

There are two types of padding: letterboxing and pillarboxing. Masking the MaskĪ common way to fix aspect ratio sizes and not spoil the video is to pad the frame with black areas.

Or the source was 16:9 and they applied a 4:3 aspect ratio squashing it horizontally.Įither approach makes the video look amateurish and can also affect performance of video editing systems because they have to process every single frame for the new size, and that takes way longer than it should. You often see videos on YouTube which are kind of squashed looking, and that’s because the creator paid no attention to aspect ratios.Įither the source material was 4:3 and they applied a ratio of 16:9 stretching it horizontally, The reason this matters is that people sometimes get this horribly wrong. See how much narrower it is than 16×9? Crushing the Size There were (in PAL TV) 768 x 576 pixels, and that means the width is 1.33 times the height (SD images sometimes go wrong, but that depends on if the system used square pixels, and that’s a whole other article.).
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But still the bad habits and misunderstandings created in that transition period still persist as people recycle old videos and show TV programs of the past on modern TV sets.įor example, the old standard definition TV pictures and old style “square” computer monitors were 4:3 or 1.33:1. They didn’t use widescreen images the used old time TV-shaped images. Twenty years ago the TV systems of the world were very different. It’s the shape of the frame, and frames are all a specific size depending on the technology you are using to grab your images. This ratio can also be expressed as 1.77:1, so the width is 1.77 times the height. If a video is 1280 x 720 pixels, then it can be said that it’s 16:9 or 16 units by 9 units. In terms of video, an aspect ratio is an expression of the ratio (or relationship) of the width to the height.
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Some people genuinely either can’t tell or don’t care about the difference between any of these things, and while subtle it’s important to know the difference for professional looking video. In this article we define video aspect ratios with examples so you will always know what size your screen should be, regardless of the source or TV system.
