HDTV picture size on standard 4:3 TV

[Electronic M]

Haven't seen nonuniform stretching yet, but a while back when watching Fox News I saw something for the first time that I've been morbidly anticipating for some time....a TRIPLE boxed comercial(once pillar boxed twice letter boxed...my 19" Zenith CCII became like a 10" set, UGH!)! Now broadcast engineering as a field is legitimately dead to me.
When I started seeing double boxed content(letter and pilar) for the first time my reaction was: 'Ugh! you are charging how much for cable?...And you are spending how many million in equipment?...And you morons don't have a device set up to detect and eliminate multiple redundant boxings and fix it by expanding the center to fill the screen!?!?!?'

I mean seriously, either the engineers have their heads WAAAY up their buts, corporate pencil pushers are ordering the engineers to do things that are bad ideas, or no one in the TV broadcast industry gives a CRAP about folks that still have NTSC sets and want PROPERLY down converted content for them.

[Chip Chester]

Keep in mind that one of those letterboxes could have come from the production company that made the commercial. There are about 92 different possible reasons for this -- ranging from the whim of the art director on the project to the fact that they needed one duplication format to cover all their airbuys.

Active Format Description can help, but it's not foolproof, as some spots are grouped together by organizations outside the station, and are aired as a "package" rather than individually. More here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Format_Description

The only way broadcasters will fix stuff like this is for comments to wind up in their FCC public comment file at the station.

And when you're doing a program, it sucks to have to second-guess how your show is going to be presented. Making things "center-cut compatible" eliminates almost 1/3 of the screen area, from a program-critical content standpoint.

Chip

[ChrisW6ATV]

Originally Posted by Electronic M

I saw something for the first time that I've been morbidly anticipating for some time....a TRIPLE boxed commercial

I probably first saw those in 2003. There is a very easy explanation. The commercial was 16:9, but it was on a 4:3 channel that is encoded as 16:9 but displayed on your 4:3 set. No TV station, much less a cable system, is going to on-the-fly change formats to assist various display types. (Europe and maybe other places had a variation of this possibility in the late days of analog TV, when standard-def widescreen TV sets were common there; that may be what Chip was describing.) The only near-cure is a tuner that can remember per-channel "zoom" settings, so that you could fill the 4:3 screen with that 4:3 channel (other than the commercial's 16:9 self-format, which would never get "fixed"). The Zenith DTT-900/901 or Channel Master CM7000 tuners can do this if I remember right, but they are for over-the-air only.

[Chip Chester]

I have noticed on NBC network shows in the evening (news, etc.) that immediately after the fade to black before local commercial breaks is about 10 frames of 4x3 -- at evidenced by a slight black level mismatch. Then, the station's programming comes in at whatever its setting is. So, somebody along the chain is using AFD...

What's also interesting is full-height 4x3 commercials within an HD show. Line 21 up top is clearly visible, with the caption data churning away, during the spot. Normally that would be buried in overscan.

Chip