Let me rephrase the question. While I’m sure there are many exceptions, every monitor I’ve ever had was either 4:3 (1.33:1) or 16:9 (1.66:1). So what’s the point of making video displays that won’t fit the screen nicely. Isn’t that the same question the OP is asking about movies and video?
16:9=1.78(1.77777…). 15:9 is 1.67 (1.66666…).
Edit—also, it is either a decimal or ratio, not both.
Minor hijack …
I have a traditional 4:3 NSTC TV. The usual place I see 16:9 TV is in bars & restaurants. I often see 16:9 format TVs showing current production sports or news / talk shows with black bars at top & bottom. In other words, the content is created at, or shown at, a *wider *aspect ratio than 16:9.
What’s up with that?
I wouldn’t be surprised to see black bars at left & right as a 4:3 source is shown unstretched on a 16:9 screen. Either that or to see a 4:3 image being stretched left/right to fill the 16:9 screen space.
But seeing the image squashed vertically to be even wider/shorter than 16:9 makes no sense to me. Yes, I read all the discussion above about movies being shot in wider formats. I get all that. This is about televised sports & talking head shows being shot live this week, if not at this very moment.
I know what you mean. I can’t understand how anyone would prefer a native 4:3 image stretched out to 16:9, making everybody look short and fat, just so they can “fill up the screen”. That’s high on my list of stupidest things humans do. (No offense to your father.) People buy new widescreen TVs to get the best possible picture modern broadcasting offers and then distort the image so it looks like shit! Unfathomable.
There aren’t any, though. All those resolutions are resolutions that are actually used by screens, and always fill up the screen entirely. Any of those resolutions that do not have the ratio were actually designed for screens that didn’t’ have square pixels.
And, as stated, there are more than just 2 ratios–there are 3 big ones, and minor variations of each to get the number of pixels to be evenly divisible.
I’m not going to argue with you, because it’s my preference, and if you don’t like it, tough. I just want to point out that I was referring to the top of his head being cropped off in both images.
I don’t get that at all, either. Yet I’ve watched TV at other peoples’ houses who had them set up that way. Everything looks like shit.
From what I understand, this basically boils down to the people creating the screens not consulting with the people who wanted to create the content. Rather than pick at least one of the existing standards that the creative types had found useful, they decided to try to make the smallest screen that could fit all current ratios. If they’d have consulted with the the creators, they could have worked together and dropped the resolutions not usually used.
It’s annoying, nonetheless, and the best creators design their work so that it will work in multiple formats. You are constantly taught to keep the important parts centered, and to keep things off of the sides of the screen that are actually important.
The question is, is this really any worse*? People are concerned about cropping, but that’s not what filmmakers need to do. Film tall, then crop.
*assuming proper composition. I tried, but I’m sure a real artist could do better. I just made sure the horizon was in the same spot.
That’s a practical impossibility with the format, though - you’re already using anamorphic distortion to get the maximum width at a resolution that still looks good when optically corrected for projection. You can’t overshoot vertically with the intent of discarding it, because the image will be degraded.
Even if they came up with new tech to overcome this problem, requiring the cinematographer to compromise his compositions by trying to fudge it so it’ll look “okay” in two different presentations is a bit of a non-starter. Movie cameras do indeed come with multiple framing marks, and you can try to shoot things so that nothing critical is out-of-frame for even 4:3, if you want to. But when it comes down to it, you’re not going to make the choice to shoot in an ultra-wide format and then simultaneously try to compose for another aspect ratio - you’re going to set up the shot so it looks best for the format you intend to present it in, and bugger anyone who might be annoyed by letterboxing.
I’d be curious to see the results of a poll on who is bothered by letterboxing. I find it is distracting for about 30 seconds, then I don’t notice it at all. Far better than cropping the screen, IMO.
Does it make Dickens any worse if you go through and replace all the three-syllable words with two-syllable synonyms? Or Manet any worse if you replace all the light blue colors with a slightly different light blue?
I dunno. But I do know that you’re changing it from what the artist intended for it to be.
I’ve yet to see a TV show produced with a wider aspect ratio on my 16:9 displays. Correctly setting up A/V equipment isn’t a lot of peoples’ fortes. A lot of people call it quits once they plug things together and see a picture. What you’re probably seeing is the cable box, sat receiver, whatever left at the default of 4:3 so it letterboxes the incoming 16:9 content. This is then fed to the 16:9 display device which defaults to stretching incoming 4:3 content. I was at a friends house and they had the DVD player set to output 4:3 to their 16:9 device. I pointed out how awful this looked and the excessive black bars on top and bottom, and they said it made it look 'more cinematic" to them.
Thanks for the info. I’m not surprised to see that silliness at some bozo’s house. But a sports bar with 50 TVs and 12 channels displayed simultaneously is presumably installed and set up by a pro AV company, not the night bar manager.
Then again, I should learn to never underestimate the cluelessness of a lot of people.
I see this at a tavern I frequent too. The problem here is both that the HDTV is connected to an SD source (cablebox, satellite etc.) **and **that the screen setting on the TV itself is wrong.
HDTVs usually have three screen settings for SD (standard definition):
[ul]
[li]**NORMAL **or **PANEL **- Screen size is unchanged, which means it’ll either be a small rectangle with a black border all around (if the original SD picture was still in 16:9 aspect) or it’ll be the square-ish 4:3 picture with pillar bars on the sides (the converse to letterboxing)[/li]
[li]**WIDE **or **STRETCH **- Screen size is stretched ***only ***horizontally (not vertically) to fill the 16:9 screen, which means if the picture is originally square-ish 4:3 it will be distorted but will fill the 16:9 screen (even though it distorts it this is what the WIDE setting is made for), but if the picture was originally 16:9 rectangular size it will be distorted ***and ***still have the black letterbox bars on the top & bottom (this is what you’re seeing at that bar)[/li]
[li]**ZOOM **- Screen size is zoomed, i.e. its stretched ***equally ***horizontally & vertically so that it fills the 16:9 screen but the picture ratio is not distorted (though it will be ‘fuzzy’ because it’s a zoomed-in low resolution)[/li][/ul]
That TV you saw should have been set to ZOOM but was instead set to WIDE. The reason this happens is because the help (waitresses, bartenders etc.) presses the wrong button on the TV’s remote! Usually while turning it on or changing the channel or the volume. And HDTVs stay that way even after turning them off & on (you have to specifically set it back).
Note that these HDTV screen settings **ONLY **effect an SD input. If it’s connected to an HD source changing these settings won’t make the picture change (aspect ratio is built-in to the HDTV signal).
Hope this wasn’t too confusing…
But the top of the image is not “cropped off.” That *is *the image. That is how it was shot.
I really don’t understand people who are bothered by letterboxing and would rather distort the image than see the black bars.
I don’t think those scales are going to come off.
Sent with my fat fingers using Tapatalk.
Did I say the top of the image was cropped off? No, I said the top of his head was cropped off.
If the “distort the image” comment was referring to me also, I never advocated that either.
That’s just a little vocabulary problem - means the same thing. (You “crop” an existing image by cutting parts off the edges. You don’t “crop” elements when you are framing the shot.)
Nitpick—on my TV, “what it is made for” is anamorphic DVDs. They get stretched to proper aspect ratio on a 16:9 screen. Non-anamorphic DVDs that are letterboxed instead must use the Zoom setting.
I don’t either. I think seeing a distorted image with squished or stretched people is far, far more distracting than letterboxing.