16:9

We have just completed a video in widescreen (16:9) format using the facilities at Charles Street Video and I thought I'd share our experiences.

What is 16:9 & Why Should You Care?

16:9 is the shape of things to come. It is wide, like an Academy 36mm movie screen. It is the shape of your next TV (or the one after that). High Definition TV (HDTV) has a 16:9 aspect ratio. But most of us still have old standard TVs with an almost square 4:3 image and we watch most of the videos we make on monitors with that same shape.

Caveat Emptor

Unless you know that the video you are making will be screened on wide screen HDTV, all you will get for your trouble will be an old standard 4:3 television image with black bands on the top and bottom. You sometimes see that on television, rented movies and DVDs - it's called "letterbox". And it is no sharper than a regular television or video picture, it just uses less of the square screen area.

Squeezed / Unsqueezed

Getting a 16:9 image onto regular video tape, which is designed to show an aspect ratio of 4:3 requires a few tricks. Every frame has about 3,500 pixels - regardless of the aspect ratio. A 16:9 camera uses all of the pixels but arranges them in a wide rectangle. If you playback a 16:9 tape into a 4:3 monitor everything will be tall and thin. The image needs to be "squeezed" shorter into the wider 16:9 aspect ratio. A special monitor will display the image properly or you can process the image with an Avid to squeeze the image into the centre of a 4:3 frame creating a "letterbox" which can be viewed on a standard monitor or TV.

Our Story

A few days before we began shooting our five minute drama called "Friends", our director of photography Doug Reed suggested that we shoot 16:9 because it would frame our actors nicely and be similar to the aspect ratio we will use this winter when we hope to shoot a feature film. Carmel Suttor, our director, liked the idea. We were using the Sony PD150 which can shoot in 16:9 with the flick of a switch. The camera just uses the central portion of the image and then uses some computer enhancement and extra pixels to use all 3,500 pixels.

We had been using our home television as a monitor on the set, but the 16:9 image came out of the camera stretched; everything appeared tall and thin. The portable monitor at Charles Street cannot display 16:9 properly. I called Sim Video and rented a special monitor that could display both 16:9 and 4:3 for $35 a day. I picked it up on the morning of our first day and it worked fine. We also discovered that we no longer needed to use a wide angle adapter.

At the end of each day I transferred our footage to our home VHS VCR with the usual time code burn. The images were extra tall on our home TV but we got used to them. We booked time in the E Room for our offline edit. Digitizing held no surprises. But neither the old Avid nor the room's monitor has any provision to display 16:9 images properly. We made our off-line cut with the same extra tall images that we had been watching in the rushes.

We moved across the hall to the A Room for high resolution and to add titles and music. The A Room is outfitted for 16:9. The newer Avid automatically displays the image in the 16:9 format and the large monitor has a switch that will squeeze the image into 16:9 letterbox. We also noticed that the "wide screen" indicator came up automatically on the new digital VTR. Nice.

We expect to exhibit our show on regular 4:3 monitors and TVs, so we will need to squeeze the picture into a 16:9 letterbox when we are finished. To retain quality, we digitized at full (1:1) resolution.

We made our titles in 4:3 since that is how the show will be viewed. But we kept the titles over black, just to be sure. Plan your titles carefully. Here's a tip. In the "wipes" section of the effects menu you will find a 16:9 box. It will put white lines on the screen, outlining 16:9. You can mark this box right on the screen with post-its. This helps with things like titles.

Once our titles were complete we selected all parts of the show except the titles. Then we marked the 16:9 box with the wipe, selected squeeze and adjusted the picture so that it fit inside our markings. Then we rendered our video. Our five minute work took about 20 minutes to render.

Is it worth it?

In a word. No. If you want to show 16:9 "wide screen" on a standard television set then it is easiest to shoot with a normal (4:3) aspect ratio. In the editing you can drop a mask over the image. You can correct any framing or move the picture to get that pesky boom out of the way. In general, I'd say it's better to wait until everything from cameras (the new camera at Charles Street shows true 16:9) to the monitors can show a full 16:9 frame.

 23 September 2003