Know your video format

I recently was on a production where the client wanted the shoot to be in 4:3 (more on that later) letterbox format. Consumers have become familiar with letterbox of course from DVD's and commercials that have the black bars on the top and bottom of the frame. This gives a commercial a more cinematic look. Also as more people are purchasing wide-screen TV's the letterboxing has become more familiar.

The shoot went well, footage looked great. We got to the edit a few days later and the client was having second thoughts about the letterbox. "I'm not sure I like the black lines on the top and bottom of the screen" he said. I gently reminded him that we discussed this prior to the shoot and he decided he liked the look at that time. His comment "But I'm paying for the entire screen, I want to use the entire screen". Now, I should point out, that most productions go very smooth without a hitch. Then you get clients like this. He wanted the black bars off the screen and wanted full video. There are options for this but none of which were economically viable. We compromised and he ended up, against my recommendation, to fill the top AND bottom of the screen with too much text, it made a classy commercial look cheap in my opinion.

The lesson to learn here is know what you want going in. Most video productions at this point should be shot widescreen. What will happen is that viewers that have a widescreen (16:9) TV will see the image full on their TV's. People that still have the older TV's (4:3) will see the image squeezed down with the black bars at top and bottom. Without getting too technical, you see the black bars because the image is being compressed or "squeezed" onto the screen so that you can see the whole image that was shot, if the image wasn't squeezed down, the left and right sides would be cut off because the shot is wider (16:9) than an old style TV (4:3). Now what are these numbers? they are simply ratios 16:9 (or 16 by 9) is the screen ratio for a widescreen TV while 4:3 (or 4 by 3) is the ratio for a older style "square" screen TV.

Now this is totally different from the "SD" or "HD" options. The details could fill a book but will keep it simple here. SD stands for "Standard Definition" think old style TV's while HD stands for "High Definition" think all the new Widescreen TV's you see at Wal•Mart. I would highly suggest that your productions be shot in HD. In some markets this costs more than standard SD. In my opinion this is a marketing ploy that video companies do because jsut a few years ago it did cost a great deal more to produce video in HD. In our case we don't charge a premium for HD over SD, all productions have the same price point.

Here's the bottom line to keep in mind: If you shoot HD your video will look good on all TV's, old and new. If you shoot SD, your video will look great on a old style 4:3 TV but will not look as good on a new 16:9 widescreen. If you own a widescreen and you've noticed some programs or commercials go from widescreen to a smaller square picture and they don't look as sharp, it is because it was shot in the older SD format.

chris AT take2visualmedia DOT COM