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Filed under: Editing •Motion Graphics •Post Production •

Open Wide: Creating That Widescreen Look

Getting Boxed In

The workflows we’ve discussed so far are intended for playback on a widescreen monitor. However, not everyone has a widescreen monitor yet; in the near term it is still likely your creations will be played back in 4:3. How do you fit widescreen inside a normal screen?

The simplest way is to chop off the left and right edges, and just display the 4:3 (or “12:9") center section of a 16:9 image. You may laugh, but a lot of current hi-def widescreen production is being shot with the knowledge this is precisely what will happen when it is downcoverted to standard definition video. (See the sidebar Pan and Scan below for how film is handled when transferred to normal video.)

But one of the points of this article is maintaining as much of the original integrity of the widescreen image as possible, even when you play it back on a 4:3 monitor. To do this, you have to scale down your widescreen image so that the edges fit into a 4:3 frame. The result is the top and bottom no longer fill up the entire height. These gaps are typically filled with black; the result is called a “letterbox”.

How much do you scale down by? The technical answer is 12 ÷ 16 = 75% for a 16:9 source (different film formats have different image aspect ratios). But the result is quite a shrinkage in the size of the original video, making details appear relatively small on the screen; you also get rather large black bars above and below. Some feel the average viewing public would be turned off by this. As a result, this is where management bumps the technician out of the chair and starts fiddling with the numbers.

A common compromise (which I learned years ago from fellow PVC Founder Frank Capria) is to scale the source as if its original aspect ratio was 15:9, not 16:9, and fit just that portion of the image into a 4:3 frame. This means scaling the source by 80% and centering it in the frame. A bit more image gets lost on the left and right edges (note that even with 16:9 letterboxing, you’re losing some of the edges to the overscan margin on a monitor), but you also get smaller black areas and taller actors on the screen. The BBC goes one step further and scales the source 85.7% to fit a 14:9 viewing area into the 4:3 screen. These options are illustrated below:

The above image on the left is our original widescreen frame; the image on the right is how it would look “center cut” to a 4:3 frame by keeping the height at 100% and cropping the left and right. This is a common practice when hi-def programming is rebroadcast on standard-def channels!

Here are three different variations on letterboxing the same image: Scaling it down 75% until it all fits in (upper left), or scale it less so that only a 15:9 (upper right) or 14:9 (left) center portion is kept, with only some of the edges being cropped off (indicated by the white outlines in the gray pasteboard area). Image courtesy Artbeats.

In reality, none of these numbers are written in stone; you can pick whatever scaling value aesthetically works for you (and the cinematographer, and the producer, and the director, and the station’s management, and...).

sidebar: Pan and Scan

We mention in this article that with a lot of widescreen high definition video production, the path many take today to produce a 4:3 version is to merely chop off the left and right sides - not polite, but fast to keep up with tight production schedules. This is also how film is often treated when transferred to video, but often with the added touch of deciding from scene to scene how much to slice off of each side, or even to animate this window around to follow the action - a procedure known as “pan and scan.” An example of this is shown below; the outlines show the portion of the original image that has been panned off-screen (click on each image to see it full-size):

Others take advantage of the fact that when film is shot, a 4:3 image is actually exposed, with just a widescreen stripe out of the middle projected in the movie theater. If the camerapeople were careful to keep the rest of the frame clean, you can use this entire original image for 4:3 video (meaning you get to see more of the image than originally intended).

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