You mean stretching the image to fill the whole screen? You’d be surprised how badly you can fudge an image before the average person notices there’s a problem. It’s tickling the back of your mind that something ain’t right, but it’s not strong enough for you to become conscious of it. Even a conversion between 16:9 and 4:3 isn’t enough to be noticed easily. (Hell, I have a hard time noticing, and I’ll pick up on any other problems instantly)
See also arguments over pan-and-scan, notably about ‘using the whole screen’
I think one of the reasons that’s often cited by the creatives rather than the business types or techies is that the wider aspect ratio is ‘more cinematic’. So those TV producers who are trying to make “quality” television do it deliberately to make the TV shows appear more like movies.
16:9 does not necessarily imply HD, btw. Over here, where HD has been slow to take off, almost everything has been made in 16:9 for years. Standard def 16:9 TV sets started getting popular when DVDs came about. The only 4:3 stuff you see is old material or imports. For analogue broadcast, 16:9 is letterboxed into a compromise 14:9 frame which, due to overscan, is usually not too noticeable on old 4:3 TVs. Digital TV is predominantly SD 16:9, and the receiver can letterbox it to suit your TV and your preference.
Though the trend is for HDTV, very few people have it yet - but over here we still get a hell of a lot of 16:9 shows via digital, cable, and satellite broadcasting, but in ‘normal’ resolution.
Nope, I mean going the other way. I only use an antenna and watch digital stuff so I know most of the 16x9 commercials. What I’m talking about is one of the 16x9 shows that’s shown in 4x3 space with black bars all the way around. The ratio is still 16x9, but it’s small. It looks something like this (though centered):
I’ve seen it happen a few times on other shows, but Stargate is always shown like this on the local Fox DC station. I’m guessing they are sending out the signal in 4x3 for some reason. You think it’s hard to watch with bars on top and bottom, it’s even harder with four sides of bars.
eta: tried to fix the centering but it doesn’t allow white space.
They may be using 16:9 material that has been pre-rendered into a letterbox in 4:3 frame. Some of the smaller satellite channels here only have 4:3 playout equipment. so their 16:9 stuff is either cropped or hard letterboxed into 4:3. If you then view that on a 16:9 TV, you might see it as a “postage stamp” in the middle of the screen, depending on how the 16:9 TV is configured to display 4:3.
HBO doesn’t pan-n-scan its own movies; the content is provided by the studios. The instant the studios believe widescreen represents a majority of home setups, that will change.
It’s easier and cheaper for HBO to produce its own material with the long term in mind, and not spend money on panning and scanning in the short term.
In the US, all SD broadcasts are in 4:3. You will only get the 16:9 broadcast from an HD feed.
This means that anything “widescreen” will be letterboxed on any SD channel.
On the HD channel, some 16:9 stuff may show up letterboxed anyway. Your local Fox station probably only gets an SD version of Stargate to show. They could upconvert the broadcast on their HD channel, but most don’t go through the hassle. Some commercials will be in the letterboxed format even on the HD feed because the advertiser hasn’t provided a native 16:9 version of the commercial.
IIRC from season 2 on they kept a widescreen aspect ratio in mind when shooting and cropped it for 4:3, but as you mentioned that old bugaboo of trying to support two aspect ratios special effects screwed it up. For reasons of cost they only rendered the effects in 4:3. When the DVD’s were released some bright person decided that they should use the 16:9 print and crop the 4:3 effects shots.
As people start using widescreen more this is going to become more and more of an issue. Those of us who have been on the OAR bandwagon for ages are now going to have to fight against having the tops and bottoms of films and television shows chopped off.
And FWIW, I’m 99% sure that Babylon 5 was not the only drama to do this at the time. It was becoming an issue around that point (1994, roughly) and quite a few producers were starting to plan for the future.
Or worse, what channels like so-called TNT HD or TBS HD are doing - stretching 4:3 content to fill the 16:9 screen. In some cases, they’re even using a non-linear stretch so you can’t easily un-stretch the stuff.
I thought going to 16:9 would rid us of the abomination that is pan-and-scan. I never expected the channels would come up with something worse.
ETA: Of course, they’re still using pan-and-scan for movies with wider than 16:9 aspect ratios. I saw Pirates of the Caribbean on ABC; its OAR is 2.35 but they pan-and-scanned it to 16:9.
The real reason? To appear pretentious and “cinematic”. I remember music videos and TV shows broadcast in letterbox ten years ago well before HD and widescreen TVs were the thing.
They don’t really pan and scan. Unlike adaptions of movies for television broadcast, 16:9 broadcasts are just framed in the center for 4:3, and kept in the center.
Even worse than that is what History HD does — especially to the Universe series, damn them! — which is to stretch 16:9 that has already been compressed into 4:3 with letterbox horizontally only! back into 16:9. There is no way to fix this. It’s mushroom heads and football shaped planets no matter what you do.
The explanation I remember is that the basic data files for the effects were lost, so they couldn’t re-render them. Really, they’d have been better off just keeping everything in 4:3 instead of the asinine cropping and rescaling they did to fake it.