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SkyTV and widescreen
SkyTV show movies in widescreen. Or do they?
By Michael Jones
December 2000
However, not all movie buffs are happy. We received this correspondence from AudioEnz reader Michael Wong:
... SKY are showing ALL widescreen material altered to fit within the 1.78:1 confines of a standard widescreen TV.
While the losses with a normal 1.85:1 film are negligible sometimes major picture loss is suffered when films with aspect ratios of 2.40:1 or greater are chopped down to fit a 1.78:1 screen
So let's look at what this means.
You'll have noticed the movies at the cinema are shown on a screen considerably wider than that of a television set. This is known as the aspect ratio.
While a variety of aspect ratios have been used in films, the most common are 2.35:1 and 1.85:1. This means that the screen is 2.35 (or 1.85) times as wide as it is high.
A standard television has an aspect ratio of 1.33:1, much smaller than that of movies. This means that, when broadcasting a movie for television, up to almost one half of the original picture can be lost, as shown in this diagram
The middle rectangle shows the screen ratio of the widescreen televisions now available. These have a slightly smaller ratio (1.78:1) compared to 1.85:1 movies.
AudioEnz contacted SkyTV for further information on their policies. Allen Hill from SkyTV confirmed the observations of Michael Wong above but said:
...but it is important to add that the picture loss is a much less than when it is chopped down to a 4:3 screen.
In many cases the producer of a movie will decide how the television image is to be framed. My observation would be that most films with aspect ratios wider than 16:9 are being letterboxed when transferred to tape for 16:9 television and DVD distribution, whereas in the past they were cropped for 4:3. Compare the same movie on SKY Movies and MovieMax to see the differences. We use two separate film to tape transfers. For SKY Movies it is a 4:3 transfer, and for SKY MovieMax it is a 16:9 transfer. Where possible Sky endeavours to source a cropped (i.e full height) 16:9 transfer however these are not always available.
Because we don't yet live in this ideal world we need to cater for existing 4:3 aspect ratio displays. Since all 16:9 television material is carried on a digital transport stream, it must be decoded for display. If the decoder "knows" that aspect ratio of the display device it is connected to is 4:3 it can resample a 16:9 image in one of two ways. It can either cut a 4:3 aspect ratio image from the centre of the 16:9 image by resampling the image horizontally, or resample the image vertically (drop lines) and present it in letter box format. The same information used to signal widescreen to a widescreen display device is used by the set top box to determine when to resample images in this case.
An important sentence in the above comments from Sky is "Because we don't yet live in this ideal world we need to cater for existing 4:3 aspect ratio displays."
When the full width of a movie is shown on a standard (4:3) television the height of the picture must be proportionally reduced, by adding black bars above and below the picture. Many viewers with 4:3 televisions find these black bars objectionable, even though they are then seeing the full movie.
When playing a 1.85:1 movie, the movie itself occupies around two-thirds of the screen. When viewing a 2.35:1 movie, the picture occupies only around one half of the screen.
My assumption is that SkyTV made a commercial decision. They knew that they would receive a large number of complaints by showing 2.35:1 movies in their full aspect ratio, so they compromised halfway.
I can understand why SkyTV does this, but that doesn't mean I like it. My preference is to see the movie the way the director intended. As does correspondent Michael Wong.
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