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88Final Cut Pro User Guide
Show title-safe and action-safe overlays
The title-safe area is the inner 80 percent of the screen, guaranteed to be visible on all
televisions. To prevent text in your video from being hidden by the edge of a TV set, you
should restrict any titles or text to the title-safe area. The action-safe area is 90 percent of
the image area. Most of the time, anything in your video image that’s outside of this area
won’t be displayed on a television screen, so make sure important material is framed within
the action-safe area.
• In Final Cut Pro, click the View pop-up menu in the upper-right corner of the viewer,
then choose Show Title/Action Zones.
Lines indicating title-safe and action-safe areas appear in the viewer.
Add custom overlays
Custom overlays are useful for the various vertical and square aspect ratios common in
social media video projects.
1. In Final Cut Pro, create a new project or open an existing project.
The example below shows a vertical project.
2. Create a custom overlay image in an image editing app.
It’s best to create an image with an alpha channel (in which the reserved areas are
opaque and the safe areas are transparent). The image pixel dimensions or aspect ratio
should match that of your project settings. Save the image in a format that supports
alpha channels, such as PNG.