Can anyone answer this ? for me please. Why is it that on a widescreen TV you still get those bars on the top and bottom of the TV whenever you are watching a widescreen formatted DVD? How do you get around this? I have forced the DVD to 16:9 output as well as video output to progressive and component. This particular tv is the new 42" Panasonic plasma HDTV and whenever i select "full" aspect on the tv remote it fills the enitre screen but in doing so faces seem elongated and I notice that peoples' heads are chopped off at the top of the screen. This was watching a movie called "Shaun of the Dead." I noticed that "Shrek 2" was perfect. My client is curious and better than giving him the wrong answer or a line of BS, I would like to know for my own knowledge as well as giving my customer the correct answer. Thank you in advance for your input to this matter. I am really gettint to like this site and all the feedback that everybody has to offer. Thank you again.

unnavoidable!

some widescreen movies are presented in ratios greater than 1.78:1(16:9 or HDTV) such as 1.85:1, 2.35:1 and even 2.85:1.

short of a true scaler, there are many limitations to "widescreen" tv's being able to natively display ALL widescreen aspect ratios available today!

Sometimes the Dierectors shoot the scene with peoples heads "Copped Off" Not usually the entire head, but the top most definatly... This is something you dont notice most of the times, but once you have a widescreen, people tend to look for flaws which really arent flaws.

As for the aspect ratios, AV Dude is entirely correct.... Except that a Scalers wont fix this. Its just the way the films are shot. Only Psuedo Fix is a Front projection setup with a 4-Way masking screen.

You can avoid this to some extent by making sure your clients rent or purchase "Widescreen" versions of movies and not the "Fullscreen" versions. Clients tend to just pick up a DVD and have no idea that there is more than one version of the movie. Some DVDs also have both versions on the same disc, one on each side(we watched Napolean Dynamite this weekend and it had the dual side format). Some movies have both versions on the same side of the disc and you need to select which one you want to play in the menus(Monsters Inc is one of these). When you play a 2.35/2.85:1 disc, you will still get some black bars, but this is a directors choice and short of getting a masking screen, there is little you can do about it except use the Zoom/full option. The majority of the problems we have noticed come from people playing 4:3 movies on a 16:9 TV. Educate your customers and they will be happier.


Jason

Jason,

The DVD was widescreen. Zoom/full looked like hell as I mentioned above and my customers know to rent only widescreen formatted DVD's. Was curious why the Zoom/full chopped heads, elongated faces,etc. All its doing is stretching the current pic so why the loss of things like chopped heads and stuff like that?

Check the DVD and see if it is an "anamorphic widescreen" or "enhanced for widescreen TV's" If so check the settings in your DVD player and make sure the TV is in the "full" mode. If all of this has been done, nothing is cropped from the picture, the film was shot in 2.35:1 and you are seeing the film as the director intended.

Anyone who has clients frazzled by the bars issue should be sure to have the PDF version of this article handy for fwd or printing.

[Link: thedigitalbits.com]

Also, I have noticed that clients love to get antsy with the aspect controls while flipping around on sat or cable and even during those d*mn commercials that appear widescreen, but are letterbox and force the pillar bars to appear on widescreen sets. I have a client that CALLS ME when his projector shows an image inside letterbox bars that are inside pillar bars.

Actually, a properly set-up 16:9 screen will give you bars on MOST movies because most movies are shot in 1.85.

From what I heard years ago, 16:9 was chosen as the standard for HDTV, even though it was not the most common FILM aspect ratio. It was still widescreen. Ish. Better than 4:3, anyway. And it has the virtue of being easy to remember.

Heck, the appellation "16:9" looks like "4:3" squared! 1.85 is 37:20, and who the heck is going to truly get a sense of what THAT looks like?

(At this point, I went off....see my thread "About TV Screen Size Naming.)

I suppose that will never change either. I own around 200 DVD's. Out of those probably 80% are 1.85. And less than a dozen are 16:9. Sure, they might say anamorphically enhanced 16:9 widescreen. But then it will say aspect ratio is 1.85, or higher.
So black bars are almost always on my TV. Since the size of a widescreen TV will never change let's talk the studios in to filming only in 16:9 :)

Hey IQ, "copped off"... is this some kind of policeman's in joke.

TJG

Telling directors to make their movies 16:9 is like telling a musician their songs must be 5 minutes long exactly, and their albums must be 60 minutes, it is a choice they make to convey their art, not something we should be complaining about. 'Widescreen Anamorphic', and 'enhanced for widescreen tvs' does not mean the film will fill the screen, it means the film is on the dvd in a verticly streched format so that it utilizes the resolution of the dvd format and doesn't have a whole bunch of black line info at the top and bottom of the picture. If you take an anamorphic DVD and put it on your 16:9 tv while in 4:3 mode (with the ears) you see the picture that comes off the DVD as is(everything is tall and skinny), they made it that way with the knowledge that you would use a 16:9 tv with FULL mode on, that is what anamophic means. Film is done the same way, go to a theater and when the green preview screen flips down from the screen and moves over the crowd only to then fill in again from the top, that is the anamorphic lens phisycally shift into place. Look at a film cell and you see tall skinny figures.

I had to add this little tidbit to this discussion:

www.mgmdvdsettlement.com

Seems someone is suing MGM and slew of retailers for seling 1.85:1 DVD's that aren't really 1.85:1.???????? I read the notice very carefully and this is what it boils down to:
"The gravamen of Plaintiffs’ Complaint is that certain representations on the label and package insert of MGM’s widescreen DVDs are false and misleading because MGM’s widescreen DVDs for films shot in the 1.85 to 1 aspect ratio have the same image width as MGM’s standard screen format DVDs."

I wonder if they are watching them on a 4:3 TV and no matter what they do, the picture doesn't get any wider than the TV......

Jason