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TATA Sky Plus NO WIDESCREEN / 16:9 Why Go Widescreen?
As the television world makes the transition from the traditional 4:3 format to 16:9 wide-screen, many people ask "Why? What's Wrong with 4:3? Should I convert to widescreen?".
These are valid questions for both programme makers at one end and viewers at the other end.
Producers and broadcasters need to decide whether to make the difficult and expensive transition to widescreen.
Viewers need to decide whether to upgrade their 4:3 TV set to widescreen.
We will attempt to answer this question from both points of view. However we should point out that in the long run there is one simple fact which overrides all other arguments: Widescreen is the new standard and everyone will eventually be using it whether they like it or not. Whilst some people will hold on to 4:3 as long as they can, the future of widescreen is inevitable. The real question is not "Should I go widescreen?" but "Should I go widescreen now, or should I wait?".
First of all, let's ask some general questions.
Is Widescreen Better than 4:3?
Although it's a subjective question and there may never be 100% agreement, the answer is widely accepted as being yes. Widescreen is considered to be a more natural view for humans, more closely simulating the way we see the world than the "tunnel vision" view of 4:3.
When Will Widescreen Become the Dominant Format?
This depends largely on where in the world you live. You should ask your local dealers and follow retail trends in your country. Widescreen is already the format of choice in most developed countries. By 2010, 4:3 will probably appear quite outdated.
Now let's consider the people who make and broadcast TV programmes.
Why Produce Widescreen Programmes?
For television production companies, it is very difficult and expensive converting from traditional formats to widescreen. However the inevitability of widescreen means that the move must be made sooner or later. Large producers with large budgets will be making the move soon (if they haven't done it already), smaller producers may hold out longer but will eventually be forced to make the move or face redundancy.
In addition to this commercial reality, there are several reasons to create widescreen programming:
The widescreen format is destined to become the preferred choice of most viewers. Programmes will be more popular in widescreen and retain value longer.
Creating television programmes in essentially the same format as theatrical release films makes it easier to transfer from one medium to the other.
Many types of programme will benefit from the extra screen space, not just feature films. For example, many sports are well-suited to widescreen.
Widescreen provides more options for split-screen images; for example, two simultaneous camera views or devoting part of the screen to graphics.
In the end, producers will create widescreen content for the simple reason that the market will demand it. This brings us to the consumers...
Why Buy a Widescreen TV?
This decision will depend mainly on three things:
Do You Actually Need a New TV?
Are you buying a TV and trying to decide which format to go with, or are you deciding between keeping your current TV and upgrading?
If you are happy enough with your current TV, there is no urgency to upgrade. Television producers know that 4:3 sets will be around for many years and they need to be catered for.
If you are tossing up between 4:3 and widescreen for your new TV, we recommend widescreen unless you have some specific reason to buy 4:3. Televisions are a relatively long-term investment and your new TV will still be young when widescreen becomes the dominant format.
What do you watch, and what is available in widescreen?
If you watch a lot of DVDs, especially feature films, you'll certainly be interested in widescreen. Whereas VHS movies are usually optimised for 4:3 TVs, DVDs are generally optimised for widescreen viewing.
For television programmes, you'll want to know what widescreen options are available in your area. Most developed countries broadcast at least some widescreen content, but if most of the programmes you watch are still 4:3 you may actually find widescreen less enjoyable.
What Are Prices Like?
If there is still a significant price difference between formats in your area, this may be a significant factor in your decision.
Conclusion
We acknowledge that there are differing opinions on this topic, but in our opinion:
If you are in the business of making video and television programmes, you should either be using widescreen already or planning for it.
For most consumers, there is no particular hurry to buy a widescreen TV. However if you are about to buy a new TV anyway then you should probably go for a widescreen if possible.
Aspect Ratio
The term Aspect Ratio refers to the width of a picture (or screen) in relation to its height. Ratios are expressed in the form "width x height". For example, a 4x3 ratio means the picture is 4 units wide by 3 units high. Alternatively a colon may be used (e.g. 4:3 or 16:9) or a ratio to the number 1 (e.g. 1.33:1 or 1.78:1).
Note that the actual physical size of the picture is irrelevant aspect ratio refers only to the relationship between width and height.
The three most common aspect ratios are shown below. There are many variations in addition to these but most video and film production uses one of these formats.
4x3
This is the standard television format used throughout the second half of the 20th Century. Sometimes referred to as 12x9.
16x9
This format has gained acceptance as the new standard for widescreen TV, DVD and high-definition video.
21x9 (Cinemascope)
A very wide screen format used for theatrical release movies.
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Converting Between Aspect Ratios
The problem of converting pictures between different formats has plagued film and television companies for years. Conversions almost always involve compromise and often annoy the end user, the film director, or both.
For example, if we take the 29x9 image above and convert it to a narrower format, we will have to lose quite a large part of the picture. The blue lines show where the picture will be cropped at 16x9, and the red lines show a 4x3 version.
4x3 Aspect Ratio
4x3 (AKA 4:3, 12:9, 12x9 or 1.33:1) is an aspect ratio used in traditional television broadcast. It means the image is four units wide by three units high.
4x3 was the standard ratio used in early cinematic film production. It is rumoured that theatrical widescreen ratios were developed in part as a response to television. Film producers needed something to keep theatrical films superior to television, and widescreen did the job.
In modern times, 4x3 has been adopted as the aspect ratio for IMAX film production.
4x3 works well for certain types of program, e.g. talking heads. However it is not considered to be the best format for general use because the viewport is too narrow to simulate human vision. Widescreen aspect ratios are seen as more desirable, hence the gradual phasing out of 4x3 in favour of 16x9 for video and television.
16x9 Aspect Ratio
16x9 (also written 16:9 or 1.78:1) is an aspect ratio which is replacing the traditional 4x3 ratio in video and television production. When people talk about "widescreen" they usually mean 16x9, although technically it is only one of several common widescreen formats.
16x9 is something of a compromise between 4x3 and much wider ratios like Cinemascope (used for theatrical release). For this reason, movies shown on a 16x9 television in their native aspect ratio may still have letterbox bars above and below the picture. Alternatively, the picture may be cropped slightly as in the pan & scan technique.
16x9 is the default aspect ratio for HDTV formats. It is becoming the standard for televisions and home video cameras.
Note: 16x9 can be achieved with the same pixel resolution as standard 4x3 video, by using wider rectangular pixels.
Convert 4x3 Video to 16x9 Widescreen
There are three ways to convert standard 4x3 video into 16x9 widescreen: Pillars, Stretch and Zoom.
Pillars
In this method there is no alteration to the image. The 4x3 footage is simply placed in the centre of the 16x9 frame, leaving vertical black bars (pillars) on each side of the frame.
This is the "pure" method as it does not distort or lose any part of the original image.
Stretch
To maximise screen use, the 4x3 image can be stretched horizontally to fill the available space.
This method is popular with widescreen TV owners watching traditional 4x3 television programs. In some cases it can be surprisingly effective but purists shy away from it due to the picture distortion. Stretching is especially bad at making people look fat.
Zoom
The third method is to magnify the 4x3 image until it fills the widescreen frame but keeps the correct aspect ratio. This is similar to stretching, except that the image is zoomed in proportion without any picture distortion. Unfortunately this means losing parts of the image at the top and bottom.
Recommendation
Unfortunately there is no ideal way to convert 4x3 into 16x9, but in order to preserve the original quality and composition, pillars are the best option.
Letterbox Format
Letterboxing is a technique used to display widescreen content on a traditional 4x3 screen such as those used by old-style television sets. The technique is very simple the picture frame is reduced in size until it fits the screen, leaving black bars above and below the picture. The effect is like looking through the slot of a letterbox, hence the name.
This is the "purest" method of converting widescreen films and programs to 4x3. The entire frame and artistic composition is retained, unlike the alternative pan and scan method. For this reason, letterboxing is generally preferred by film directors and enthusiasts.
However the letterbox format has not been as popular with the general public. The image is certainly smaller, making it more difficult to see on a smaller television. The problem is worse in countries using the NTSC standard, which has a lower resolution to begin with.
One of the most common complaints is that people feel they are losing part of the picture with letterboxing. Some viewers feel they are being ripped off when a program doesn't fill their entire screen. Of course this is somewhat ironic, given that the more widely-accepted pan and scan method does lose part of the image.
Convert 16x9 Video to 4x3
There are two common ways to convert widescreen video into the standard 4x3 format: Letterbox and Pan & Scan.
Letterbox
The letterbox format is so-called because it creates black bars above and below the image which gives the appearance of looking through a letterbox. This is the "pure" method as it preserves the entire widescreen frame. For this reason, letterboxing is preferred by film directors and enthusiasts.
To convert widescreen to 4x3 in a video project, the footage is simply imported and reduced in size until it fits the 4x3 frame.
Pan and Scan
Pan and Scan is the traditional method of displaying widescreen content in broadcast television and old VHS movies. The widescreen image is cropped at the sides and only the main part of the image is shown.
This method has the advantage of utilizing the entire frame, but the disadvantage of losing parts of the original image.
There are two ways to create a pan and scan video:
1. Crop the entire video and leave the centre 4x3 image. Technically, this is not "pan and scan" it's just a cropped image.
2. As the video progresses, the editor constantly adjusts the cropped image left and right to display the most important part of the image (panning and scanning). This requires much more effort but results in much better framing.
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Recommendation
We recommend the letterbox format in most cases. It's the only faithful way to present widescreen material in 4x3.
However there are some cases where pan and scan works quite well. If you can use this method without losing important elements of the composition, it can be worth considering. In particular, if you shoot the widescreen footage yourself, you can often shoot using 4x3 safe framing. This means you plan the footage to work in either aspect ratio (but this still often involves compromise).
Shooting "4x3 Safe" Footage
Shooting "4x3-safe" means shooting widescreen footage (usually 16x9) that can also be used for standard 4x3 distribution without ruining the picture composition. It attempts to get the best of both worlds shots that look good on both 16x9 and 4x3 televisions.
This technique assumes the widescreen footage will be converted to 4x3 by cropping the frame, i.e. chopping of the left and right portions and leaving the centre portion. The idea is simply to frame your shots so the important subjects and action are kept within the centre 4x3 area.
Many widescreen cameras have optional 4x3-safe guides. These are lines that appear in the viewfinder showing the 4x3 safe area. The image below is a simulated viewfinder with white 4x3-safe guides. As you shoot, you need to simultaneously frame the area inside the white lines as well as the entire widescreen area.
The images below show how this shot will look on both aspect ratios:
Notes:
4x3-safe shooting is a compromise. In order to keep the action in the centre, you often find that the widescreen framing can't be as interesting as you would like. In the widescreen image above, for example, the extra screen space at the edges is somewhat wasted. Too much emphasis on the centre of the frame is not best practice for composition, so you may need to be creative to find ways of making both versions attractive.
If the video project is to be converted using the pan & scan technique, you have more flexibility. In this case your 4x3-safe area doesn't always have to be in the centre.
Pan & Scan
Pan and scan is a technique used to convert widescreen film or video footage into a conventional 4x3 aspect ratio (used by old-style television sets). Pan and scan involves a process of selecting the most important part of the frame and discarding the other parts. In this way the image width is reduced to fit the 4x3 screen dimensions.
The example below shows how a shot can be cropped using pan and scan.
As you can see, the two versions are quite different. This is a good example of how much the original framing is changed and how much the process is at the mercy of the pan and scan operator. This is why many film directors hate pan and scan it can easily destroy the intended composition.
The most popular alternative to pan and scan is the letterbox format, in which the original composition is retained at the expense of placing black bars above and below the picture. Unfortunately this option is widely disliked by viewers who feel that they are somehow losing part of the image.
Aspect ratios
A DVD video stream is 720x480, right? But 720/480 = 1.5 which is an impossible aspect ratio for a movie. And what about full screen, widescreen, anamorphic, etc?
Many people are unfamiliar with these terms and are unsure about how to resize. This article tries to explain some of these mysteries.
DAR - or how to make the DVD look right
Each MPEG-2 Video stream has a DAR (Display Aspect Ratio) flag. The flag tells the player for what kind of target display the stream has been encoded. There's 4 values: 1:1, 4:3, 16:9 and 2.11:1. The first and last one are not terribly important since there's no TVs having these aspect ratios. A video stream having a DAR of 16:9 is designated for a 16:9 TV, but that doesn't mean it can't be used for 4:3 TVs. The same applies to a DAR of 4:3.
Now let's have a look at a real example: Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery, R1. As this is an NTSC disc the video stream has a resolution of 720x480 (PAL discs have 720x576.. but everything explained in this article also applies for these streams, but the resizing takes the vertical resolution 576 into account). This disc contains 2 versions of the movie: widescreen version and standard version. Standard (also called fullscreen on this disc) is the standard for a 4:3 TV, that is a picture that fills the whole screen, whereas widescreen in this case means 16:9. The expression widescreen should not be used in that way since there is 2 different widescreen variants: letterboxed widescreen and anamorphic widescreen, both of which will be illustrated a little farther down the line. After ripping you can load the VOBs from the widescreen side into DVD2AVI and you'll get an output which looks like the following:
This looks a bit strange doesn't it? Of course, it's 720x480 which gives an aspect ratio of 1:1.5 whereas the movie actually has an aspect ratio of 1:1.85.
When you press F5 for preview the statistic window will tell you that this is a 16:9 stream.
When you watch the movie in your software DVD player what you'll get is this:
This looks better, right? People are not longer squeezed and thin, they look the way they looked on the big screen.
What has happened here? The studio has made an anamorphic widescreen transfer. It took the full frame from the camera (as shown on the left), then horizontally squeezed it to fit the resolution of the DVD (the first picture). Then they set the 16:9 DAR flag which tells the player to unsqueeze the picture again.
Mathematically seen this works as follows: We have a 720x480 MPEG-2 stream. You multiply the vertical resolution with the aspect ratio (480*16/9=853) which gives you the horizontal resolution for a properly stretched movie. So the 720x480 stream will be stretched horizontally to 853x480 during playback. This allows to use the full vertical resolution of the DVD which retains maximum quality.
When you encode for a PC based format (like DivX) you'll have to first unqueeze the picture and then resize that to your desired resolution (this would correspond to a stream having a 1:1 DAR). Formats for standalone players like VCD and SVCD work differently, since they too have a DAR flag (4:3 or 16:9, where the latter won't work properly on all known players). So let's take a look at what has to be done here. The first step is to get the correct aspect ratio at the DVD resolution. In order to do that the picture has to be resized as can be seen below:
Compare this with the first and 2nd picture. You'll see that it has the same resolution as the first one but the same (correct) aspect ratio as the 2nd one. This process of taking a frame and resizing it to the DVD resolution while retaining the correct aspect ratio is called letterboxing. As you can see we use less of the available vertical resolution. This is ideal for 4:3 TVs since there the picture can be displayed as is, whereas when you have a 16:9 DVD the player will first have to perform this letterboxing transfer (which involves a slight, albeit unnoticable, quality loss). If you haven't properly set up your DVD player (4:3 TV = set the TV format to 4:3 or 4:3 letterboxed, 16:9 TV: set the TV format to 16:9) there will be no letterboxing and the picture will look squished as in the first screenshot.
What is important to notice here is that your playback device does letterboxing for a 16:9 disc when watching it on a 4:3 TV. Now when we're encoding such a stream for VCD and SVCD this process has to be done as well. Unfortunately the only encoder which supports to select a DAR of the input stream is TMPG (set source aspect ratio in the advanced settings, plus video arrange mode to full screen while preserving the aspect ratio). When you don't go thru TMPG you'll have to come up with another way of properly letterboxing. One way is VirtualDub where you resize to a smaller resolution than your target resolution and then add black bars (hence the resizing parameters in the CCE guide which look very strange at first sight).
There are also DVDs which have a DAR of 4:3 but contain widescreen picture. In fact, it should say letterboxed widescreen. These DVDs have been mastered as just explained. When you watch these DVDs on a 16:9 TV the picture will both have to be stretched horizontally and vertically whereas when having an anamorphic widescreen picture the picture will only have to be stretched horizontally, giving a larger vertical resolution to work with and therefore a better picture. In the early DVD days letterboxed widescreen transfers were quite popular, especially amongst US studios, whereas in Europe where 16:9 TVs are more popular, 16:9 has been something of a standard from the very beginning. Fortunately nowadays most DVDs are 16:9, and only some stubborn directors and cheap studios refuse to have a new 16:9 transfer created.
Now as you might know the resolution of both VCD and SVCD is not 4:3 even though the video streams have DAR 4:3. But SVCD is 480x480 and if you apply the same calculation rule as above (480*4/3= 640) the output resolution is 640x480 which corresponds to 4:3. Note that the video is stored horizontally squeezed on the disc, and will be unsqueezed during playback. So in fact, if you take the full frame from the (S)VCD it doesn't have the right aspect ratio, which is the exact same situation as with a DVD. Obiously the same rules appy for PAL SVCDs (576*4/3 = 768 so after strecthing you have a 768x576 picture) and VCDs.
An important thing to keep in mind here is that the Windows Media Player does not know about DARs usually (this might be different depending on what MPEG-2 filters you have installed) so it might happen that it plays your SVCD MPG as 480x480 and it looks squished again. But don't worry.. players with SVCD support will stretch it properly and giving you the correct aspect ratio.
Pan & Scan transfers
Now a look at a sad chapter in video history: Since many TVs today are still in 4:3 format many films are still being released as pan&scan copies, or in other words: they fill the screen. 16:9 TV owners hate 4:3 movies with all of their hearts, and after reading this I hope you'll never again buy such a crappy transfer since basically what's going on is crippling the video. Fortunately in the DVD age these kind of transfers are less and less common, despite DVD going mainstream and cutting into the rental biz.
Let's have a look at our source frame again.
What is being done in a pan&scan transfer is that a part from the source frame, having an aspect ratio of 1:1.33 or 4:3 is being cut out. This is symbolized by the red square in the picture. This "window" is not fixed but flexible. So when the actor moves to the right border the window can follow him up to a certain extent. This is the pan part of pan&scan. In certain cases the window might also zoom in on the frame, hence the scan part.
As you can already see in the screenshot pan&scan transfers lose a lot of of the source picture and ruin the director's vision of how the movie should look like.
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