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In Reply to: difference in and explaination of "Anamorphic" and "enhanced for widescreen TV" posted by Elizabeth on March 23, 2001 at 09:24:56:
Right! Here you go!Whether you have widescreen or 4x3 tv sets the number of pixels shown remains constant, ie 720x480 for NTSC and 720x576 for PAL. Its only the shape of these pixels that change.
DVD's can come in four "flavours" 4x3 picture will fill a 4x3 set or show as 4x3 with black strips at the side on widescreen, unless you change your set to a so called "smart" or "widescreen mode".
Next is the increasingly common mode 16x9 letterbox. In theory this should fill a widescreen tv, possibly with a black strip top and bottom if the film is say 2.35:1 (eg The Bond movies, Gladiator ect) on a 4x3 set it should always display with black strip top and bottom, (a big black strip top and bottom with the Bond/Gladiator type movies).
Next you have two types that although they are possible I have never seen myself, and its debateable if anything mainstream has been done on them! (Some anorak though is bound to shoot me down in flames for that one! lol), these are 16x9 pan and scan, which contains vector information that allows the whole frame to be shown on a widescreen set and will pan the frame to the most relevant part of the action for those viewing in 4x3 mode. And finally 16x9LB/PS (letterbox/Pan & Scan) wich gives the end user (on a 4x3 set) the option of letterboxing or pan & scan presentation.
When you are talking about "Anamorphic", strictly speaking the frame is being stretched and cut off as in your smart mode on a widescreen set, although I'm sure that plenty of these films are just being selectively framed for widescreen. Which neatley brings us to "Enhanced for widescreen", which should mean that they have subtly framed the pic for widescreen, but could also mean that they have anamorphosised the picture.
My suggestion to anyone buying a DVD title is, read a review, if its good "buy it", if its bad, ask yourself if you really want that film, and if so buy it anyway.
As I read in an earlier post, the only thing that does bug me are widescreen films encoded as 4x3 letterbox, whch can only really be viewed in zoom mode on a widescreen set, these tend to suffer quite badly from loss of definition, due to the very few lines being used.
I hope this answers your question Elizabeth, DVD is still a bit of a black art, you should see the posts I do from my industry counterparts doing the job and you would realise. Happy viewing!!
Roland
Follow Ups:
Enhanced for widescreen and anamorphic are the same thing. Essentially the image is compressed horizontally on an anamorphic DVD. A widescreen TV stretches it out again so that it looks normal. A DVD player will actually remove every fourth vertical line so that the image appears normal on a 4:3 TV. This of course, doesn't help the picture any on a 4:3 TV, although it doesn't usually hurt it too terribly either. On the other hand, an anamorphic DVD is noticably better than a non-anamorphic on a widescreen TV.
After reading your post I did some further checking, and you are right its a 3 in 4 vertical reduction when shown on a 4x3 screen, however video encoded as 16x9 is automatically Anomorphic as the pixel ratio is still the same. Its the player throwing away the lines, thats not something that we have to be concerned with in the authoring process. Generally speaking when we are authoring pictures will either come in as 4x3 for video derived programmes (and some older film sources) or 16x9 for some modern video sources and most recent films. 2.35:1 will still have letterboxing top and bottom and 1.85:1 normally looks 16x9 due to overscan, or cropping during the telecining. The only time you are likely to get 4x3 letterboxed, is if someone has been two lazy to get the transfer done to digibeta in widescreen.Conclusion? After doing some further checking only thing you probably want to avoid is 4x3 letterboxed. Not that I've ever had to do any!
Enhanced for widescreen meens only that its widescreen encoded.
Roland
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