Good points all Serena.

I do have a challenge to make. If there are any art teachers or multimedia teachers on this forum.

Without prefacing why, ask your students to draw a rectangle.

I would bet money that the majority of the rectangles drawn would be closer to the 4 x 3, 4 x 5 aspect than the 16 x 9.

OF course, I know the argument could be made that since image composition is not involved, then there would be no reason to draw a particular aspect. But I think it would show what the mind naturally composes as a aspect. Then again, it could just be a whack idea without merit.

I don't have access to several unbiased people, but I think it would be an interesting experiment.

Dave T2

people have misconceptions about screen size...

as already mentioned, some ppl who see 16:9 on a 43 tv believe theyre missing out. In fact i had a client threaten to cancel their booking wht me becuase of tehse black bars.. i kid u not...

I asked her when was the last time she went and hired a widescreen DVD and she couldnt tell me so i took a commercial movie to her and showed her exactly how my formatting is no differnt to a commercial DVD... she still didnt buy it so I CANCELLED HER... im nto gonna deal with morons like this..

So what she wanted, was to have a 16:9 version for her widescreen tv, (which we showed during demoing) as well as a full frame 43 version. I told her it woul dcost extra for teh processing and she went off..

Some peole (to be hnest i think 90% of the general public) dont understand the differncs between the 2. They think widescreen is a higher or "bigger" or better picture, when we all know that its jsuta tweak in the aspect ratio and nothing more..
IMO, progressive scan is another one which people do not understand. Lets face it, the only way to get full resolution dvd's at their FULL resolution count, is to provide a DVD in progressive scan. With HD, 720p may SEEM like a lower count, however in reality, its a higher resolution than 1080i and the imag qualty is noticable.. on a HD panel, those 200 lines make a HUGE difference...
When you explain this to people and show them the difference in motion, they CAN see the difference, but they still think that the higher the number, the better off they'll be..

In the end though, as i always say, content is king and people who obsess over these formats, arent looking at what they should be looking at.. Maybe its a marketing thing, maybe its a general public ignorant thing.. who knows.. but in the end, OUR job is harder when we spend hours explaining the differences... then to be "corrected" by a retail salesman who has no clue about the technology whatsoever... its pathetic and we as producer SHOULD be making an effort to educate the public..

I'm cratching my own personal brain in my head here and maybe i've missed a point. How is 1080i less resolution than 720p? 1080i is still 1080 lines. True, for 1/60 of a second you see 540 lines and for the next 1/60th second you see 540 other lines. Note the word other. You do not see redundant information in the next field. Add the two fields together, which does happen visually, and you do have 1080 discrete lines. 1080 sure sounds like a bigger number than 720, at least to my own personal brain.

when dealing with HD panels, youll notice that not all of them (actually most of them) have a native 1080 pixel count. If they did, theyb be able t run 1080p, which at this time, most do not.
in turn the image u see is exactly how u described it, however as Plasmas and LCDs are natively progressive scan, onboard deinterlacing is required (even if those fields are doubled). Whereas with 720p, the image u see is the native resolution of the panel itslef. Another thing to note is that with 1080i, even though its temporally "higher" in resolution, the difference in motion and shrpness between 1080i and 720p IS noticable. Now 1080i footag running at 720p IS sharper, but people dont do that.. 720p upscaled isnt the best looking stuff either..

Also you might notice that on lower end panels, the 720p signal runs a lower latency count than 1080i, simply due to the deinterlacing not being operational. So screen refresh on 720p is far more efficient. Obviously this is all dependant on the display panel itself.

Selling these panels over a number of years and checking out various display modes gives one exposure to alot of wierd and wonderful things. One thing i can say that for HD, 720p to MY eye, is far more pleasant and easier to watch than 1080i. Thast just me though... I also find that watching WMV9 HD material is defiantely cleaner than watching an MPG equivalent. (i was watchigna HD WMV9 copy of Terminator 2) then threw on some HD clips i found online and the WMV was significantly cleaner..

I mean everyones opnion i different, but to me i find that 720p is a better looking format for teh current panles available today

OK, so you're talking about how it gets displayed on common hardware that doesn't handle native 1080 lines, not about the format itself. Given proper display technology 720p could look worse than 1080i because 720p is lower resolution.

> With HD, 720p may SEEM like a lower count, however in reality, its a higher resolution than 1080i and the imag qualty is noticable..

Where did you get this notion from? The fact that the even lines are captured 1/60th of a second after the odd lines still does not negate the fact that there are physically 1080 lines of resolution in the image. 720p is absolutely NOT more resolution than 1080i and when both are viewed on an HD display capable of 1080i the 720p looks worse because it has to be scaled up.

~jr

Which brings kind of another question. Since some movies are even wider than 16 x 9, I think "Lawrence of Arabia" might fall in that category. Do you people with a 16 x 9 TV find the black bars annoying in order to see the whole frame? Or would you prefer that the film is formatted to fill the 16 x 9?

Dave T2

farss has a good point here. If you think about how human vision works, there's an area in the center of your field of vision that's in sharp focus. I'm not sure, but I'm guessing this area roughly corresponds to a 4:3 area. Outside of that area, your peripheral vision (perhaps closer to 16:9) is visible, but out of focus.

Our peripheral vision, however, is very sensitive to motion, no doubt as an evolutionary response to possible danger coming from the sides. Rapid motion in the corners of our eyes quickly attracts our attention.-- after all, it might be a carnivorous animal, or for that matter, an oncoming bus -- and we'd need to be alerted to get out of the way.

This suggests to me that if you're composing a moving image, where you want people to pay attention to what's going on the screen, you keep most of the motion in the 4:3 zone, while the 16:9 peripheral area remains indistinct. The exception to this would be if you WANT to distract or disorient the audience. Then, rapid movement in the 16:9 area could be used to give the audience a sense that things are happening all around them.

Of course, all this supposes that the image you are showing an audience fills their entire field of vision. This is true in movie theaters, but obviously less so with smaller screens. If the entire TV screen only falls within th 4:3 area where we expect to be able to see clear detail, we feel cheated if we don't see the whole picture.

The field of vision thing is interesting. A few years back when a friend and i started attending movies together regularly we had some discussions about where to sit. He like sitting towards the back so he could see the whole screen "at a glance". I prefered sitting near the front so that the screen filled my vision pretty much completely. After going to see a few movies twice so we could both observe them from both positions he decided that i was on to something. When the edges of the screen are so far apart that you can't make out the whole width, you do feel much more immersed in the action. This relates to Brian's point about action in the peripheral vision area.

In a way though, the wide format wars are neglecting a good possibility for surprising the audience. While we do take notice of and react to movement on the sides, we do even more so for movent far above and below our center of vision. Motion entering vertically is much less expected and therefore could have a greater surprise value. This really can't be taken advantage of properly in a 2.35:1 format!

I'll say it again ... we should go back to round screens. After all, our field of vision is roughly circular, even if we do pay more attention to the sides than the top and bottom.

I think all of you are overlooking something I pointed out above in terms of field of vision. The newer wide screen televisions are not Cathode Ray Tubes. If you sit off to the side the image deteriorates and sometimes disappears. Stand up and you can't even see it if it is on a low stand. Talk about narrow field of vision!

John

With HD, 720p may SEEM like a lower count, however in reality, its a higher resolution than 1080i and the imag qualty is noticable..

.... Then:

Also you might notice that on lower end panels, the 720p signal runs a lower latency count than 1080i, simply due to the deinterlacing not being operational. So screen refresh on 720p is far more efficient. Obviously this is all dependant on the display panel itself.

Which are we talking about? A format or a display hardware? Hardware constraints of today's TV don't justify blanket statements about the amount of data in a 1080i format. That's like saying a 4 cylinder engine is bigger and better than an 8 cylinder engine because the V8 won't fit on a motorcycle. Are we talking about engines or motorcycles?

Personally I see merits of both formats. For high motion, it is intuitive that progressive is better. You don't have "jags" between lines that would be caused by differences in position of the subject between fields.

And for images with less motion, the 1080i will have more image data to look at. Even if you could only see one field at a time (which isn't true), 540x1900 = 1,026,000 pixels, which is more than 720p (720x1280 = 921,600). Thus, in digital equivalents, a full 720p frame has only about 90% of the data vs. a half-frame of 1080i. (And yes, I know the difference between analog and digital.) So you could try to boil it down to the question : which is better, more accurate motion or more data and resolution? But that still isn't enough to ask. It also depends on the size of the television. More data is worthless on a 9" TV.

So, in my opinion, hardware and personal preferences have a whole lot to do with the question "which format is better," not only the amount of data. Blanket verdicts are hard to justify. (My own TV is 1080i, and I love it. Incidentally, I also watch HD slide shows on it, and you'll never convince me that 720p is better for running slide shows.) But I'd drop it in a heartbeat if 1080p hardware and content were available at reasonable costs.)

Also, note that the ATSC spec for high definition broadcasts included something like 16 or 18 different aspect ratios, most all of them wider than 4:3. With broadcast doing digital, it will eventually be undesirable to have a 4:3 TV.