Here is my picture:
Now, suppose you have a widescreen TV. My picture isn't wide, so it's going to look like one of these:
It should be quite obvious to you that the image on the right is incorrect. My fat does not, in fact, need magnification! If the image on the right looks OK to you, see an optometrist and a psychiatrist, in that order, immediately.
This page exists in order to point out the very silly mistake that oh so many people make, and to encourage all who are able to correct it, to right that which is wrong, to preserve the ratio.
Ages ago, pretty much all movies were shot using the academic ratio, also known as 1.33:1 or 4:3. That picture of me up top, that's a 4:3 picture. When television came around, it too used 4:3. It was and remains a very good standard shape, able to handle most subject matter reasonably well.
Among the advancements made in film, in order to provide theatre patrons with experiences they could not have on their television sets, were experiments in higher aspect ratios. Wider pictures. Panavision and Cinemascope, and a bunch of other words that are probably trademarked, were wider formats for movies. Framing shots with a wider ratio let filmmakers create much more dramatic imagery, but it opened a can of worms which we're still dealing with to this day.
Finally, more pictures!
Here are some widescreen images. The one on the left uses the standard widescreen ratio, 16:9. The one on the right is in Cinemascope, 2.35:1. You've seen plenty of movies shot at both ratios. In a theatre, you might not even notice which shape is being used.
These wide pictures have a problem, though. How do we show them on all the old standard 4:3 screens out there? The correct answer is to shrink the picture down:
But, for fear of stupid people whining about "black bars", most film studios decided instead to crop the picture, throwing away the composition:
Notice that we're losing lots of the original subject matter by cropping. To the credit of stupid whiny people and film studios, what's left of the cropped picture is more detailed than a shrunk image. But, cropping was and is still wrong and horrible on anything with even the slightest artistic value.
A third option when putting a wide image on a narrow screen is to squish it:
Now we're not losing very much detail, and we haven't cropped out any of the original subject matter, but it looks horribly wrong! We've failed to preserve the ratio.
Enough talk of old TVs. 16x9 is the new 4x3, so to speak. It's everywhere. You'd be hard-pressed to find a new, high-definition TV set that isn't widescreen. Personally, I think that's great. I like wide, dramatic shots. There's not much drama in my wide pictures up there, but you get the idea.
The downside of this new standard is, of course, that we've already got tons of content that was intended for the old 4:3 standard. That's not really a problem, actually. We can very easily preserve the ratio and show a 4:3 picture on a 16:9 screen:
Unfortunately, for reasons entirely beyond my comprehension, most wide screens out there showing 4:3 pictures are either cropping, which is horrible but not terribly common, or stretching, which is also horrible and is seen absolutely everywhere:
That awful stretched image on the right... I know you've seen it. In a sports bar, or on a display model at an electronics store, or even on the little DVD player in your van on which the kids watched this year's cute-furry-animals-share-heartwarming-fart-jokes movie.
Fix it. Find the "zoom" or "wide" button, and fix it. Preserve the ratio!
Showing an image at the wrong shape, making the reporters and actors look fat, that's one thing. One stupid thing. But things can go much worse than that. And they do. Very often.
Take, for example, those wide pictures:
Say they were cropped for old 4:3 TVs, and recorded that way to tape or disc:
Then, say that tape or disc was played back to a widescreen TV that isn't set up correctly:
In the top row, you see two brutal rounds of cropping, throwing away about half of the original picture. Half! And in the bottom row, we've not only chopped off a good chunk of the original picture, we've added insult to injury by stretching out and making fat anything that survived!
But say the movie was adapted to 4:3 correctly, without cropping:
There's still the chance to screw up, and I've seen this plenty:
This is exactly why widescreen TVs even have that "zoom" setting. Black bars should only be used to preserve the ratio, not to screw it up!
This is neither rocket science nor brain surgery. Preserve the ratio. Set up your screen properly. If you see one set up stupidly, fix it. A widescreen TV can be a beautiful thing, if it's showing the picture the way it's supposed to:
