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aspect ratio?
- Thread starter Rasheem
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There are quite a few movie theater aspect ratios.
Early films (and many of those directed by Sidney Pollack between 1982-ish and maybe 2004 or 2005 ) were shot in 4:3, the ratio on old computers and TVs
Starting in the 1950s, movies began to be shot in wide aspect ratios such as 1.85:1 for the most part, with some movies shot in "Anamorphic Widescreen" which was 2.35:1 until the 1970s, thereafter 2.39:1.
HDTV is 16:9, or 1.78:1
Early films (and many of those directed by Sidney Pollack between 1982-ish and maybe 2004 or 2005 ) were shot in 4:3, the ratio on old computers and TVs
Starting in the 1950s, movies began to be shot in wide aspect ratios such as 1.85:1 for the most part, with some movies shot in "Anamorphic Widescreen" which was 2.35:1 until the 1970s, thereafter 2.39:1.
HDTV is 16:9, or 1.78:1
That's very true, but practically, if it came from a "widescreen" source such as a DVD, the actual video content is going to be 16:9, possibly with persistent letterboxing (because it's not a 16:9 movie), and if it came with a normal AR source, such as old-school TV, it'll be 4:3 -- even if it was presented on TV in widescreen, the video will be a 4:3 with boxing -- because the transmission modalities of DVD and TV sources basically only do 4:3 or 16:9, right (HD methods like component and DVI / HDMI notwithstanding)?
Right.
It's likely to be a rip of a 16:9 DVD that was done improperly and ending up being 4:3. Can this be corrected with ffmpegx without re-encoding? Like an "anamorphic widescreen" checkbox or something? There will be a loss in quality otherwise.
Not really But If you apple+j in quicktime pro you can choose the resolution it displays it at.
FFmpegX can re-render it in non-native AR. You just choose the aspect ratio you want from the autosize box in the video tab. But you're right in that there is no free lunch... the video may be of a lower quality than if it had been ripped at the correct AR, because you'll have to interpolate pixels horizontally to get back all the pixels you're supposed to have to get to 16:9...
It also could be a pixel aspect problem (as opposed to a resolution aspect problem). On a computer, each pixel is square, but on video, each pixel is rectangular (stretched horizontal in NTSC and stretched vertically in PAL). Often when converting between video and computer, the aspect will not get set correctly. This is about a 10% stretch either way. Although in any case it's really weird for any movie to end up looking like a perfect square. Generally 4:3 ("pan and scan" or just an old movie shot in 4:3) is what you'll see. So if it's truly a perfect square, that is a very odd problem.