Aspect Ratio -- or "Why is that person short and fat?"

I was watching my HD TV the other night when it occurred to me. I am seeing A LOT of full screen material. Why is that so earth shattering? Well, it wasn't that long ago that most of the material did NOT fill the screen. I had just gotten used to it the old way. I had noticed a change. Subtle, but a change.

First, a quick history lesson on how we got here.

The reason TV was a square, 4:3 in the first place was to mimic movies. They were roughly 4:3 aspect meaning, for every 4 units wide, the picture will be 3 units high. It is basic physics of 35mm film. In the 1950's, the movie industry was afraid that TV would kill it so they created, Cinemascope type or wide screen formats where the picture was wider that the old standard of 4 units wide to give it an edge over television and keep seats in the movie houses filled. When digital TV was developed in the 1980's, it was decided to again adapt to the wider screen format of movies. The only problem is that there are several different wide screen cinema formats so 16:9, 16 units wide to 9 units high was adapted for digital television. That is why you can sometimes still see black bars at the top and bottom and really wide movies when played on a HD TV. It is all about aspect ratio. "Why is that person short and fat?"

I bought my first HD TV in 2003. I got it for work since we had just started digital broadcasting and network was sending actual 16:9 formatted programming. I wanted to see it to be sure it was being broadcast correctly. In 2003, very few people had HD TV's. I jokingly said I had my "own" TV station. I could turn it on and off and do all kinds of stuff with it and no one ever called and complained. (They didn't) Problem was for all of 2 hours maximum a day, we had full screen material to broadcast. The rest of the day, we ran our analog 4:3 video through a converter that put black wings on the side of the picture to keep people the correct aspect and to fill out the 16:9 screen. It was simple. If network on was line, the converter was out of line and network worried about its own programming. When not in network, the converter was in line. Correct aspect was maintained. We did that for years. So did the majority of TV stations nationwide.

On June 12, 2009, full power TV stations were required by the government to turn off their analog transmitters. This forced the viewing public to conform to the new digital standard. This also forced stations and program distributors beyond the networks to begin dealing with aspect ratio since the new defacto standard had moved from 4:3 to 16:9. Literally overnight.

When the digital standard had been set, it was stated that standard definition could be 4:3 or 16:9. There was no embedded way to tell the set how to automatically format the picture though. Still isn't. All HD would be 16:9 and if it were upconverted SD the picture formatting signal was an option. After the Digital Transition in 2009, production companies very quickly moved towards converting their programs from 4:3 SD to 16:9 HD. In just 3 years, very few programs intended for mass distribution are still in SD where only network programs were in HD 16:9 before June 2009. Even local stations have converted to HD in a fraction of the time that they converted from black and white to color between the late 1950's into the mid to late 1960's. We began true 16:9 programming in the fall of 2009. Our newscast was still in SD, but it was true widescreen. In the fall of 2009 only 4 non network programs were available to us in HD and we broadcasted those programs in 16:9 HD while the rest of the schedule was upconverted SD 4:3 with black bars on the side, including locally produced programming. In the fall of 2010 we converted our news and production operation completely to HD including live field news reports via microwave and via satellite. Today, only 3 non network programs are SD. We air over 20 hours a day of HD 16:9 programming. Not bad. But........

On the other hand, commercial production has lagged way behind. The majority of commercials at the national level are still produced in 4:3 standard definition. The reason? Production houses charge more for HD commercials. It cost more to distribute them. Gone are the days of sending tapes with the commercials on them. They are now sent to severs located at the stations as files via the Internet and satellite. It takes bandwidth to do that. HD commercials use A LOT of bandwidth. So they charge more for it. That is changing, but very slowly. We have been producing our local commercials in widescreen and then in HD since the fall of 2009. The other local stations have also started to produce their local commercials in widescreen at least. We get about 6 HD national commercials a week compared to the more than 250 we get in SD.

The other night is when I noticed that I was seeing more and more national HD commercials. I was seeing less and less of the back bars on the sides. As a matter of fact, most of the commercials were in widescreen. Something in 2003 was unimaginable. It is amazing how far we have come in just 8 years.