14:9 Television

five also have a nasty habit of buying films in 4:3 instead of 16:9

So do they actually crop an already cropped widescreen film into widescreen again?! If that's true if you're watching this cropped film on a 14:9 analogue you surely are losing a massive percentage of the original picture!

A bizzare state of affairs now prevails in Ireland with Fawlty Towers.
RTÉ have just bought it from the BBC for its by now almost annual summer run, yet the original 4:3 is being broadcast in 14:9, despite the overwhelming majority of viewers here watching on 4:3 analogue!
(RTÉ is widescreen on Sky for a minority of viewers)

This is a serious issue - are broadcasters in the future going to commit themselves to broadcasting 4:3 footage as it was meant to be seen, or will we all be supposedly conditioned to 16:9 and not be able to bear to watch a gasp! smaller 4:3 image on our widescreen sets?

I hate watching 4:3 footage cropped for 16:9 programmes. If the majority of footage is 4:3, the entire programme, even in these 'modern times' should be made in 4:3 also.

What is with the lack of headroom on 16:9 proper? Even the BBC on News 24 etc often poorly frame with only a tiny amount of headroom, and at times if any at all on other programmes!
This I think highligfhts the problem with 16:9 - as has been pointed out by others, it's a lateral medium, but too often featuring vertical subjects, i.e. people.
So to fit in as much as possible, the subject is shoved right up to the top of the picture in a standard mid-shot or MCU, chopping off most, if not all of their headroom.

4:3 is much more flattering. This has nothing to do with accounting for safe areas, rather it is a basic compositional problem that arises with the widescreen format.
Comparitively there's way too much vacant space either side of a subject, whilst not enough vertically, So as with BBC News you end up with dead space wither side of the newsreader, and poor framing with not enough headroom.
Perhaps the 4:3 headroom we're used to will just have to go, but this just serves to reinforce for me how inapproprate 16:9 is for the basic human form. Okay, television is not just about human froms, but is a large part - as equally important as other subjects anyway.

One of the most common reasons for less headroom in 16:9 compared to 4:3 is the different gallery monitoring.

Most 16:9 monitors in galleries are letterboxed 4:3 (as are some camera viewfinders) - so people often ignore domestic cut off vertically - and subconsciously incorporate a bit of the black bars - when framing 16:9 stuff, so reduce the headroom.

Of course this reduced headroom then matches the cropped headroom on the 4:3 material cropped to 14:9 pillarbox as well...

I don't fully agree that 4:3 is preferable - for drama and entertainment there are real advantages to 16:9 composition.

However you have to change the way you shoot stuff a bit - for instance low-angle stuff often looks better in 16:9, whereas high angle stuff, for some reason, usually looks better in 4:3. Complementary often two-shots work nicely in 16:9 - whereas they often look contrived in 4:3.

no they just buy the pan scan version i think

That sounds rediculous! Event he BBC aren't that bad, As long as it's outside the CBBC slot, 4:3 programmes get shown as 4:3, they are never cropped.

this is what happens when you go to uni, you even notice things like this, with widescreen, I really don't understand the purpose of widescreening news in the first place, does anyone know why the BBC took the step to widescreen news?

Well for drama, movies, entertainment and sport, there are advantages to using widescreen, and very clear ones, BBC World seem to be very bad at framing, Manisha Tank's head was cut off at one point and I was watching this in 14:9 mode, now in full 16:9, this effect would have been worse given you lose the overscan area in full mode.

on a 16.9 tv you can put it in 14.9 although it is not the samer i have noticed ITV News has gone into 14.9 because on a normal TV (4.3) there are no lines at the top and the bottom but on a widescreen TV (16.9 there is a line on the side of the screen and the screen does not look as stetched how does that work it is not widescreen on a normal tv but on sky,freeview and cable it has been put in widescreen

AFAIK BBC World isn't broadcast in full 16:9 anywhere, so quite why everything's in 14:9 letterbox is a bit of a mystery.

Since we're all talking about Widescreen at the moment, could someone explain to me why Sky One show all their adverts in 14:9 when they are more than capable of showing their 16:9 programs in 16:9?

For some reason ITV have chosen to make their news broadcasts look **** on digital. Possibly to match the content.