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Author
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Topic: Which dv cams do real widescreen?
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nasq
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posted 03-24-2000 01:37 PM
Up, I just wanna know which dv cams do real widescreen.. I mean not just placing black bars, but giving you a wider pic. |
Suspiria
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posted 03-24-2000 03:01 PM
I have the Sony TR7000 digital8 cam, it has an option for widescreen (16:9) |
funkymunkey
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posted 03-24-2000 03:35 PM
I'm pretty sure all Sony cameras (Video8, Hi8, Digi8, DV) with the widescreen option give you anamorphic 16:9. |
24fps
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posted 03-24-2000 03:38 PM
No consumer level camcorder has a true wide screen option. Some do have the 16:9 option, but that electronically crops the top and bottom of the image and stretches it to fit the CCD. The only way to have true widescreen video (that is pick up more image on the sides) is to use a camera with a 16:9 CCD (not the 4:3 CCD in consumer products), and for a camera that has that you are looking to spend more than you (or I) have got - $10,000, give or take a couple o' thou...[This message has been edited by 24fps (edited 03-24-2000).] |
nasq
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posted 03-24-2000 03:45 PM
But as someone said earlier, Sony get more picture from sides when used in 16:9 mode.. How is that done if it's not a real widescreen? |
nasq
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posted 03-24-2000 03:46 PM
Umm..sorry about double post =) If it electronically stretches the picture, I think I can squeeze it on my tv to widescreen..right? |
24fps
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posted 03-24-2000 04:13 PM
Check out this site:
http://www.mediadesign.net/canondv.htm Go to the Articles section and read The Myth of DV widescreen under "Camera Head" in the Articles section. It is specifically about the XL-1, but the same holds true for any consumer camcorder. As for the widescreen on your TV - no, you will get a vertically stretched image unless you play back on a 16:9 television. If you really want widescreen footage, mask it that way in post production. That's the way they do it in 35mm motion picture stuff 90% of the time anyway. |
Mister Twisted
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posted 03-24-2000 04:59 PM
Wait a second though... Some of the cameras (Sony?) give you a widescreen picture in the viewfinder, some (Canon?) show the anamorphically distorted picture in the viewfinder, but all of them, I believe, send the anamorphic picture out as the signal (in other words, you never get the "black bar" picture coming out of the firewire socket). Since the DV data rate is fixed, letting the camera do the cropping ought to mean that the final picture is slightly better, since if you crop the normal picture on the computer you're just throwing 25% of the data away, whereas if you squeeze the distorted picture back into shape, you're resampling 100% of the data to take up 75% of the space. Technically, I suppose that means that you're still throwing away 25% of the data, but tests that we've done suggest that subjectively the picture looks much better. A word of warning if (like us) you use a PAL camera - because, for a full frame, each chrominance component is only sampled two lines out of four (two lines of U, then two lines of V, one from each field) you might find that certain pictures develop strange fringes when you resize them. You can fix this by using a small amount of vertical convolution. |
nasq
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posted 03-24-2000 06:44 PM
>no, you will get a vertically stretched image unless you play back on a 16:9Umm I have heard U don't have a squeeze (16:9) feature on your 4:3 TV's in the States? I mean I can squeeze real anamorphic picture, for example from DVD with this button and it will be in correct aspect ratio. |
EricM
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posted 03-24-2000 08:25 PM
Let's try to sort out this widescreen issue.
A normal TV (PAL or NTSC) has an aspect ratio of 4:3 or 1.33 to 1 depending on how you like to say it (they both mean the same thing). The new standard for wide screen TV is 16:9 or 1.78 to one.
A widescreen TV image really has a ratio of 4:3 but it looks tall and skinny. This is called animorphic. You need a widescreen TV to stretch the image out to the sides to make the picture look normal.
Newer cameras have the option of shooting at either ratio, but as noted above, most consumer cameras "fake" it. Consumer cameras have a CCD (the chip that makes the image) that has a ratio of 4:3. To make a wide screen image, they crop the picture to 16:9 and stretch it verticaly into an animorphic 16:9. This uses fewer pixels on the CCD and therefore is a reduction in quality.
There is often the option of animorphic 16:9 or flat 16:9 (black bars at the top and bottom).
A real wide screen camera has a CCD that is 16:9. When it is shooting a 4:3 image it is only using part of the CCD. When it makes a 16:9 animorphic image, it use all of the CCD, no loss in quality.
A lot of DVD titles are mastered in animorphic 16:9. If you set your player to 16:9 widescreen, then the image will look tall and skinny on a 4:3 TV. You need a widescreen TV to view movies this way.
When you set your player to 4:3 widescreen, the image is squeezed smaller and you see bars at the top and bottom. To do this, some lines have to be removed and this is a reduction in quality. PAL and NTSC DVD players work this way.Someone did say that there was a Sony consumer camera that did a proper 16:9 animorphic picture. I have no reason not to believe this, until told otherwise. Hope this clears things up. |
nasq
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posted 03-25-2000 08:33 AM
No I don't need a widescreen TV! I do have a dvd player and I do watch movies in ana(/i)morphic aspect on my 4:3 TV and it doesn't look weird. Because we have a squeeze feature on our TV's (European TV) we can squeeze the anamorphic picture to the right aspect. (The squeezing being done on the TV, not on the player, so we won't lose any quality.) I've heard there's no such feature in TV's sold in USA. Maybe I should get a Sony camera then, if some of them features an anamorphic widescreen option. | |
