Widescreen

When is Widescreen really Widescreen?

There seems to be a lot of confusion at the moment about shooting in widescreen, possibly because there are so many different ways of displaying a widescreen image.

For this article when I refer to a "normal" TV or monitor I mean one with an aspect ratio of 4:3. A widescreen TV or monitor is one with an aspect ratio of 16:9.

Lets start at the beginning. Until about 8 years ago almost every single television set and monitor sold around the world was a 4:3 unit. That is the ratio of the width and height of the screen, so most TV's had almost square screens. Most feature films are shot in some sort of widescreen aspect, often 2.35:1, giving an image over twice as wide as it is tall. In order to show a feature film in it's original aspect ratio on a normal TV it is shown with large areas of black at the top and bottom of the screen, in effect wasting most of the screen useable area. This type of viewing is know as "Letterbox". However on a small TV the picture may end up being so small that you can't see what's going on.

2.35:1 Letterboxed Image on a 4:3 screen.

Until recently most movies were show using a technique called "Pan and Scan" where only selected parts of the films full width are transfer ed to video and it is then viewed filling the whole of the normal 4:3 TV screen. This method is a compromise. Imagine a dramatic movie scene where the Roman army, on the far left of the rolling hills are about to attack the poor Celtic peasants to the right of the hills. In the cinema on the big wide screen with its 2.35:1 aspect ratio you would be able to see both armies and the hills in between, but when the scene is converted to 4:3 for broadcast you loose half the scene so either the Romans or the Celts get cut and the whole scene looses its impact. Then along came videos and broadcasts of films in a compromise format, letterboxed (ie with black bars at the top and bottom) with the movie cropped down to an aspect ratio of 16:9. The black strips at the top and bottom of the screen were still there, and some scenes in films were still compromised, but this was seen as an acceptable half way house.

16:9 Letterboxed image on a 4:3 Screen

Things really started to get confusing when the first widescreen TVs came onto the market. At first all broadcasts were still 4:3 broadcasts, so if a film was broadcast in widescreen that meant that if you viewed it on a 4:3 TV it would be letterboxed (Black bars top and bottom). To watch it on a 16:9 TV you would have to stretch the picture vertically to eliminate the black bars, this is OK except that for the fact that a large part of the transmission bandwidth is being wasted on the black bars and as a result the picture quality on a 16:9 TV isn't as good as it could be.

Today many Digital TV channels and DVD disks are available in a widescreen format that uses all of the bandwidth available so there are no black bars at the top and bottom of the screen. When viewed on a normal 4:3 TV this pictures looks odd because they appear stretched vertically, cars appear to have oval wheels etc, but when viewed on a 16:9 TV or monitor they look correct. This is known as Full Height Anamorphic 16:9 (FHA 16:9, or Anamorphic 16:9)

16:9 Full Height Anamorphic Image on 16:9 screen.

16:9 Full Height Anamorphic Image on 4:3 Screen, notice the tornado appears to be stretched compared to above.

In the case of some DVD's it can be even more confusing because they retain the 2.35:1 aspect ratio of the original film, but are designed to be viewed on a 16:9 TV with black bars at the top and bottom.

So in the modern video world shooting widescreen correctly means shooting with a camera that can produce an image with an aspect ratio of 16:9 that fills the full height of the video screen, ie. Anamorphic 16:9 or Full height Anamorphic 16:9.

If this image is viewed on a conventional 4:3 TV it will appear stretched vertically. To view it correctly it must be viewed on a monitor that has either a screen with a 16:9 aspect ratio, or is capable of squashing the image vertically.

Any image that appears on a normal 4:3 TV to have black bars at the top and bottom of the image is NOT a true widescreen image, this is a "letterboxed" image. Stretching a letterboxed image vertically to fill the screen on a widescreen TV will result in a low quality image.

To add even more to the confusion many cameras that can shoot Anamorphic 16:9 only have a 4:3 viewfinder. The image displayed in the viewfinder may be shown as a letterboxed image (depending on the cameras menu settings) while the recorded pictures and the pictures comming out of the camera will be Full Height Anamorphic pictures so they will appear stretched on a 4:3 monitor. For proper monitoring a 16:9 monitor is needed. Some domestic video cameras claim to be able to shoot widescreen, often these cameras only produce a letterboxed image which should not be regarded as proper widescreen.

So as you can see the term "widescreen" can mean many things, it could be cinema widescreen at 2.35:1, it could be Full Height Anamorphic 16:9, or it could mean letterboxed 4:3. It is important therefore to be specific about what aspect ratio you want to shoot and how it will be displayed. All too often I have been asked to do a widescreen shoot, shot it in 16:9 FHA and then been asked why it looks stretched when viewed on a 4:3 TV, the viewer expecting to see black bars at the top and bottom. This can be fixed in post production with an Aspect ratio converter or DVE, but its best to make sure everyone knows what to expect from the outset.