looking at 16:9

[Bob Zimmerman]

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?

[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.

[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.

[Bob Zimmerman]

<<<-- 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I should make a trip in Best Buy or somewhere and check out the new TV's. My 10 year old 19'' Sony is getting alittle outdated.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!!!

[Boyd Ostroff]

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.

[Bob Zimmerman]

Thanks for the info.

[Rob Lohman]

<<<-- 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.