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.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |