Can someone explain the logic behind widescreen ?

[Bill]

[boss]

what Dave said.

[Mikey]

Thanks for explaining it Dave

Crazy as it sounds, i'm beginning to understand

[mego73]

There's also 16:9 stuff shot to be 4:3 safe. Like Late Show With David Letterman. On HDTV, it's the 16:9 ratio, on standard TV it's 4:3 but cropped at the sides. It's shot so that it works both ways (nothing too important on the sides).

Saturday Night Live, however, shows on standard TV letterboxed so they don't have to worry about being 4:3 safe.

edited to add: I wrote all this before I looked at DaveMC's post.

I know that shows were beginning to be shot widescreen ever since the 90's but as far as I know, up until at least the 1980's shows were shot in the Academy ratio (1.33 to 1) film Which fit the TV ratio for the most part.

Widescreen in movies is still mostly based of a 1.33 to 1 film frame. In the case of Cinemascope or Panavision, the widescreen image is squeezed on the square film frame. In the case of 1.65-1.85 to one movies the films are shot on a square frame with the intention of matting off the top and bottom. This is why there were times that theatrical films were shown unmatted on TV and you ended up seeing a whole bunch of boom mikes in the shot and other stuff not meant to be seen (like on the early release VHS of Pee Wee's Big Adventure which had a couple camera tricks exposed because it was transferred open matte)

[apes3978]

There's also 16:9 stuff shot to be 4:3 safe. Like Late Show With David Letterman. On HDTV, it's the 16:9 ratio, on standard TV it's 4:3 but cropped at the sides. It's shot so that it works both ways (nothing too important on the sides).

I've got an HDTV and Letterman has the grey bars on either side of the screen, where Leno fills the whole screen... What's up with the Letterman show?

[cjefferys]

I've got an HDTV and Letterman has the grey bars on either side of the screen, where Leno fills the whole screen... What's up with the Letterman show?

Are you sure you are watching Letterman from a HD source? I watch it over the air in HD and it definitely fills the whole screen like Leno does.

[cjefferys]

This is why there were times that theatrical films were shown unmatted on TV and you ended up seeing a whole bunch of boom mikes in the shot and other stuff not meant to be seen (like on the early release VHS of Pee Wee's Big Adventure which had a couple camera tricks exposed because it was transferred open matte)

Not to mention that sometimes an open matte transfer will reveal nudity that wasn't meant to be seen.

[apes3978]

Are you sure you are watching Letterman from a HD source? I watch it over the air in HD and it definitely fills the whole screen like Leno does.

I'll double check tomorrow night, but as I said the last time I tuned into Letterman, there were grey bars on the sides of the screen... it was that way with the show following it too... (And yes, the local affiliate for CBS is broadcasting in HD, and my TV is also HD.)

[mego73]

I've got an HDTV and Letterman has the grey bars on either side of the screen, where Leno fills the whole screen... What's up with the Letterman show?

In HD it does fill up the whole screen. Either you aren't on the HD channel version of your local CBS affiliate or your CBS affiliate does not yet broadcast in HD (even though CBS does).

It's not a given that stations carry network's HD signals. My Fox affiliate only started to broadcast in HD less than a year ago.

P.S. The show following Letterman (Craig Ferguson) is not yet in HD.

[mego73]

Not to mention that sometimes an open matte transfer will reveal nudity that wasn't meant to be seen.

Yup, Sissy Spacek sure found that out.

[jimbutsu]

Mike- to answer your question about "why" we're losing the space -

Originally, before Television, EVERYTHING was the 4:3 television size that you're used to now, and directors framed shots so that everything that was part of the story they wanted to tell fit in the more square space. That's why there's no "widescreen" version of older films- they really were shot in the 4:3 that you're used to. Widescreen displays have "pillarbox" (bars on the sides of the screen) to counter 4:3 TV's "letterbox" (bars on the top and bottom of the screen); good eample of these in action are the Hi-Def releases of the Errol Flynn Robin Hood movie- always has bars on it when you play it back.

At some point, filmmakers realized that viewing spaces are generally wider than they are tall (think movie theaters), so making the screen more rectangular than square created a more immersive experience for the viewer. TV didn't do this for many years because film and television were different media (although, as Dave said, many TV shows were shot on film and can be "wide" even if they were never presented as such). Home theater and HD technology did two things- it made people more interested in their TVs being more like filmscreens (wider), and it made people want the biggest possible screens. Big screens, because of the shape of 90+% of rooms you will ever be in, must be wider than they are tall by a fair bit.

That being the case, directors are now shooting for the screen width they want to use- so as long as the display is appropriate to the intent of the filmmaker, you won't miss a thing. But until they make a TV that can change shape on the fly, we'll either have bars on the top and bottom or bars on the sides.