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Enb letterbox remove12/30/2023 ![]() I exaggerated it a bit so you could see the difference in lower resolution. Original (top) vs upconverted or "scaled" (bottom). Often they buttons are labeled "wide" or "format." These exist largely because people get upset that black bars cover the screen, thinking they weren't seeing "the whole image" (even though, as we've discussed, they were). Cropping and stretchingĪll TVs come with aspect ratio controls to zoom or stretch the image so it fills the screen. Here's a great collection with plenty of other examples. And for some films presented in IMAX, like "The Dark Knight" and "Tron: Legacy," only certain portions were shot in the 1.44:1 IMAX format. "Oz the Great and Powerful" switched from black-and-white 4x3 to color 2.35:1 after the protagonist moved to Oz, for example, and "Life of Pi" was a 16x9 film that included two changes, once during the flying fish scene and another in homage to the cover of the book. Many directors use this format to its full advantage, putting important aspects of the story all over the screen, or setting up beautiful shots, all of which gets lost if the aspect ratio isn't correct.Īnd sometimes the same film will actually employ different aspect ratios, often for effect. As in, everything the director intended you to see. So even though it seems like you're seeing less image, you're actually seeing the entire image. Or with small letterbox bars when showing a 1.85:1 movie (comedies, some smaller dramatic films):Ī 1.85:1 aspect ratio image as shown on a 1.78:1 (16x9) HD/UHDTV. Bonus points if you can figure out what town this is in. Most Blu-ray and streaming services show these movies in their original aspect ratio, with either thick black "letterbox" bars at the top and bottom of 2.39:1 aspect movies (2.40:1 as it's put on the Blu-ray):Ī 2.40:1 image as shown on a 1.78:1 (16x9) HD/UHDTV. Depending on your favorite old movie, however, these could range from 1.37:1 ("Casablanca") all the way to 2.76:1 ("Ben-Hur," and more recently, "The Hateful Eight"). These days the most common are 1.85:1, and 2.39:1. Hollywood has had many, many different aspect ratios over the years. Old shows would have sidebars ("pillarboxing"), new shows would fill your TV. ![]() If all you watched on your TV were current TV shows, with the occasional rerun of "Night Court" thrown in, you'd be all set. This makes everyone look exceptionally fat.Ī common way to show 4x3 content on a 16x9 screen. This often removes things like foreheads.Īnother even less ideal way to do it is to stretch the image horizontally. Nightly news shows often show a blurred out version of the image on either side of the "real" image.Īnother, less ideal, way is to crop and zoom on the image, removing the top and bottom, but fitting the image on the 16x9 screen. ESPN, for example, does this a lot with old footage, putting their logo on the right and left. The easiest way is to put bars on the left and right. ![]() You can't fit a square peg in a rectangular hole, so to speak. In order to fit them on your wider screen, 16x9 HDTV, something has to give. Old TV shows generally have an aspect ratio of 4x3. So for every 16 inches wide your TV screen is, it's 9 inches tall. If it's been a while since you've seen a tube TV (try a cheap hotel.), another really common 4:3 device is the iPad. They had an aspect ratio of 4x3, which could also be described as 1.33:1 (technically, 1.33333333333.:1 but let's not get too crazy). For example, the old tube-style TVs were slightly wider than they were tall. Things start getting a little confusing when you have stranger ratios. A rectangle that's twice as wide as it is tall would have an aspect ratio of 2x1, or 2:1. ![]() "Aspect ratio" is the ratio of the width of a rectangle to its height.Ī perfect square has an aspect ratio of 1x1, or 1:1. Note how much is lost when cropping the original image (bottom) to fit screens with a squarer aspect ratio.
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