Aspect Ratio

Unit 21 video technology

Aspect ratio

Aspect ratio is the view you get when you look at a screen

4:3 is classic view which doesn’t show much

16:9 is widescreen it shows you a lot more than 4:3 it will also give you a panorama view

In movies they sometimes use a technique called pan and scan which means that they go through the movie and cut the shot to 4:3 to broadcast on older televisions but when you do this you lose alot of the detail. One director said that when you pan and scan it is like taking the last supper and only seeing 6 instead of 12

Pillarboxing

Letterboxing

Aspect ratio

Tv pixels and your brain:

If you divide a still image into a collection of small coloured dots your brain will reassemble the dots into a meaningful image

Pixels- the more pixels you have the better the resolution

The tv screen

A video camera divides up an image into horizontal scan lines which make up every single frame, this is then transmitted to your television

Different countries use slightly different standards or systems with different numbers of lines per screen and different numbers of frames per second

The UK uses

525 lines and 25 fps

picture from kcts9