14:9 Television

ISTR reading somewhere that all of Sky's adverts, for all of their channels, are played out from the same set of servers. As not all of their channels are widescreen capable yet, the format has to remain in a 4:3 frame for all.

BBC News is filmed in 16:9 - sorry - videoed in 16:9 - for the UK therefore everything graphics wise is 14:9 safe. It's easier to put it out in letterbox than arse about with all the graphics on World to make them 4:3 safe.

That would make sense, although I was always under the impression that all graphics on BBC News should be 4:3 safe, hence the position of the tower, etc.. Maybe they don't want reports which originated in 4:3 and were then cropped to 14:9 being cropped again.

BBC News graphics are 4:3 safe because on most/all digiboxes, users can select either to output native 16:9, letterbox 16:9 to a 4:3 frame, or crop 16:9 to a 4:3 frame . Because of this, all programming currently produced must be 4:3 safe.
Instead of having a crop to 4:3 option, digiboxes should convert to 14:9. Then broadcasters would be able to make all widescreen programming 14:9 safe rather than 4:3 safe, and thus be able to more fully utilise the 16:9 frame.

If someone could explain the above point about 4:3 centre cut out to BBC Leeds it would be helpful, the breakfast graphics are regularly 14:9 safe but not 4:3 safe.

BBC News graphics should all be 4:3 safe. (Just as the tower and name supers are - apart from during signing...)

Although News, and most other shows apart from some drama and sport, are shot 14:9 action safe - and shown in 14:9 on analogue - the graphics safe areas for both 4:3 safe and 14:9 safe productions are actually almost identical. (A lot of people think that graphics and action safe are the same thing - they aren't - there are two separate grids...)

The graphics safe area for 4:3 and 14:9 safe shows are both actually 4:3 safe - this is because many digital set top boxes (all Sky boxes for example) either output 16:9 letterbox or 4:3 centre cut out - and don't have a 14:9 option - and thus many people watch 16:9 shows in 4:3 centre cut.

Because graphics are usually important enough to be presented so that they are always legible (name captions, phone numbers, small print on adverts etc.) you can't allow graphics to be anything other than 4:3 safe...

Action and edit decisions are not quite as editorially important as graphics - so action safe is different.

(Of course some producers and tech reviewers miss non-4:3 safe graphics though - and the rules are different for 16:9 action safe I think - though I'm not sure of this)

Watching News 24 today, all astons and tower as usual were all 4:3 safe except for the 'LIVE' bug to the top left which went way beyond the tower - being only 14:9 safe...

I much prefer 4:3 for studio and news production, but agreed 16:9 has its benefits for drama and film.
But they both have their faults and weaknesses and overall they balance each other out, making one wonder about the switchover at all - rather gimmicky in my view.

I've never really understood why widescreen television was considered necessary. I doubt anyone here, even the loudest shouters of widescreen's virtues, genuinely gave such a thing the slightest thought before it existed. I can see people wanting more channels when there were only 2, I can see people wanting colour when there was only black&white, I can see people wanting stereo when there was only mono, I can even see why people now want HDTV when there is only SDTV in this country, but I cannot ever forsee someone wanting to change the aspect ratio of the picture when it had been fixed for almost 40 years prior to the first use of widescreen in this country. When asking the audience of the 80's what was wrong with TV in a technical sense, I can't seriously see 'i want it a different shape' to even get onto the list, let alone make the top 10.

The commercial reasons for introducing it to the cinema are easy to understand - the rise in popularity of domestic TVs hit cinemas hard, they could offer colour but colour TVs wouldn't be far behind (indeed, the US had allready begun broadcasting in colour when many cinema films were still B/W), the only tangible thing they could offer was a significantly bigger screen. Recognising that CRT technology was fast developing and it would soon be possible to make TVs the same size as the average cinema screen, they needed to go for something even bigger. Scaling the existing '4:3 like' (for lack of a better term) screens up in the same ratio wasn't viable, so instead they were scaled up in a single dimension only creating widescreen. This purely commercial reason for changing the shape of the cinema screen was packaged around various pieces of research (which varied greatly in their case for being applied to cinema widescreen) which sold the wider screen as being an improvement.

Most of that is now recycled to justify widescreen TV (along with the promise of being able to watch films 'in their original widescreen', despite virtually no cinema films being made in 16:9) and although many people retrospectively prefer widescreen, I just cannot see how there was enough interest in doing this in a time when there was no widescreen, nor can I see any commercial reason for doing so - all it's done is cause additional expense for broadcasters and although it has shifted new TV sets, people were always going to buy new sets anyway.

Cinema's adoption of widescreen was inevitably the driving force for a move to widescreen TV.

To show a 16:9 or 21:9 film (or similar) on a 4:3 display you either have to letterbox hugely or crop and pan and scan. Pan and scanning is widely despised by many - and letterboxing to very deep degrees (where you end up with less than half of the screen containing picture) is massively unpopular.

With the rise of film viewing in the home - via satellite TV movie channels and pre-recorded formats like VHS - combined with the rise of digital technology (though a solution was sought in the analogue domain as well - MAC and MUSE were both analogue 16:9 capable technologies, and there were analogue 16:9 laserdiscsc) it became easier to produce a 16:9 format that could feed both 16:9 and 4:3 TVs.

Similarly the move to high-definition - started in Japan in the 70s - meant lots of R&D on the "most popular" and aesthetically pleasing way of presenting TV. Every bit of research seems to have arrived on 15:9 or 16:9 - the Japanese originally went with 15:9 for HD (The same ratio Super 16 film delivers) - but tweaked this to 16:9 at some point.

When given a choice between watching material on a 4:3 set and a 16:9 set - especially materially shot for the display format - people prefer the wider image. It is just more natural to the eye/brain - especially at smaller viewing distances.

I'm not arguing that some forms of TV can look better in 4:3 (talking heads for example) - nor that everyone likes it. However it has been an inevitable move since the 70s - usually a case of when not if - and had been waiting for a technology suitable to deliver it. Digital broadcasting and digital recording were the driving forces - as they required adoption of new equipment which could support the new formats in a compatible manner.

The increased cost for producing widescreen wasn't as big as many assume - as sensible broadcasters used the move from analogue to digital studio equipment to also upgrade their kit to be 16:9/4:3 switchable. Cameras are pretty much the only digital devices that come in 4:3 only models these days - and often the 4:3 versions are not the top-line models (with poorer CCD technology etc.) In some areas there was a requirement for extra investment in aspect ratio conversion, but most of the increased costs were a result of the move from analogue to digital production and broadcasting, not a 16:9 cost per se.

There was a lot of talk in the mid 90s of the US HD system also supporting 21:9 broadcast formats to keep Hollywood happy - however whilst these are part of the MPEG2 spec, they aren't part of the US ATSC HD system spec AIUI.

16:9 is a reasonable compromise IMHO - shallow letterboxing works for 21:9 stuff, and pillarboxing of varying degrees allows archive and legacy 4:3 stuff to be shown as well.

(Just as the introduction of colour reduced B&W picture quality - colour cameras were less sharp than the best B&W at change-over, and colour introduced dot crawl etc. for B&W viewers - there has to be a trade-off between compatibility with existing viewers and the introduction of new systems - 14:9 letterbox is a reasonable solution IMHO)

They said that about computers, too



A bit of Googling reveals that "[16:9 is] The shape of most American movies today." and that "1.85:1 [is a] Popular aspect ratio for many movies." There are certainly plenty of films on DVD in a 16:9 ratio.

David

Well, Chris, I certainly gave it some thought long before it was introduced.

I remember being taught about the "golden ratio" in an art lesson at school, back in the nineteen-fifties.

At that time we discussed paintings, the (then) newly introduced cinema ratios and the fact that television would never be able to widen because they'd never be able to fire the cathode rays over the longer distances. Famous last words!

I'm just watching You Only Live Twice on ITV1. The film itself is 2.35:1. The opening shot was at this ratio, then it changed to 16:9 on the first cut. Then when the titles started, it cut to 2.35:1 again. Then , the picture slowly squeezed itself in at the sides so the whole of the active picture was within a 14:9 frame (black bars top and bottom).

Little wonder everyone's so confused...

David