Just spent a few minutes playing with a DV camcorder and a 4:3 rectangle on a piece of paper. I wanted to see just how much cropping typically takes place in real life.
I taped my 4:3 rectangle to the wall and set up my cheap little Sony TRV8 miniDV camcorder to take in the scene. I simultaneously fed a firewire signal to ScenalyzerLive for capture to hard disk.
Here's what I found:
(1) DV is not 4:3, but slightly wider than that. I already knew that from previous discussions, but it's probably worth repeating.
(2) The 3.5" viewfinder on the Sony TRV8 camcorder crops about 5% vertically and 0% horizontally (that's because DV is slightly wider than 4:3). My VX2000 crops slightly less vertically, about 4%.
(3) The image window in ScenalyzerLive doesn't crop at all. Ditto for the preview window in Vegas.
(4) My brand-new DLP rear-projection 61" Mitsubishi monitor is a wonderful device. The screen has a 16:9 shape, so if one shows a 4:3 image in it, there will be narrow vertical black bars on each side. I had ASSUMED (famous last words) that, in the absence of any kind of bezel, that 4:3 image would be the whole NTSC image. I was surprised and disappointed to discover that even the DLP set crops about 4% vertically and horizontally. Why they would need to do this, I don't know. Perhaps they figure that's what people expect. Maybe it's to cover timing variability in the analog circuitry. Maybe it's to cover whatever nasty artifacts occur at the edges, since this set does some amazing stuff with NTSC--it rescales it and removes the interlace.
(5) Making a DVD out of the test footage and showing it on a PC using WinDVD or PowerDVD proves that those programs show the entire image, with no cropping at all.
I'd be curious to learn whether 16:9 sets also crop 16:9 images, and also whether other big-screen technologies such as plasma and LCD crop NTSC in the same way. I think BB mentioned a few weeks ago that his plasma set does.
I taped my 4:3 rectangle to the wall and set up my cheap little Sony TRV8 miniDV camcorder to take in the scene. I simultaneously fed a firewire signal to ScenalyzerLive for capture to hard disk.
Here's what I found:
(1) DV is not 4:3, but slightly wider than that. I already knew that from previous discussions, but it's probably worth repeating.
(2) The 3.5" viewfinder on the Sony TRV8 camcorder crops about 5% vertically and 0% horizontally (that's because DV is slightly wider than 4:3). My VX2000 crops slightly less vertically, about 4%.
(3) The image window in ScenalyzerLive doesn't crop at all. Ditto for the preview window in Vegas.
(4) My brand-new DLP rear-projection 61" Mitsubishi monitor is a wonderful device. The screen has a 16:9 shape, so if one shows a 4:3 image in it, there will be narrow vertical black bars on each side. I had ASSUMED (famous last words) that, in the absence of any kind of bezel, that 4:3 image would be the whole NTSC image. I was surprised and disappointed to discover that even the DLP set crops about 4% vertically and horizontally. Why they would need to do this, I don't know. Perhaps they figure that's what people expect. Maybe it's to cover timing variability in the analog circuitry. Maybe it's to cover whatever nasty artifacts occur at the edges, since this set does some amazing stuff with NTSC--it rescales it and removes the interlace.
(5) Making a DVD out of the test footage and showing it on a PC using WinDVD or PowerDVD proves that those programs show the entire image, with no cropping at all.
I'd be curious to learn whether 16:9 sets also crop 16:9 images, and also whether other big-screen technologies such as plasma and LCD crop NTSC in the same way. I think BB mentioned a few weeks ago that his plasma set does.