# Movie Aspect Ratios



## rhaythorne (Jan 12, 2004)

Can someone explain why "widescreen" DVD's in the UK (and perhaps in other countries too?) are routinely presented in an aspect ratio of 16:9, whereas SKY TV broadcasts in the "proper" widescreen ratio.

On my Philips widescreen TV this causes problems with certain subtitled movies.

_Lord of the Rings_ is a good example. On the DVD's, when the Elves are speaking Elvish, the bottom row of the subtitles drops off the bottom of the screen so they can't be read. In order to see the subtitles you have to switch the TV to "Subtitle Zoom" mode which basically shoves the picture up a bit but changes the ratio slightly. Hardly ideal, but clearly it's a known problem otherwise they wouldn't have included such a feature.

However, if you watch the same movies on SKY, they're not presented in 16:9 but "widescreen", and both the picture and subtitles are correctly shown.

So, why the difference? Anybody know?


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## foztex (Nov 6, 2005)

Its a nightmare Rich,

Aspect ratios have become a real minefield.

The problem is that 16:9 is a television widescreen format and not the film widescreen format. film is a greater ratio up to 2:1 and so cropping still occurs, even on a 16:9 set widescreen film should still be "letter-boxed".

To add insult to injury when shooting for telly these days we are encouraged to think in 14:9 ! as it then looks reasonable on either.

It would take ages to fully explain it but here is a pretty good paper on the topic.

cheers

Andy


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## rhaythorne (Jan 12, 2004)

Thanks for that. I'd feared as much!

Funny you should menton 14:9. Occasionally this works very well with movies shown on TCM. They always seem to show their movies letterboxed to an extreme degree and I just "pump them up" until they fit the screen. In their case 14:9 or 16:9 works well.







my brain hurts!


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## Robert (Jul 26, 2006)

I have a Phillips 28" widescreen (old style - CRT) box which has widescreen, 4:3, 14:9, 16:9, subtitle zoom and superwide settings .... but never seems to show the whole picture unless you use 4:3









You then get black bands down both sides which seems to defeat the purpose of a widescreen tv.

Just waiting for it to break down so I can justify replacing it with a LCD or plasma !


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## pg tips (May 16, 2003)

I'm glad I'm not the only one who's having problems with this, after spending nigh on a grand on a Telly you'd expect to be able to watch a bloody film properly









it's got 4:3 14:9 16:9 (which I thought was widescreen







) and then 2 zoom modes and "auto" which is supposed to detect the transmission format and set accordingly.

Some transmissions I get full width but still black bars top and bottom which i assume means it's wide or superwide (wider than 16:9 anyway) These aren't too bad cos I can zoom and just lose a bit off the edges (makes you think how much you miss when your on 4:3 though) but stations like VH1 put black borders all around the image, it's like having a 21 inch 4:3 image in the middle of my telly! WHY









Mind you the mrs likes putting 4:3 transmissions on to 16:9 she says it make all the slim bitches look like something near normal!


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## rhaythorne (Jan 12, 2004)

My Philips is a 23" widescreen LCD which has the same available ratios as yours Robert.

I think it's about 4 years old now and, although I've been extremely happy with it, I think it's just beginning to show signs of its age: A few dull areas on the screen (not really noticeable in normal viewing but a bright white screen will show them up quite clearly) and an annoying tendency for the picture to bob up and down slightly on occasion, almost as if it's pining for the days of "vertical hold"









Still, if some manufacturer can come up with a TV that offers the same ratios in which films were intended to be shown, I'll be first in the queue.

Currently I think you're always going to have black bands at the top/bottom or left/right of the screen. That doesn't bother me too much as long as I can see the film in the ratio (or as near as damn it) in which it was produced.

TCM is a funny one. Their films nearly always first appear as a "postage stamp" in the middle of my screen which can then usually be pumped up to 14:9 or 16:9 to produce near enough the correct ratio.

But the subtitles dropping off the screen really does annoy me. I'm a fan of Japanese/Korean movies and having the subtitles drop off the bottom of a 16:9 movie drives me nuts.

That prompts another question that Foz might know the answer to. Why do some subtitled movies have the bottom line of the subtitles on a line below the level of the screen, whilst other subtitling systems superimpose the subtitles over the bottom part of the picture. Given that it's a known problem that the bottom line of the subtitles will be obscured when the film is shown on a DVD on a 16:9 widescreen TV, why do they do the subtitles in this way?


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## pg tips (May 16, 2003)

That was a fascinating read Andy, shows what little I knew! Page 8 just goes to show how simple solutions are often the best.


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## rhaythorne (Jan 12, 2004)

Take a deep breath and count to ten... ... ... ... ... ...

... ... ... exhale ahhh, ahhhh ,ahhhhhhhhh.....

There, are we better now?


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## foztex (Nov 6, 2005)

rhaythorne said:


> My Philips is a 23" widescreen LCD which has the same available ratios as yours Robert.
> 
> I think it's about 4 years old now and, although I've been extremely happy with it, I think it's just beginning to show signs of its age: A few dull areas on the screen (not really noticeable in normal viewing but a bright white screen will show them up quite clearly) and an annoying tendency for the picture to bob up and down slightly on occasion, almost as if it's pining for the days of "vertical hold"
> 
> ...


a lot of the time its the director who specifies the subtitling requirements. I for one would like my stuff subtitled in the black of the letterbox( it is easier to read and doesn't interfere with my lovely images  ) . in-picture subtitling is safer but covers the image and is a bugger to read depending on the image brightness (black bordered 80% white works best). Of course the obvious solution is dubbing, but as a resident of France (who do it all the time) it sucks, I'd rather watch a film for its images and get the emotion from unintelligible dialogue than suffer the abomination of badly synched dubbed dialogue in my own language. As an experiment watch a really cool subtitled film, during the best bits you will watch only the images and get the 'feeling' from the original track, you wont be reading the subtitles at all









Andy


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## rhaythorne (Jan 12, 2004)

Yep, I do understand about the subtitles obscuring the visual imagery. And I definitely agree about films being presented in their native language and not being dubbed. Can't stand dubbing!

Lots of the BFI Kurosawa movies I've got though are, I think, (and forgive the lack of technical knowledge here) white text subtitles superimposed over the film rather than in the black band at the bottom of the screen. I think at the end of the day I prefer it that way. I can apreciate the film and I can tell what's going on too.

Not Andy, rarely Handy, but occasionally quite Randy


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## murph (Aug 14, 2006)

I just leave the TV on auto and it copes with most things. The only one that gets to me a little is 2.35:1 or whatever it is called, the one above 1.85:1 films. You end up with a little strip in the middle of the screen.

Maybe when we all go to hd everything will start to appear in 16:9 only. Some chance!


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## rhaythorne (Jan 12, 2004)

Problem is some people get upset when a movie is not released in its original format. I bought a box set of Hitchcock films from Amazon a year or so ago which I thought was great but someone had given it a really bad review because all the films had been reformatted to 16:9. A couple of weeks ago I got a DVD from America (The Innocents) which provides two versions of the film on a double-sided disc. One is the original 2.35:1 which, as you say, is a bit troublesome, but side B gives you a 4:3 (1.33:1) version which is a bit better. Not a bad solution (though 16:9 (1.77:1) would've been better)









By the way, I've only just noticed that Foztex's name is Andy. Earlier, I thought PG was suggesting that I was _that_ "Andy" (if you know who I mean) which he obviously wasn't, sorry!

I'm going back to bed for a lie down


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## rhaythorne (Jan 12, 2004)

Probably not worth a new thread so I thought I'd ask another film/DVD techie question here (which i've moaned about before and probably will do again







)

DVD Region encoding.

Lots of the films I want to buy aren't available in the UK. But many are available in the USA and you can get them from the likes of Amazon.com (rather than Amazon.co.uk) very cheaply (thanks to the Â£/$ exchange rate) although you might get stung for VAT and import duty and have to wait a couple of weeks for delivery. Lots of such titles are not surprisingly advertised as being Region 1 encoded.

Therefore, I got myself a cheap Region 1 hackable DVD player and ordered a bunch of dics from the USA. To my amazement, what I've found is that lots of them aren't Region 1 at all, they're Region 0 / "Region Free" so will quite happily play on any DVD player.

So the question is, if they're produced in Region 0 format, how come they're not made available over here or otherwise internationally? I can't believe it's becuase there's only an American audience for these films as many of them are old Brit/European movies and one of the orders I received from Amazon.com was actually shipped from Germany







How come we can't buy them through our own "local" channels? Anyone know?


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