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Wrestlevania

A possibly ill-informed rant about HD displays

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We all know that the standard HD resolutions are 1280×720 and 1920×1080. With this (and budget constraints) in mind, why is it then that so many manufacturers create units with bizarre/stupid halfway house alternatives that are either slightly under or slightly over standard HD resolutions. Why are they doing this? "Yes, we're going HD - through stretched and smeary upscaling!" Genius, but you're not having my money.

Also, why - why - do so many displays come in the useful-to-no-one 16:10 aspect ratio, instead of the accepted and most widely used 16:9 widescreen format?! What, the public not only wants smeary HD, they also want rectangular pixels too??! Aaargh!

Someone please explain; I've been unsuccessful in getting anything like a reasonable answer regarding these issues so far. :bomb:

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16:10 is very old, it's CGA (320x200), it's often used for widescreen computer monitors, not for TVs (iirc).

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what i want to know is, why, even onwidescreen tvs, do widescreen movies always have the letterboxing no matter what you use, 14:9 16:9 etc

MAKE TVS THE SAME SIZE YOU FUCKERS

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Sorry Wrestle, no ideas here about the ludicrous native resolutions manufacturers choose, it is baffling...

Spaff however, what you speak of can be due a couple of different things.

1) The movie is in anamorphic widescreen, which is wider than normal widescreen.

Having read a bit more, anamorphic is something different to do with having one format for both 4:3 and 16:9, but it is used for wider than widescreen formats also I believe.

2) If it's broadcast, then it's a widescreen format being broadcast fullscreen with borders. (This will only be a problem on TVs that can't compensate)

3) PAL has more horizontal lines of resolution than NTSC, so an NTSC formatted film may display with borders as there is no info to display there. (Not a problem on HDTV sets with the standard resolutions as these are international)

Wait, writing that last one may offer an explanation for the crazy native resolutions of some HDTVs. Perhaps it is a multiple of the PAL format (576p I think) to allow for more efficient scaling??

Anyway, a good TV should be able to deal with it all :) I have no borders on (non-anamorphic) widescreen stuff.... (However I have borders on the left and right when I run the PS2 in progressive scan, that I can't understand even a little).

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what i want to know is, why, even onwidescreen tvs, do widescreen movies always have the letterboxing no matter what you use, 14:9 16:9 etc

MAKE TVS THE SAME SIZE YOU FUCKERS

Because the DVD movies often simply use the film print without any changes, thus you'll have a 2.35:1 or even 2.76:1 resolution.

Back in the video cassette days they used a thing called pan&scan to cut the movie down to 4:3

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Working as a projectionist, I will only ever really see 3 ratios. There's the afforementioned 2.35:1 (Cinemascope) which is indeed wider than a widescreen TV, thus the letterboxing. The other two are broadly referred to as "Flat" (because the lense they use doesn't curve at all to widen the image, as it does for scope) and are 1.85:1 and 1.66:1.

1.85:1 is your standard 16:9 widescreen TV format. I'd say about half of our movies show up in this one. The only reason that would letterbox on your TV is if the manufacturers have made some kind of weird choice in their TV's native resolution. Unfortunately, for God knows what reason, many do. Always check when you're buying a TV to see if it's actually 16:9/720p/whatever lest you should have to deal with this.

1.66:1 is decidedly more rare in North American cinemas, yet for some reason remains popular in Europe. This means that I'll only deal with it when we get European films in, and even then it'll be a toss-up. It's a tad more narrow, so on a 16:9 TV there would actually be a bit of horizontal letterboxing. At our theater, we cope with this by blowing the image up a little extra and cutting a tiny amount off the top and bottom to make it project at the same size, but I'm not sure what a TV would do to remedy the same issue.

Aaaaaaaaand there's your intro to projection! As for why they would make TVs at a different ratio than 1.85:1, not a fucking clue. Doesn't make a bit of sense to me.

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Aaaaaaaaand there's your intro to projection! As for why they would make TVs at a different ratio than 1.85:1, not a fucking clue. Doesn't make a bit of sense to me.

then why do they make movies in 1.85:1 and beyond (e.g. ever wider).

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As for the why exactly, I'm really not sure. All I know is what I need to work with. As I recall from when I learned all this stuff during my training, it's due to a competition between the two major formats (1.85 and 2.35) back in the day that never really got resolved. Some filmmakers liked the wider angle to play with, (certainly works better for action movies and those with a focus on scenery) some prefered using 1.85 for dealing with the characters more intimately. While all this was going on, Europe was off doing it's own thing and having its film industry take off, using its own format all the while and oblivious to the war going on in North America between the others.

1.33:1 movies are not unheard of either, but they mostly disappeared around the time that sound came in, so I doubt you'd ever run into one nowadays. As for why go wide at all, dunno the specifics. You'd kinda have to ask the people back when they did it in the first place. I suspect it's nothing more than the fact that it looks a lot nicer when you can see more of the scene as it's happening. Allows directors more room to play and such.

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1.66:1 is decidedly more rare in North American cinemas, yet for some reason remains popular in Europe. This means that I'll only deal with it when we get European films in, and even then it'll be a toss-up. It's a tad more narrow, so on a 16:9 TV there would actually be a bit of horizontal letterboxing. At our theater, we cope with this by blowing the image up a little extra and cutting a tiny amount off the top and bottom to make it project at the same size, but I'm not sure what a TV would do to remedy the same issue.

On the few widescreen CRTs I've played with in the past, this was compensated for using a selectable "Smart" screen mode. Which means the TV automatically detected any borders/letterboxing in the signal and scaled the image up or down--whichever meant the screen was filled with picture. Automated cropping basically, but it wasn't very intelligent in my experience.

Aaaaaaaaand there's your intro to projection!

Fascinating - thank you!

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On the few widescreen CRTs I've played with in the past, this was compensated for using a selectable "Smart" screen mode. Which means the TV automatically detected any borders/letterboxing in the signal and scaled the image up or down--whichever meant the screen was filled with picture. Automated cropping basically, but it wasn't very intelligent in my experience.

There is a proper solution for digital television called AFD.

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Movies look terrible when viewed out of their correct aspect ratio, though. For example, you might have two people talking to each other and see neither of their faces.

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16:10 is very old, it's CGA (320x200), it's often used for widescreen computer monitors, not for TVs (iirc).

Just nitpicking:

Back in CGA, MCGA days, monitors were still 4:3 but they used non-square pixels. So even though 320x200 seems like a widescreen resolution, it's not. It's true though that almost 100% of widescreen monitors these days are 16:10.

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16:10 is popular for widescreen computer monitors, apparently because it is the best suited aspect ratio for fitting two A4 documents, or two pages of a document, side-by-side.

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Kind of different though elmuerte.

I really miss the old household Sony TV's smart mode; all you can do on this new HD LCD one is swap between various pre-set modes (cinema, live 1, live 2, etc) which can usually get it right eventually but is a pain in the cock.

It might be good having AFD for future stuff, but when playing old console games and DVDs and stuff on the new television that never had widescreen display you need to piss around instead of it sorting itself like smart mode did. ;(

That said, it's irrelevant to me on a game basis as I use a non-widescreen 21-inch CRT in my room.

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Just nitpicking:

Back in CGA, MCGA days, monitors were still 4:3 but they used non-square pixels. So even though 320x200 seems like a widescreen resolution, it's not. It's true though that almost 100% of widescreen monitors these days are 16:10.

I never realized this until I think someone from LucasArts commented that our mental picture of certain characters like Ben from Full Throttle has been distorted through time. Since a screen capture of Ben basically widescreens him he seems less tall with a wider face than he was intended to have.

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My mental picture uses the correct aspect ratio.

Are there actual problems with using 1366 x 768 HDTVs with 720p input, say a 360? 360 owners?

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Are there actual problems with using 1366 x 768 HDTVs with 720p input, say a 360? 360 owners?

If it supports VGA input, the Xbox 360 can output to 1360 x 768 natively. Couldn't tell you if that's through upscaling[1] or simply with borders[2].

  1. Upscaling
    Uses a simple 'nearest neighbour' technique like many HD TVs do:
    768nearestneighboureg6.th.png
  2. Borders
    Standard 720 signal, positioned centrally, with borders out to 1360 x 768:
    720borderseq2.th.png

Those aren't going to be 100% accurate representations because a) every HD supplier's technology is different, and B) even at 24-bit colour depth the PNG file format isn't bomb proof.

Still, I think that comparison gives you a good idea of what to expect. And the smearing in the upscaled example gives me convulsions...

:barf:

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well.. usually a game contains moving pictures so you won't notice small artifacts.

and to be honest, I don't see any difference between the two images

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The ratio is messed up, isn't it ? I couldn't see it a t first but toggling quickly from one image to the other, I noticed the soldiers in the upscaled one are 'wider' than what they should be.

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I don't really see what's too upsetting either. The text looks horrible when upscaled, but otherwise it's nothing I'd be opposed to playing. CoD 3 is rendered at a lower resolution anway, and then scaled to what you see there (on the 360 at least).

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The ratio is messed up, isn't it ? I couldn't see it a t first but toggling quickly from one image to the other, I noticed the soldiers in the upscaled one are 'wider' than what they should be.

really? don't see that.

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For some reason incorrect scaling seems to stand out to certain people more than others. While even the slightest incorrection completely ruins my experience, my parents and many friends simply don't notice at all. In fact, they bitch me out for screwing with the settings to correct it on a per-channel basis (it doesn't happen on all broadcasts). I just can't enjoy it otherwise.

With all that said however, I too didn't notice any problems with either of those images. To be sure my sense-o-meter wasn't failing I threw them into photoshop and scaled the larger one down to the same size as the border without adjusting the aspect ratio and they are indeed identical proportionally.

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In regards to aspect ratios, 1.33:1 has been very rare since the '60s, but Gus Van Sant recently used it in "Elephant" and "Last Days."

Technically, 1.37, 1.66 and 1.85 all use the same 1.37 frame, but different plates are put in the projector to crop it as the filmmakers intended. If a theater has a full, academy ratio (1.37:1) screen, they simply have to change out the projector's plates and adjust the masking on the top and bottom of the screen.

Most theaters, however, only have and need 1.85:1 screens. Rather than Miffy's theater's cut-off-the-top-and-bottom-a-bit-and-hope-no-one-notices technique, some theaters have more lenses that adjust the height to fit, projecting a smaller image, but using the whole frame.

Cinemascope (2.35:1) uses the entire 1.37:1 frame, but stretches it with an anamorphic lens. All these ratios were used by filmmakers before HDTV, so they couldn't really accommodate them all.

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