Comments on: Aspect Ratio Lunacy

By: Andrei State

Andrei State — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 08:59:33 +0000

About those idiotic CNN videos: amusingly enough, the commercials that come with them are shown w/o distortion; the advertising industry obviously couldn’t sell much stuff with fat people. But what is amazing to me is that people like, say, their news anchors do not feel “misrepresented” and complain about it. Surely at least half of them must be vain enough to do so. After all, who wants to look fat? But the fact that this does not happen must mean that most people are indeed clueless. Or at least, that vain people are clueless. Now it all makes sense.

By: Jodi

Jodi — Wed, 19 Sep 2007 06:40:12 +0000

I would be willing to bet money that CNN just takes the original stretched video and drops it on the web site without any thought whatsoever. I’d also bet that there are a handful of people who work there and are really irked by it, but no one else cares, so they won’t do anything. Having worked for a couple of media organizations, I can say without a doubt that any mistake, however egregious, is 9 times out of ten the result of someone not paying attention, not caring, or not knowing how else to do it.

By: suv4x4

suv4x4 — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 18:56:40 +0000

I came to this post by googling for “cnn aspect ratio” since I also couldn’t comprehend the reason CNN’s online video is so badly stretched.

Compensation does happen since we often view our TV-s at odd angles where the ratio is not what we perceive it as.

That said it doesn’t make the choice to plain out stretch the video in this way much less horrible (only a bit less horrible).

Even weirder is this: notice the text and CNN logo are overlayed at square ratio.

It looks like this was a decision at CNN so they can transmit wide screen video on cable, and now all their archives are pre-stretched like that, hence this is how they publish it online.

I pray it’s just an artifact of transitional period as you do, and hope they’ll get it right within 1-2 years.

By: anonymous snowboarder

anonymous snowboarder — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 00:13:09 +0000

great to see some discussion of pixel aspect ratios! Just to toss out another oddity many may not know, most dvds cut out up to 10% of the available picture. This is because of another tie to analog tv - overscan. Because of inconsistencies in quality and differences between manufacturers, the video that was transmitted was bigger than the displayable area (search around for a more detailed explanation). The next time you watch a dvd, grab the controller and play with your zoom button (shrink it).

By: Gareth

Gareth — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 14:27:58 +0000

The only reason I can think of it that at some point in the near future CNN intends to go HD & thus Widescreen - and that they took the decision to hardcode their flash to 16:9 in a future-proofing we can’t quite be bothered why.

As for #29, there’s an awful lot of thought that went into the standards that have driven TV for many years, PAL was especially clever (as a european I have to say that). There’s never been anything stopping you use square pixels with MPEG1 or 2, and indeed non-square pixels on H264. Yes non-square pixels are an oddity, but HDTV was the right time to phase them out, given what MPEG1 and 2 were designed for, it’s not surprising that they supported non-square pixels and aspect ratios. In the UK the main broadcasters are actually very good at making sure their video is signalled correctly.

Don’t act like IT people have all the answers please, because in reality a lot of the failures you get on TV are not about broadcast equipment failing, but the computers that control them failing.

By: rillian

rillian — Sun, 09 Sep 2007 05:55:23 +0000

It’s nice to hear I’m not the only one with this pet peeve.

I assume it’s mostly to do with “getting your money’s worth with that wide screen”. I’ve been in several hotels recently with new 16:9 LCD televisions, but with 4:3 cable feeds. The irony is that the tv has an “autodetect aspect ratio” setting which worked properly, but the power-on default was “stretch to fit”.

Most people are used to watching movies letterboxed now; I wonder if they’ll get used to “barndoors” on older tv shows in another twenty years.

By: Stu Savory

Stu Savory — Sat, 08 Sep 2007 13:58:52 +0000

I think it is even more amazing that by just changing the aspect ratio in your two pictures, the car in the background changed from black to white

By: serial catowner

serial catowner — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 19:28:07 +0000

It’s actually worse than all that.

Take a picture of a person, import it into a graphics program, put a new layer over it, and trace the picture. Now withdraw the original photo. The tracing will look “wrong”. How can that be? The picture- take it yourself if you don’t trust others- looks right, the tracing looks wrong.

The good news here would be that there will always be work for illustrators who do it the old way, and your spouse will look beautiful to you as long as you love them.

By: foldedpath

foldedpath — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 03:49:36 +0000

The way CNN handles online video is annoying, but you can use the aspect ratio switch back at ‘em, to clean up that annoying ticker-tape text scroll across the bottom of the screen on their cable video.

We have a small LCD 16:9 screen in our kitchen. We only use it for watching local news and CNN (the big projection screen is in the bedroom for DVD movies). The cable feed is 4:3, and I leave it set on the “zoom” aspect ratio so it cuts off a little on the top and bottom, knocking out that annoying constant text crawl at the bottom.

By: Richard

Richard — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 02:31:15 +0000

I’ve seen this sort of distorted video as well, and I don’t like it. I grew up in an era where the aspiration was reproducing reality with fidelity, whether it was photography, cinema, music, etc. I think that those accursed cell phones began the fall of civilization into mediocrity. Built by engineers who mostly have tin ears, they sound atrocious, and human voices sound alien. It seems to me that reproducing the human voice should have been the topmost goal of the design of these things, and these things don’t. As far as I”m concerned, they are total failures as human-centered technology. Then we got compressed audio and video. Most kids in college now have no concept of what fine audio is, and what actually sounds natural. None.