does filming 16:9 give "bigger picture"?

[choirislife923]

i am wondering about that. since all of those hollywood people say that widescreen shows the movie the way it was intended to be shown (as in more background detail and such), does the 16:9 consumer stuff do that too (makes more stuff visible), or does it simply squish the picture and that is captured from the lens and when you play on a 4:3 TV it slaps two blackbars so that it gives the widescreen effect?

[JimJohnD]

It depends on the camera. Most "consumer" cameras do something like what you said and just add black bars to the top and bottom of the frame (wasting perfectly good pixels). You can get a 16:9 adapter lens which will create a true anamorphic image using all of the pixels your camera has. Some cameras like the Sony DSR-PDX10 have mega-pixel CCDs that can capture "true" anamorphic 16:9 images without an adapter. This setting on the PDX10 gives you about an 8mm wider image than the 4:3 setting. The video is simply WOW on a big wide screen TV. I do all of my video work in anamorphic 16:9 now. By authoring the video as anamorphic from start to finish you get a DVD that the player will automatically "letterbox" on a 4:3 TV or show full-screen on a 16:9.

[JimJohnD]

P.S.

I have used PowerDVD to take 7 "snapshots" from some DVD footage I have done. I resized them to proper proportion using PaintShop. They are located at a page I'm starting:

http://www.bright.net/~jimjohnd/photo.htm

[racer-x]

Nice pics JimJohnD. It's giving me the earge to try some 16:9 shots on my Panasonic PV-DV953. I always use 4:3, but maybe I'll give the 16:9 a try for tests. I'll just set it on a tripod and shoot the same scene in both modes. That should give an accurate comparison.

[choirislife923]

this site is pretty much an ad for the widescreen lens, but on the right hand side of the page, there is a really good demo on DV camcorder 16:9 vs 4:3 vs widescreen lens.

http://www.centuryoptics.com/products/dv/16x9/16x9.htm

[EricBinford]

Well, I have a very cheap Canon camcorder and it has a cinema mode which simply puts bars at the top and bottom of the picture, but it also has a widescreen mode that squashed the picture horizontally (so objects look taller than they really are). This gives a psuedo anamorphic picture, but it is quite effective.

When I sya cheap, I mean cheap. 4 years agoit was £250.

Eric