you still need to honor Action Safe with graphics, text and URLs.
Larry
Thanks for the info! I hadn’t seen a modern discussion of this.
Really. People don’t know about this? Hmmm.