Safe Area Calculator: Title Safe & Action Safe Areas
Safe Area Calculator. Enter your frame size and pick a Broadcast Standard in this safe area calculator to get the title safe and action safe areas. Use the aspect ratio calculator to find the exact ratio for any pixel dimensions and verify proportions before exporting.
Interactive Tool
Frame Settings
Percentages are the share of width and height each safe area keeps. Margins: Broadcast 5% action / 10% title, SMPTE 3.5% / 5%, Legacy 10% / 15% on every side.
Visual Preview
Full frame: 1920 × 1080
Enter your frame width and height in pixels, pick a broadcast standard — Modern HD, Broadcast, or Legacy NTSC — and this safe area calculator gives you the exact action safe and title safe dimensions with pixel margins, plus a live visual preview showing both zones overlaid on your frame.
Type in your frame width and frame height, choose a broadcast standard, and the safe area calculator returns the exact title safe and action safe rectangles, with the pixel margins on every side. You get numbers you can type straight into a guide layer, so no lower third, caption or logo ends up cut off by a television, a phone or a player bar. Any custom size works, from a 720p explainer to an 8K master.
How the Safe Area Calculator Finds Title Safe and Action Safe
Every video frame has two invisible rectangles inside it. The outer one, the action safe area (often written action-safe area), is where faces, products and anything viewers must see should stay. The inner one, the title safe area, also called the title-safe area, graphics-safe area or text-safe zone, is where every word belongs. Both are centred, and each is a fixed inset from the four edges, so the calculator only needs your frame size and the rule you pick. The video resolution calculator covers common codecs and colour spaces so file size estimates reflect real-world encoding conditions.
Anything between the frame edge and the outer safe boundary may be lost on some television sets, and anything between the two boxes may be readable on one screen and clipped on the next. That is why broadcast engineers still draw both safe areas.
The Safe Area Margins Formula
The safe area margins are a share of each dimension, taken off each side. Under the traditional rule the outer box leaves 5% on each side and the inner box leaves 10% on each side, so they keep 90% and 80% of the width and height:
$$\text{Margin}_{\text{side}} = \text{Frame dimension} \times p$$ $$\text{Safe width} = W - 2 \times (W \times p) \qquad \text{Safe height} = H - 2 \times (H \times p)$$Here \(p\) is 0.05 for the outer box and 0.10 for the inner one. A per-side margin is never the total loss: a 10 percent margin on each side removes a fifth of the width, the most common mix-up in this maths. When \(W \times p\) lands between whole pixels, round the margin, not the final rectangle, so both sides stay equal.
Worked Example at 2560×1440
Say you are cutting a 1440p explainer and set a custom size of 2560×1440 instead of a preset. Under the traditional 90/80 rule:
- Action safe margin: \(2560 \times 0.05 = 128\) px left and right, \(1440 \times 0.05 = 72\) px top and bottom, so the box is 2304×1296.
- Title safe margin: \(2560 \times 0.10 = 256\) px and \(1440 \times 0.10 = 144\) px, so the text box is 2048×1152, starting at x = 256 and y = 144.
- Under the 93/90 HD rule (3.5% and 5% per side) the margins drop to 90×50 px and 128×72 px, giving 2380×1340 and 2304×1296.
Notice the overlap: at this resolution the modern text box is exactly the old outer box. Before you export or render, check which rule your client asked for, because the gap is 128 px of text room on each side.
Safe Area Percentages by Broadcast Standard
The safe area percentages you enter depend on where the video will be shown. Two rules cover almost every television and web request you will meet. Run the aspect ratio visualizer to see how 9:16 vertical video appears relative to the landscape formats used for streaming.
Traditional 90/80 Versus the SMPTE HD Update
The 90/80 rule comes from the CRT era and is what most NTSC and PAL work, and plenty of SD legacy feeds, still expect. For HDTV, SMPTE ST 2046-1 relaxed it to 93% for the outer box and 90% for the inner one, matching the much smaller overscan of modern panels. Europe's EBU R95 recommendation gives similar figures for HD. When a network's technical specification names neither, use 90/80: a layout that clears the stricter box clears every looser one.
Reference Table for 720p, 1080p, 4K and 8K
| Resolution | 90/80 action safe | 90/80 title safe | 93/90 action safe | 93/90 title safe |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| HD 1280×720 | 1152×648 | 1024×576 | 1190×670 | 1152×648 |
| 1080p 1920×1080 | 1728×972 | 1536×864 | 1786×1004 | 1728×972 |
| 1440p 2560×1440 | 2304×1296 | 2048×1152 | 2380×1340 | 2304×1296 |
| UHD 3840×2160 | 3456×1944 | 3072×1728 | 3572×2008 | 3456×1944 |
| 7680×4320 | 6912×3888 | 6144×3456 | 7142×4018 | 6912×3888 |
| Vertical 9:16 | 972×1728 | 864×1536 | 1004×1786 | 972×1728 |
Each margin is rounded to a whole pixel per side, which is why the 93/90 outer sizes are not exact.
Why Overscan Still Makes Safe Margins Matter
You could assume safe margins died with tube sets. They did not: overscan survived the move to flat screens, and phones added a new kind of loss at the edges. Older crews call these guides the safeties, and the reason to keep them is simple: what sits near the edge is not reliably visible to all viewers.
From CRT Picture Tubes to Flat-Panel Displays
A CRT, or cathode ray tube, could not hold its picture steady at the edges, so makers enlarged the image until the shaky border hid behind the bezel. Every frame was transmitted in full, but the outermost sliver of the active picture never reached the glass of those picture tubes. Flat-panel displays are fixed-pixel devices with no reason to enlarge anything, yet many smart TVs still ship with overscan on in their picture settings, trimming 2-5% off the edge of the screen. Studio monitors have an underscan mode that shows the whole frame, which is how editors see what home television screens lose. A flat panel in a living room is not that monitor.
Phones That Zoom to Full Screen
Most phones do not share the 16:9 aspect ratio of the video. A handset with an 18:9 or 19.5:9 display shows it with black bars until the viewer taps zoom to full screen, which fills the width and trims the top and bottom. On the taller smartphone, 16/19.5 of the height stays, so about 9% is cropped from each edge; on 18:9 it is about 5.6%. In the 2560×1440 example that crop removes 129 px top and bottom: the 144 px margin of the 90/80 rule survives, the 72 px HD one does not. Add notches and rounded corners, and mobile viewing is now the strongest reason to keep the old rule, above all for an unskippable pre-roll ad, where image cropping hides the text the client paid for.
Finding the Subtitle Safe Zone for a 2K Short Film Cut Down for Cable
My nine-minute short is finished as a 2048×1080 master for a festival DCP, and a regional cable channel has also accepted it for a short-film slot. Their spec sheet asks for a 1920×1080 file with burnt-in subtitles inside the traditional 90/80 title safe area. The question I need answered before re-exporting: where can the subtitle block start on the left?
The answer, up front: 256 px in from the master's left edge, not 205 px, if the channel crops rather than scales.
- I enter 2048 and 1080, pick the 90/80 broadcast option, and get margins of 204.8 px (rounded to 205) and 108 px, so a 1638×864 text box. My subtitle template already starts at x = 205, so at first glance it passes.
- Then I rerun with the channel's frame, 1920×1080. That gives 192×108 px margins and a 1536×864 box.
- A 16:9 center extraction from my master keeps \(1080 \times \tfrac{16}{9} = 1920\) px, dropping 64 px per side. So the channel's text edge sits at 64 + 192 = 256 px in master coordinates. I check it by hand: \(1920 \times 0.10 = 192\), plus the 64 px crop.
| Frame entered | Side margin | Left text edge in my master |
|---|---|---|
| 2048×1080 (master) | 205 px | 205 px |
| 1920×1080 (cable cut) | 192 px | 256 px |
At x = 205 my subtitles would land 141 px inside the cable picture, 7.3% of its width: inside action safe but outside the title box, which is exactly the kind of miss their quality check rejects.
The non-obvious part is that the answer flips if the channel scales instead of crops. Fitting 2048 px into 1920 multiplies everything by 0.9375, so x = 205 becomes 192 px, right on the line, and the bottom subtitle row ends up 135 px above the frame bottom after the 34 px letterbox bars. Same master, two opposite verdicts. So I email the channel to ask which conversion they run, and in the meantime I move the subtitle region to x 256-1792 and re-wrap the two longest lines. The input I'd watch on any cut-down is the frame you enter: always run the calculator on the delivered frame, never only on the master.
Keeping On-Screen Text Inside Title-Safe Bounds
The inner box is about legibility and readability, not looks. Every piece of on-screen text and most on-screen graphics go fully inside it, shadows and descenders included. Background plates may bleed to the frame edge; the text they carry may not.
Lower Thirds, Chyrons and Tickers
Lower thirds hold the smallest text on screen, so they get the strictest placement:
- Keep the lowest text baseline at or above the title safe line; at 2560×1440 that is y = 1296 under the 90/80 safe area rule.
- Start the name and role text at the left edge of the title-safe area, not the action safe edge, so a lower third reads on every set.
- A news ticker may run its bar into the action safe band, but keep the crawling text inside the inner box.
- Put every line of a title card, slate or end-screen inside the inner box; only the backdrop goes out to the edges of the frame.
- Leave an extra 1-2% beyond the safe areas near corners, where overscan and phone corner radius both bite.
The same goes for a chyron, stacked chyrons in an interview, and full-screen graphics such as phone numbers or score titles. Good typography cannot fix a word that never reaches the screen, which is why most tickers sit in the lower margin band.
Closed Captions and Channel Bugs
Closed captions and subtitles are an accessibility matter: a clipped caption is an unreadable one. Keep the last caption line inside the title safe area, and on social uploads raise it further. Channel bugs are the exception. A small network logo still reads with a sliver trimmed, so most stations park it just inside the outer corner, leaving the lower centre free for subtitle lines.
Center Cut Safe Zones for 4:3 Inside 16:9
Some broadcasters still ask for center cut safe graphics, so a widescreen master can be cut down to 4:3 for older television feeds without losing text. The center cut is the 4:3 window in the middle of the widescreen frame, and its safe zones sit inside that window, not inside the full aspect ratio.
Working Out Center Cut Guides
At 2560×1440 the window is \(1440 \times \tfrac{4}{3} = 1920\) px wide. Its outer box is \(1920 \times 0.90 = 1728\) px, so the guides are inset 416 px from each side; its text box is 1536 px, 512 px in from each side. As a share of the full width, as some composition guide settings expect, that is 32.5% and 40% in total. These numbers matter only when the narrow version is a crop, not a letterbox; with letterboxing the whole picture and its usual safe areas stay intact. Set the guides once in your template compositions and every new edit inherits them.
Clean Aperture and Pixel Aspect Ratios
In standard definition the stored 720-sample width is the production aperture, and only about 702-712 of those samples form the clean aperture meant to be seen. With non-square pixel aspect ratios, a strictly correct text box shifts a fraction of a percent on the left and right. In HD the two apertures match; for SD, enter the clean width (about 704) in the calculator when a spec measures from it.
Action-Safe Framing for Streaming and Delivery Specs
The two rules are only the baseline; the job's delivery specs win. Networks and cable channels publish their own margins, and quality control rejects a master with a lower third a few pixels outside the safe zone. Broadcasters serving older affiliates often hold to 90/80 even for HD and UHD. Streaming services and online video sites usually accept 93/90, but producers working across all of them in one video production are better off with a single action-safe master built to the strictest box. One video, one set of guides, every outlet.
Vertical Video and Platform UI
Vertical video for Instagram, TikTok and other social media apps loses edges to platform UI instead of overscan: like and share buttons on the right, account names at the bottom, and playback controls or player controls on YouTube. Treat the title-safe area as the minimum and pull text further up from the bottom. These safe areas are not a published standard; the safe area requirements of each app change with every redesign, so check a test upload on a real phone.
Turning On Safe Zone Guides in Your Editing Software
Nearly every NLE can draw safe area guides over the viewer. In After Effects, set them under Preferences, Grids & Guides; Final Cut Pro and Premiere show safe area overlays from the viewer menu; iMovie handles them for you. Most editing software, After Effects included, defaults to the 90/80 rule, which matches the safe area guidelines most clients expect. Once the calculator gives you exact values, a non-linear editing template with matching guides lets every editor on the project, and any outside editors, place text the same way.
Frequently Asked Questions
- What is a safe area in video?
- A safe area is a centred rectangle inside the video frame where content is sure to stay visible on any screen. The action safe area is the outer box for important action, and the title safe area is the smaller inner box where all text and graphics belong.
- What is the difference between title safe and action safe?
- Action safe keeps 90% of the width and height (a 5% margin on each side) under the traditional rule, and title safe keeps 80% (a 10% margin on each side). Text goes inside title safe; faces and key action can use the band between the two.
- Which broadcast standard should I choose?
- Use Broadcast (90/80) when a network or cable spec asks for traditional safe areas or names no rule, since a layout that clears it clears every looser one. Use Modern HD/UHD (93/90) for streaming and web delivery that allows it. Use the Legacy option only when a client wants extra room for old CRT sets.
- How are safe area margins calculated?
- Multiply each frame dimension by the per-side percentage and subtract twice that from the dimension. On a 2560 px wide frame, a 10% title safe margin is 256 px per side, leaving a 2048 px wide text area.
- Do safe margins still matter on flat screens and phones?
- Yes. Many smart TVs still apply overscan by default, and phones that zoom 16:9 video to full screen crop the top and bottom. A 19.5:9 phone crops about 9% from each edge, which is more than the 5% SMPTE title margin but less than the 10% traditional one.
- Can I use the calculator for vertical or custom frame sizes?
- Yes. Leave the preset on Custom and enter any width and height, such as 1080 × 1920 for vertical video. The calculator applies the same per-side percentages to whatever dimensions you enter.
- Why should text sit inside title safe if the phone or TV shows most of the frame?
- Because you can't control the viewer's screen. Overscan, phone zoom, notches and player controls all cover pixels near the edges, so text in the outer band may be cut off for some viewers even if it looks fine on your monitor.