16x9 anamorphic 1.66:1...Has Warner FINALLLY done it!!!???!!! (1 Viewer)

[Bill Burns]

David wrote:

16x9 1.66:1 encoding:

The 4x3 masses are happy and content. The 16x9 100" projection-screen videophile is happy and content WIN WIN. WB...why can't you understand this????

Yes indeed. All players can down-convert anamorphic to non-anamorphic (which is why anamorphic material plays correctly on non-anamorphic displays), so even those who have anamorphic direct-view sets and would like a "bigger" picture with anamorphically-encoded 1.66:1 material, to reference an earlier post on this thread, need only set their player to 4X3 and ... voila, it's non-anamorphic. I owned a non-anamorphic 32" set for the first three years of DVD, and read many times (from Criterion and elsewhere, though Criterion has now thankfully changed their policy in this regard) that on non-anamorphic sets, anamorphically encoded material, down-converted, looked a little worse ("fuzzier," I suppose, a little less detailed) than material recorded non-anamorphically in the first place; thus Criterion forewent 16X9 enhancement in their earliest waves of titles (at any ratio, including scope films at 2.35:1), assuming most viewers would have non-anamorphic sets. Some may still believe the "flat films for flat sets" mantra, and on some technical level it may be true (it's probably dependent on the quality of the down-conversion spec in the player, which by now should be uniformly good in most major brands) -- but I could never see a notable difference (I've been through three players, a Pioneer and two Sonys). A down-converted anamorphic widescreen presentation always looked just as good to me as a film recorded flat (non-anamorphic) in the first place. So even when using a non-anamorphic display, I always appreciated widescreen product that was anamorphically encoded, because I knew I'd see benefits in the future, when I upgraded my set, and could enjoy the film with my non-anamorphic set at the time. Win win. Sure enough, when I bought an anamorphic-capable set in 2000, the benefits were stunning, and all of those widescreen films recorded non-anamorphically truly did "fall flat." Aim high, everyone. It doesn't make good consumer advocacy sense to say "good enough" when a superior standard isn't just possible, but already available.

 

[Cees Alons]

I'm glad David pointed out what I liked to mention .
(The crossing point is closer to 1.54).

The benefit of an enhanced treatment on 1.6667 framed films is only more than marginal if you take into account the horizontal resolution reduction that the widescreen set has to perform on non-enhanced images. And for 4x3 screen owners it also means the transition of going from non-converted images to converted images, which in practice will lay the 'acceptable' boundary a bit further for them - to wider aspect ratios: at 1.778 to be precisely.

Personally, I think 1.667 may be borderline, and generally not something to make too much noise about, especially because many of those movies will have rather old negatives to start with.

But.... of course, I haven't compared the two in any real case yet, so I simply may be underestimating the effect!

Cees

 

[DaViD Boulet]

Cees,

You're right that the resolution increase for 16x9 viewers is not the entire "33%" we normally quote. However, the results are *significant* never-the-less. Comparing a "zoomed" 1.66:1 4x3 transfer to a native 16x9 1.66:1 transfer on a 100" screen leaves little ambiguity as to which is better.

All worries about 4x3 viewers getting "compromised" pictures due to downconversion artifacts etc. need to be put into perspective. It's easy for folks to fall into (what is probably WB's point of view) what I'm suggesting is a trap that since "more" people have 4x3 TVs than 16x9 that the image should be optimized for them.

WRONG

The image should be optimized for the group of consumers who CARE.

I have yet to hear a casual Walmart-esque DVD viewer mention any complaint about downconversion artifacts or whether their supposed 1.66:1 DVD looks closer to 1.78:1 in aspect ratio on their 4x3 set.

The only thing that the traditional 4x3 market cares about is do they see black bars on their TV or not...does the picture fill the screen...

It's the critical viewer who cares about the highest quality image. Therefore, the image should be optimized for them. That means 16x9.

And for the critical viewer who has a 4x3 set...he/she is *also* asking for 16x9 because their next HD-TV will be 16x9 and they want their DVD software to take advantage of it.

16x9 1.66:1 = WIN WIN.

 

[Ken_McAlinden]

Personally, I think the image should be enhanced for 16:9 until it presents an unreasonable compromise to 4:3 sets, which occurs before you get to 1.54:1, but certainly does not apply to 1.66:1.

(BTW, since most 16:9 sets (in the US, at least) are also digital hi-def sets, don't they have more than enough horizontal resolution to reproduce everything encoded on a 4:3 SD transfer when windowboxed?)

Anyway, anamorphically enhancing a 1.66:1 film gives a 16:9 viewer a 20% increase in vertical resolution in exchange for a 6.6% loss in horizontal resolution. In turn, a 4:3 viewer loses 5% in vertical and the same 6.6% in horizontal resolution. Considering that most folks have more than 6.6% overscan, that's a very reasonable compromise.

Regards,

 

[DaViD Boulet]

Ken,

Excellent points. Agreed 100%. Thanks also for sharing the numbers!

-dave

 

[Cees Alons]

Ken,

Although it's clear what you're saying, the '20% increase in resolution' is actually a 25% increase (because a lower number of lines - 384 - is the base).


Cees

 

[Ken_McAlinden]

All of my numbers are based on the percentage of the total available resolution (i.e. for vertical resolution, they are proportional to the number of horizontal lines). In the case of a windowboxed 16:9 transfer, you use 100% of the available resoultion. A 1.66:1 letterboxed transfer would use 80% of the available vertical resolution.

If you want to convert it to relative percentages, feel free.

For a 4:3 TV, a 1.66 transfer uses 80% of the available resolution while a 16:9 transfer uses 75% of the available resolution. In relative terms, you can look at that as a 6.7% reduction rather than a 5% difference depending on how you want it, but I personally went with the absolute percentage because it is directly proportional to the number of scan-lines lost.

Now that we've made everything crystal clear...

Regards,

 

[Cees Alons]

Cees