Windowboxing (also called either the "postage stamp effect", "gutterboxing", "matchboxing", or "double letterboxing") in the display of film or video occurs when the aspect ratio of the media is such that the letterbox effect and pillarbox effect occur simultaneously.[1][2][3] Sometimes, by accident or design, a standard ratio image is presented in the central portion of a letterbox picture (or vice versa), resulting in a black border all around. It is generally disliked because it wastes much screen space and reduces the resolution of the original image. It can occur when a 16:9 film is set to 4:3 (letterbox), but then shown on a 16:9 TV or other output device. It can also occur in the opposite direction and a few films have been released with this aspect ratio one example is The Crocodile Hunter: Collision Course, which had numerous scenes with Steve & Terri Irwin using widescreen pillar boxing.
Deliberate windowboxing
A 2.40:1 ad pillarboxed for a 2.40:1 program, letterboxed by the broadcaster to fit the 2.40:1 channel, which is then viewed on a 2.40:1 TV that further pillarboxes the image.
On rare occasion, a picture will be windowboxed on purpose. During the opening, documentary-style sequence of Rent on the DVD and Blu-ray Disc releases, the picture is windowboxed to suggest an older camera meant to present at a 2.40:1 aspect ratio; as the movie transitions from that segment, it then expands horizontally from a windowboxed 2.40:1 to a letterboxed 2.40:1 aspect ratio. The other example is in on Brother Bear. On the theatrical and widescreen DVD release, the beginning of the film is windowboxed until Kenai, the main character, becomes a bear. This is to show that his world-view, and his perspective on nature, has widened. The another example is in on Oz the Great and Powerful. The film was opened in black and white and 1.33:1 fullscreen. The film was changed from black and white and 1.33:1 fullscreen to color and 2.40:1 widescreen.
A form of windowboxing is also occasionally encountered in 3D film; by containing the reference plane in a box smaller than the actual screen, the filmmaker can increase the stereoscopic effect of objects coming out of the plane and toward the viewer by having them extend outside the windowbox.
Windowboxing has also been used in the instance of transferring films with the academy ratio of 2.40:1 to video, as evidenced in recent DVD releases of older films shot in this standard.[4] This is to compensate for the overscan on many 2.40:1 television screens, which cuts off part of all four sides of the image. Windowboxing ensures that either more or all of the image is visible on these TVs; in a best case scenario the TV overscan cuts off nothing but the windowbox borders. It originally was used only for the credit sequences in 2.40:1 films, where the text could extend out to the very edges of the image, but it was gradually adopted to be used throughout the film.
Critics[who?] often[when?] argue that windowboxing of this ratio is unnecessary due to the image loss caused by overscan being negligible. Moreover, for those who watch such films on computer monitors or newer TVs, both of which have little to no overscan, the black borders around all four sides of the image are visible, effectively shrinking the image on those displays. Windowboxing on video also reduces the total amount of resolution the image effectively uses, but defenders of the process argue that the lost resolution is negligible.[4]
Defenders[who?] also argue that the prevalence of credit sequences being windowboxed on recent DVDs suggests a natural progression towards the full presentation being windowboxed, just as widescreen presentations progressed. However, letterboxing never ensured that the TV displaying it was showing the full image, just that it was present in the signal, while anamorphic enhancement on DVDs was designed to maximize the resolution used by widescreen films on the format, again with no compensation for overscan.[citation needed]
Defenders[who?] further argue that the traditional method of cropping 1.33:1 aspect ratio films to fill the 1.33:1 ratio of standard definition video causes visual information, however negligible, to be permanently lost from the film. However, critics[who?] point out that this situation can be remedied by letterboxing the 1.33:1 image instead of windowboxing, while windowboxed images are often still in a 1.33:1 aspect ratio, meaning the lost image information was not restored by the process.[4] Furthermore, DVD video has slightly more horizontal resolution than analogue video, giving it an effective aspect ratio of 1.33:1 which allows for a nearly full-screen 1.33:1 image to be stored without cropping, although whether this extra image information can be properly displayed depends on the equipment used.[5]
Ultimately, the use of 4:3 windowboxing on video is dependent on whether or not the issue of overscan is better solved via hardware (through the use of newer equipment, to the detriment of those with older displays) or via software (through the use of windowboxing, to the detriment of those with newer displays).[4]
At the time before widescreen televisions became popular, most video game consoles until the seventh generation were windowboxed when shown on a widescreen display.[6] The windowboxing was done so that overscanning would be prevented when playing a game on a 2.40:1 television unit, and so that no on-screen information would be cut off. Some widescreen televisions have a horizontal stretch feature that stretches the image with minimal vertical cropping, compared to the vertical amount that normal zoom feature would crop off, but it causes far more distortion rather than normally zooming in on all four sides of the image.[6]
Related Research Articles
Letter-boxing is the practice of transferring film shot in a widescreen aspect ratio to standard-width video formats while preserving the film's original aspect ratio. The resulting video-graphic image has mattes empty space above and below it; these mattes are part of each frame of the video signal.
Pan and scan is a method of adjusting widescreen film images so that they can be shown in fullscreen proportions of a standard-definition 4:3 aspect ratio television screen, often cropping off the sides of the original widescreen image to focus on the composition's most important aspects.
Standard-definition television is a television system that uses a resolution that is not considered to be either high or enhanced definition. Standard refers to offering a similar resolution to the analog broadcast systems used when it was introduced.
Widescreen images are displayed within a set of aspect ratios used in film, television and computer screens. In film, a widescreen film is any film image with a width-to-height aspect ratio greater than 4:3 (12:9).
Anamorphic widescreen is a process by which a comparatively wide widescreen image is horizontally compressed to fit into a storage medium with a narrower aspect ratio, reducing the horizontal resolution of the image while keeping its full original vertical resolution. Compatible play-back equipment can then expand the horizontal dimension to show the original widescreen image. This is typically used to allow one to store widescreen images on a medium that was originally intended for a narrower ratio, while using as much of the frame – and therefore recording as much detail – as possible.
16:9 (1.78:1) is a widescreen aspect ratio with a width of 16 units and height of 9 units.
The display resolution or display modes of a digital television, computer monitor or display device is the number of distinct pixels in each dimension that can be displayed. It can be an ambiguous term especially as the displayed resolution is controlled by different factors in cathode ray tube (CRT) displays, flat-panel displays and projection displays using fixed picture-element (pixel) arrays.
Overscan is a behaviour in certain television sets, in which part of the input picture is cut off by the visible bounds of the screen. It exists because cathode-ray tube (CRT) television sets from the 1930s to the early 2000s were highly variable in how the video image was positioned within the borders of the screen. It then became common practice to have video signals with black edges around the picture, which the television was meant to discard in this way.
Cropping is the removal of unwanted outer areas from a photographic or illustrated image. The process usually consists of the removal of some of the peripheral areas of an image to remove extraneous visual data from the picture, improve its framing, change the aspect ratio, or accentuate or isolate the subject matter from its background. Depending on the application, this can be performed on a physical photograph, artwork, or film footage, or it can be achieved digitally by using image editing software. The process of cropping is common to the photographic, film processing, broadcasting, graphic design, and printing businesses.
14:9 is a compromise aspect ratio between 4:3 and 16:9. It is used to create an acceptable picture on both 4:3 and 16:9 TV, conceived following audience tests conducted by the BBC. It has been used by most UK, Irish, French, Spanish, Colombian and Australian terrestrial analogue networks, and in the US on Warner Bros. Discovery' HD simulcast channels with programming and advertising originally compiled in 4:3. Note that 14:9 is not a shooting format; 14:9 material is almost always derived from either a 16:9 or 4:3 shot, and no televisions have ever been made in 14:9.
Safe area is a term used in television production to describe the areas of the television picture that can be seen on television screens.
The pillarbox effect occurs in widescreen video displays when black bars are placed on the sides of the image. It becomes necessary when film or video that was not originally designed for widescreen is shown on a widescreen display, or a narrower widescreen image is displayed within a wider aspect ratio, such as a 16:9 image in a 2.39:1 frame. The original material is shrunk and placed in the middle of the widescreen frame.
In television technology, Active Format Description (AFD) is a standard set of codes that can be sent in the MPEG video stream or in the baseband SDI video signal that carries information about their aspect ratio and other active picture characteristics. It has been used by television broadcasters to enable both 4:3 and 16:9 television sets to optimally present pictures transmitted in either format. It has also been used by broadcasters to dynamically control how down-conversion equipment formats widescreen 16:9 pictures for 4:3 displays.
A Pixel aspect ratio is a mathematical ratio that describes how the width of a pixel in a digital image compared to the height of that pixel.
Widescreen televisions provide several modes for displaying video from 4:3 sources. These modes may be selected manually from a remote control, or automatically if an Active Format Descriptor is available.
1440p is a family of video display resolutions that have a vertical resolution of 1440 pixels. The p stands for progressive scan, i.e. non-interlaced. The 1440 pixel vertical resolution is double the vertical resolution of 720p, and one-third more than 1080p. QHD or WQHD is the designation for a commonly used display resolution of 2560 × 1440 pixels in a 16:9 aspect ratio. As a graphics display resolution between 1080p and 4K, Quad HD is regularly used in smartphone displays, and for computer and console gaming.
The technology of television has evolved since its early days using a mechanical system invented by Paul Gottlieb Nipkow in 1884. Every television system works on the scanning principle first implemented in the rotating disk scanner of Nipkow. This turns a two-dimensional image into a time series of signals that represent the brightness and color of each resolvable element of the picture. By repeating a two-dimensional image quickly enough, the impression of motion can be transmitted as well. For the receiving apparatus to reconstruct the image, synchronization information is included in the signal to allow proper placement of each line within the image and to identify when a complete image has been transmitted and a new image is to follow.
The display aspect ratio (or DAR) is the aspect ratio of a display device and so the proportional relationship between the physical width and the height of the display. It is expressed as two numbers separated by a colon (x:y), where x corresponds to the width and y to the height. Common aspect ratios for displays, past and present, include 5:4, 4:3, 16:10, and 16:9.
"21:9" is a consumer electronics (CE) marketing term to describe the ultrawide aspect ratio of 64:27, designed to show films recorded in CinemaScope and equivalent modern anamorphic formats. The main benefit of this screen aspect ratio is a constant display height when displaying other content with a lesser aspect ratio.
The aspect ratio of an image is the ratio of its width to its height, and is expressed with two numbers separated by a colon, such as 2.40:1. For the 2.40:1 aspect ratio, the image is 2.40:1 units wide and 2.40:1 units high. Common aspect ratios are 1.85:1 and 2.40:1 in cinematography, 4:3 and 16:9 in television photography, and 3:2 in still photography. The film was filmed in 2.40:1 widescreen.
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