In a previous Blog post I talked about Aspect Ratios and there history, and gave a brief discussion about how they are dealt with when transferring to screens of different aspect ratios than the original.

Over the past few weeks I have been taking conscious effort to notice how different media is dealt with when the aspect ratio is an issue.

4:3 programs on TV (usually reruns) are usually displayed with 2 black bars going vertically up each side when displayed on a 16:9 screen. One such example of this that was prevalent was episodes of The Simpsons from earlier seasons which are displayed this way.

But other methods are used as well, another common method I observed was to still leave the image un-cropped, but instead of simply having Black Bars a faded, blurred version of the image is used. This allows the original footage to be un-altered, as well as the screen to be completely filled (even if its just filler). The advantages of this are removing the stark contrast the Black Bars give, the edges of the screen are the same colour palette as the actual video, it also moves which prevents “burn in” on older Plasma TVs. I observed this method on the ABC show Good Game, where it was used to show footage of older video games made for 4:3 screens.

As far as I know, I did not encounter any 4:3 media that had been cropped to fully fit a 16:9 screen on television.