What does title-safe mean for subtitles & on-screen title translation?

The idea of a “title-safe area” of the video screen (also known as the “graphics-safe area”) is just about as old as subtitles translation, and has been a crucial standard for captioning and subtitling since. With the advent of digital video, though, placing on-screen text in the title-safe area has become less crucial to the success of a production – indeed, many cutting-edge video producers go outside it occasionally. So what do you need to know about the title-safe area for digital video and multimedia localization?

This post will list the three reasons keeping subs and captions text in the title-safe area is good for video translation.

[Average read time: 4 minutes]

What is it exactly?

The title-safe area is the area of the video screen that will be seen reliably on just about any of the many distribution methods used for film and video content, but it was most useful for broadcast televisions. Older televisions used to “overscan” the images they broadcast, meaning that they would crop out some of the sides of the screen, most drastically in the corners, since some of the first TVs didn’t even have sharp corners. Editors needed to keep all elements that needed to be completely visible a certain distance from the edge of the screen – and that of course included titles.

It’s such a common part of video post-production and editing that all professional software, like Final Cut Pro, AVID, and Premiere/After Effects – and even some non-pro apps like iMovie – has title-safe markers built into their display windows, as you can see in the following screen shot:

The green lines can be turned on and off by an editor, usually once the titles are built to make sure they’re within the safe area. Note also the short vertical lines (one of them is circled in red) – these are guides for content that’s going to be cropped for displays in other aspect ratios like 4×3.

For more information on aspect ratio, check out our previous post, Video Translation 101: What are frame size and aspect ratio?

Is the title-safe area as crucial today?

No – it’s not nearly as crucial, for two reasons. First, digital and HD TVs don’t overscan images like they used to, and their frames are rectangular. In fact, most late-model CRTs were pretty good at this as well. Second, videos viewed in online players retain the frame size and aspect ratio of the original content (unless there’s been an encoding issue), so that users can rely on being able to see ever pixel of the frame.

In fact, as online video developers are getting more creative with titling in general, they’re often ignoring title-safe dictates. If you scroll through your Facebook feed, you’re likely to see videos optimized for viewing with the audio turned off – the standard for social media. They’ll often title any off-screen voice-over in creative ways, filling up the frame with full words or sentences, or even moving text around to create a dramatic effect. Likewise, digital platforms allow production companies more caption and sub placement control, which they’re using to creative effect – for example, placing captions directly under the character who’s speaking, rather than in the center of the frame.

The platforms certainly support this creativity, and it’s doing exciting things for video titling in general. However, there are still three good reasons to keep titles, and specifically captions and subs, within the title-safe area:

1. Cropping still happens in some formats. Movie theaters, in fact, are notorious for cropping a projected image so that it fits a pre-set screen size better, or so that there’s no part of the screen left without image on it. This is a constant source of frustration to cinematographers, directors, and just about all film professionals, as you can imagine.
2. Some video players re-size video at user command. Next time you watch an online streaming service (like Netflix, Amazon on Hulu), on your iPad, double-tap your screen. You’ll see the video re-size to fit – so, for example, if you’re watching an anamorphic widescreen movie, you’ll lose about 40% of the picture – and just about any titles in it. If that includes burned-in or forced subtitles, they’ll almost certainly be cropped if they’re not title safe. This happens with many online systems, and for the most part this kind of cropping has to be selected by the user – but it can still wreak havoc on the viewing experience.
3. General accessibility. Remember that caption and subs text is on the screen specifically to make the content accessible to the deaf and hard-of-hearing, and to non-native speakers of the original production language. Standard captions placement ensures best readability, in part because this is what users expect – our eyes are trained to scan that part of the frame for text. Remember that placing the text in different places will cause eye strain as users “look” for it, and that likewise any text that’s far from the center of the frame will require the user to go further to read it.

Note that these situations are all for burned-in or forced subtitles – if you’re adding the subs to the video from a text file, these concerns apply only if you’re encoding the subtitle position in the file itself, and setting to override player defaults.

So what does this mean for video translation?

Since the point of subtitling is to increase accessibility, the best practice is to stick to the title-safe area, and specifically to use standard subs placement – as well as character limits, fonts, color, outlining, and even backgrounding for maximized readability. This is especially true for Asian double-byte languages – for example, moving Chinese subtitling lower than the title-safe may mean cropping characters at the bottom, since the fonts and line spacing are greater in general for this language. If you do plan on moving any text outside of the title-safe area, make sure that it won’t cause issues with the final delivery format. If you can at all, do a test before making a decision, to make sure that the final videos won’t have any cropping issues. This will require more preparation up front, but will pay off during the video localization process.