GateTrue

What each generator documents about marking its output

Burned-in mark: part of the picture, not attached to it

A burned-in mark is composited into the frame, so it is made of the same pixels as the picture. Nothing outside the picture carries it, and nothing that leaves the picture intact removes it. As of 2026-09-22.

Which layer of a file a burned-in mark occupiesA burned-in mark is made of the same pixels as the picture, so it travels with the picture through containers, codecs and metadata stripping. Operations that alter the picture, such as cropping the region it occupies, are the ones that remove it.One file, two layersThe pictureWhere a burned-in mark lives, made of the same pixels aseverything else in frame.The containerWhere a manifest or metadata block lives, attached around thepicture.A re-encodeRewrites the container and can drop what is attached; leaves thepicture recognisable.A cropChanges the picture, so it can remove a burned-in mark andleaves a manifest alone.Two operations, opposite effects
Fig. 1 High durability against handling, low durability against deliberate reframing: the reverse of a manifest's profile.
How this register uses the term, and what it excludes. Written 2026-09-22.
The termBurned-in mark
What it namesA mark that is part of the frame's pixels
What it is notA note attached to the file around the picture
Where the register uses itEvery value in the free-tier and paid-tier columns

Inclusion rule. Words this site uses in a narrow sense, where the ordinary sense would lead a reader to misread a cell. No vendor statement appears on this page. Order. Fixed order: what the word names, what it excludes, then where it is used here.

1Why this is the default reading of watermark here

When a plan grid says a watermark is removed at a certain tier, the thing being removed is almost always burned in. That is what makes it worth charging for: a viewer sees it, it appears in a thumbnail, and it cannot be taken out by anybody downstream without repainting part of the frame.

It is also what makes the promise easy to keep. A vendor that stops compositing a mark has genuinely changed the file, and the change is visible at a glance. Compare a claim about the inside of a file, which nobody can confirm without a tool and which no pricing page on this register makes.

2What survives, and what does not

A burned-in mark survives everything that preserves the picture: a new container, a different codec, a change of bitrate, stripped metadata. It is the layer that is still there after a file has been through three editors and a social platform, which is the whole reason regulators and publishers pay attention to it.

It does not survive operations that change the picture. Cropping away the region it occupies removes it, unless it moves or covers the frame; scaling and re-encoding degrade it without removing it. So its durability is high against handling and low against deliberate reframing, which is the opposite profile from a manifest.

3What a register can and cannot say about one

Whether a mark exists is answerable from a vendor page. What it looks like usually is not: position, size, opacity and behaviour at other aspect ratios are unpublished almost everywhere, and a description taken from one downloaded clip would be a description of one clip.

So the columns here record the existence of a mark and the plan that removes it, and leave appearance at not documented. The readings say which entries publish an attribute of the mark itself, and how each of those attributes changes what a crop achieves.

Nothing on this page is a vendor statement; the values it helps read are on the support table, with the page and the date each one was read from. See also the free tier column, metadata against watermark. Nearby terms: corner stamp, full-frame mark, moving mark.