looking at 16:9
 

Maybe someone can clear a few things up.

1. If you tape at 4:3 what does it look like on a widescreen?

2. Windscreen on my normal TV has the black on top and bottom. Like with a DVD widescreen movie. If you use a video camera on 16:9 is that what it would look like on a normal TV?

3. If you were going to shoot a movie for the big screen is that shot in 16:9?

4. If you use a anamorphic lens does then give a true 16:9?

3. film is usually shot in 1.85:1 (nearly 16:9) or 2.35:1

4. yes

How it will look on a widescreen or normal 4:3 TV depends on
the medium you use to display the movie with. If you are going
for a 16:9 DVD release (where everything is properly encoded/
authored as 16:9 anamorphic) and you have your DVD player
set up correctly the footage will be letterboxed (by the DVD
player) for a 4:3 TV and send as is to a 16:9 widescreen TV.

If you put 4:3 material on a DVD disc it will always be send as
is. What a widescreen TV will do with it depends on the settings,
normally it should stretch it a bit to fill the 16:9 area, but you can
choose to pillarbox it (black sides) and all sort of things inbetween.

I was just thinking too that if you can shoot in 4:3 then later if you can make 16:9 in post you would have both. If the 16:9 can be done as good in post.

<<<-- Originally posted by Rob Lohman : 3. film is usually shot in 1.85:1 (nearly 16:9) or 2.35:1

4. yes

How it will look on a widescreen or normal 4:3 TV depends on
the medium you use to display the movie with. If you are going
for a 16:9 DVD release (where everything is properly encoded/
authored as 16:9 anamorphic) and you have your DVD player
set up correctly the footage will be letterboxed (by the DVD
player) for a 4:3 TV and send as is to a 16:9 widescreen TV.

If you put 4:3 material on a DVD disc it will always be send as
is. What a widescreen TV will do with it depends on the settings,
normally it should stretch it a bit to fill the 16:9 area, but you can
choose to pillarbox it (black sides) and all sort of things inbetween. -->>>

So you can adjust the widescreen TV's then? I guess I should make a trip in Best Buy or somewhere and check out the new TV's. My 10 year old 19'' Sony is getting alittle outdated. But it still works good!!!

Every widescreen TV I've seen has a number of different modes, as Rob mentions. My Sony LCD has:

FULL - stretches the video to the full screen width, regardless of its type
NORMAL - displays 4:3 as pillarboxed and 16:9 as full screen
LETTERBOX - zooms in on letterboxed 16:9 such that it fills the whole screen
ZOOM - Chops off the top and bottom of 4:3 video to make it 16:9
WIDE ZOOM - Not clear on this one...

So basically, if you don't like the way something looks when viewing on a widescreen monitor you just cycle through these options using a botton on your remote and pick the one that gives the best results. It's interesting that there's a signal which can be imbedded in the video that tells a widescreen TV to switch to anamorphic mode for 16:9 content, but there is no 4:3 signal which can tell it to switch to pillarbox mode for 4:3.

Some of the new sets have "smart stretch" modes where it stretches the left and right edges more than the center as another way to show 4:3 on the full screen.

Thanks for the info.

<<<-- Originally posted by Bob Zimmerman : I was just thinking too that if you can shoot in 4:3 then later if you can make 16:9 in post you would have both. If the 16:9 can be done as good in post. -->>>

Depending on the program (and the quality of the algorithms it
uses), yes, you can do 16:9 anamorphic widescreen in post. Just
as long as you keep in mind that a true 16:9 camera or anamorphic
attachment for your camera woud yield a higher resolution than
the post method or in camera 16:9 on a non-true 16:9 camera.