Shooting 16:9 WidescreenIf I have the option, I always rent the widescreen version of a DVD, even though I only own a normal 4:3 television. Of course the image is letterboxed, with black on the top and bottom of the screen, which some folks find annoying. Still, Hollywood shoots for the big screen, which is much wider than television, and something of the art and framing is lost when a movie is simply cropped left and right. Television is slowly changing, however, and one standard that has emerged is 16:9 aspect ratio widescreen television. And while the DV format is not really set up to shoot 16:9 video, it is a possibility. |
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First, let's tale a look at what DV footage looks like on a standard television. The image on the right is a screen grab from a Sony PDX10 (click the thumbnail to see the full-sized version) as it would appear on a normal 4:3 aspect ratio television. Keep in mind that the DV format was designed with 4:3 television in mind. Strictly speaking, it isn't a 4:3 format, but it is pretty close. (The gray frame represents the bevel of your television set, which covers up part of the video shot by your camera.) |
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The cheapest solution to get 16:9 widescreen image framing is to just crop the video on the top and bottom. This is how many consumer camcorders create their 16:9 mode. While you might want to do this for artistic purposes, you should be aware that you are losing 25% of your image data that you can never recover (it appears to be slightly less here because of the television's mask). Although it is more work, I'd recommend capturing as much high-quality footage as you can and then add the optional 16:9 letterbox bars with your editing application. In other words: don't shoot camera-cropped 16:9 video. |
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True anamorphic 16:9 video appears to be cropped as well, but if you look closely, this image has almost the same vertical resolution as the first 4:3 image and is also wider at the same time. You could accomplish this by pulling back a little and camera-cropping the image, but that is not true anamorphic video. |
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16:9 doesn't truly shine until you see it on a proper 16:9 widescreen television. The footage in the shot below is identical to the shot above, only it is viewed on a television with a different aspect ratio. |
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The DV format is strictly defined, however and was designed for 4:3 television (1.33:1 ratio) with raw images that are 720x480 pixels. The trick is to squeeze the 16:9 (1.78:1) ratio picture onto those 720x480 pixels, as pictured to the right. This is the anamorphic process. When a widescreen DVD is made from this squashed DV footage, the DVD player knows to unsquash the image and letterbox it on the average television (as in the third picture above). When connected to a widescreen TV, you get the beautiful image above. These are the same pixels, displayed in different ways. |
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All this magic electronic processing can be a bit hard to understand, but anamorphic film has been shot for decades. Consider all of the theaters around the nation with 35mm projectors. When Hollywood wanted to film epics like Ben Hur and Lawrence of Arabia, it couldn't very well demand that theaters install new projectors for wider film formats. The solution was to use special lenses to optically squash the widescreen image onto standard 35mm film (at left, on top). The theater owners then only had to buy and install the proper lens to unsquash the image on screen (bottom). |
The same optical anamorphic processing can be done to squash widescreen images onto 720x480 DV frames using a $400-800 lens adapter from Century Optics on a standard camcorder. It is then up to the DVD player to electronically unsquash the video and display it in a letterboxed format on a 4:3 television or in true widescreen on a 16:9 screen. Another solution is to electronically squash the image in the camcorder, but, given the same amount of pixels on the CCD capturing the light, this results in some loss of image quality. A very few camcorders (see the References below), such as the Sony PDX10, use the extra pixels in oversized CCDs to minimize the image degradation. The anamorphic process happens before the video is compressed to the DV format, so I personally cannot see how this can be much of a compromise from using an expensive optical solution (any more than electronic image stabilization on a roomy CCD is much worse than optical stabilization). Many professionals are skeptical of the process, but I have difficulty even understanding why folks get all worked up about "true 16:9 CCDs" when shooting non-16:9 DV video. In my tests, the 16:9 anamorphic video shot on a CCD with plenty of pixels looks lovely, and any image degradation is very difficult to measure on the test bench. There can be no denying that inexpensive 16:9 at the touch of a button is a wonderful convenience. Here's a chart illustrating the pervious discussion, based on real-world measurements, that shows the actual area shot, with the screen aspect ratio of each. |
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I only have one final caution for anyone condisering shooting 16:9: you need to know how to edit and author widescreen DVDs for all of this to work. That, however, is a topic for another day. |
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References:16:9 DV Camcorders - Since this article was written, 16:9 has become a fairly common feature in consumer camcorders. It is just about impossible to tell from the marketing materials which ones are true anamorphic 16:9 cams and which ones are croppers, but here is a short list of cameras I have actually tested that have a true, electronic, anamorphic 16:9 mode. The list is by no means complete, but you can probably guess which other cameras have 16:9 based on manufacturer methods and models:
The American Widescreen Museum - Of course 16:9 widescreen is a modern video compromise that pales next to the real thing. 16:9 works out to a paltry 1.78:1 screen ratio. You haven't really seen widescreen until you've seen eight chariots with four horses abreast in Ben Hur at 2:76:1. Check out the history of widescreen (among other topics) at the fabulous Widescreen Museum site. |
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