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Monday, March 26, 2001

Open Wide: Creating That Widescreen Look

Widescreen can have different meanings, depending on how you have to deliver. Here’s some tips on creating that widescreen look.

For years, the widescreen look has held a certain allure. Most widescreen imagery originated as film that was reframed for television, implying “classy”, “expensive” and “not of video.” Now, with the arrival of high-definition television, widescreen also means “cutting edge” and “the future”, and more clients want that look. The question is, how can you achieve it without hi-def sources? As strongly as our hi-def future beckons, the reality is that many productions for some time will need to be created or repurposed to standard definition.

When a client says they want to “do a project in widescreen”, they could mean one of several different things:

• true high-definition video
• playback of “anamorphic” standard-definition video on a widescreen monitor
• squeezing widescreen content into a “letterbox” for display on a normal 4:3 video screen
• merely adding black bars to the bottom and top of normal 4:3 video to fake the widescreen/letterbox look
• a design that implies widescreen, even if the playback will be on a normal 4:3 screen

It’s your job to resolve the difference between what the client says they want and what they really need. The true high-definition case is fairly straightforward: The footage originates widescreen, and will be played back widescreen. It’s the standard definition cases that are trickier, and that’s what we’re going to focus on here. We’ll start by going over the technical issues, and then on the last two pages give a couple of case studies on alluding to a widescreen look inside a 4:3 frame.

Stretch to Fit

Let’s start with the anamorphic option. Normal video has a 4:3 image aspect ratio: in other words, the final image is supposed to be 4 units wide to 3 units high. Widescreen video has an image aspect ratio of 16:9, meaning 16 units wide to 9 high. Compare this to the 4:3 image, which can be thought of as 12:9 (just multiple by 3).

A normal 4:3 frame (left) by definition does not contain as much image area in the width as a 16:9 widescreen image framed to have the same height (right). So how do you fit one into the other?

All hi-def video is widescreen. However, you can’t assume widescreen automatically means high definition - for example, standard definition DVDs can hold widescreen format movies. Video engineers devised a way to cram a 16:9 image into a standard-definition video frame intended to hold a 12:9 (4:3) image: they merely squish the image narrower when they store it on tape, and stretch it out wider again when they display it on a monitor. This technique, usually called anamorphic widescreen, means a widescreen image can be recorded onto any normal tape - including BetaSP, DigiBeta, or DV - as long as you have some extra electronics at the camera to squish the captured image down from 16 units wide to 12 units wide. What concerns us here is how to deal with this distorted image when we capture them into our computer.

It’s not immediately obvious when a footage item was recorded using anamorphic widescreen - after all, its pixel dimensions are the same as normal 4:3 captures. If the footage was not already correctly labeled or tagged, you will have to stare at the footage and figure out of things look squished horizontally (which means it was recorded anamorphic), or somewhere between normal and slightly wide (typical NTSC D1/DV pixel aspect ratio).

It is not immediately obvious when a 4:3 video frame is holding an anamorphically-squeezed 16:9 image. Stare at the people in the clip at the left: What is the true aspect ratio of this clip? The people in the water in the upper left look normal, but there’s something about the surfer in the lower right...

Below is the same image, correctly stretched out its intended widescreen size. (Footage courtesy Artbeats.)

Editing • Motion Graphics • Post Production •

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