[MJD314]

I hope this is the correct forum to air this query

I watched Dad's Army recently and it was the very first episode of the first series It was originally made in 4x3 format but broadcast this time in widescreen. The picture did not appear to be stretched or distorted in any way. How is this done?

[David Waine]

Whenever I have watched Dad's Army recently, it has been pillar boxed. You don't say what you watched it on, but the only way it could fill a wide screen without stretching would be to chop the top and bottom off the picture. MGM once did that with a 1970s re-release of Gone With the Wind. It didn't work very well. All of the TV series of Dad's Army were made in 4x3 long before the arrival of widescreen TVs. I believe there was a feature film, which would have been made in the standard cinema aspect ration of 1.85:1 (which fits a widescreen TV quite well), but you mentioned that this was the TV version.

[Chris Frost]

If you watched this off a TV broadcast or a DVD box set then there a couple of ways it could be achieved by the broadcaster or production company responsible for remastering the release.

If there's enough space above and below the actors in shot then the frame can be cropped to 14:9, and then stretched a small amount to fill the width of the screen. Some of the shots might even allow a direct 16:9 crop. The important thing here is that these decisions are made shot-by-shot. The results are then pieced together to make a "made for 16:9" edition of the show.

Typical TVs have quite a blunt instrument in the aspect ratio button. It is a passive system, usually resulting in either indiscriminate cropping or some fairly aggressive image stretching.

Some newer Smart TVs are now using Face Recognition algorithms to make adaptive decisions about the way content is cropped or stretched. If you have one of these TVs then that could be your answer.

[jenzie]

cropping is the natural way of creating a 16x9 picture from a 4x3 frame, having the 4x3 frame WITH black bars on the sides of the screen is the other way ..... obvious i know

gone with the wind was originally filmed in 1.37x1 format, and released later in the wider 2.20x1

quite a few movies have been made with tv's in mind

[David Waine]

I went to see the cropped (2.2:1) Gone With the Wind in the cinema when it was released about forty years ago. MGM went the whole hog by blowing it up to 70mm at the same time. The spectacular scenes, such as the burning of Atlanta were, if anything, enhanced by the switch to widescreen. Everything else, however, was a bit of a disaster. Close shots of Clark Gable and Vivienne Leigh were minus his forehead and her chin. Shots that had been perfectly framed in 4x3 just looked wrong wide. On the other hand, the image quality was excellent, which just goes to show how good the original 1939 master print was.

Just thought I would mention that even though it has nothing to do with Dad's Army.

[MJD314]

Thanks to all those who responded, especially Christ Frost. I understand now how the original 4x3 picture was made to fill a 16x9 wide screen without distortion My TV is not a smart TV just a fairly standard Panasonic 26in widescreen.