Black Bars or No Black Bars?

[Goku100xKamehameha]

Recently I bought the first volume of Kai on Blu-Ray (not to be confused with Z Kai) and when I played the footage on my widescreen HDTV, I realized that there are 2 black bars, each one on the left and right and I'm really don't like this. I know the standard for HD is 16:9, so that's why when companies wants to put a 4:3 footage in HD, they put the footage in the middle while keeping the black bars as the footage. I realized if I watch the DVD version of DBZ Kai, my TV would stretch the footage to fit the screen but of course the quality wouldn't be as good as the Blu-rays and it's not the correct aspect ratio (because of my TV, this wouldn't be a problem for me). I know other people annoyed by it, so what's your opinion? Black bars or no black bars?

[Metalwario64]

I have no idea what people have against pillarboxing... What is wrong with black bars on the sides? Back in the say, did those same people complain if they had black 4:3 TV's and saw the edges of the television against the side of the picture?

On a semi-related note, I've seen people who've played old Game Boy games on a Game Boy Advance, and they always stretched the image out to fit the whole screen. Anyone who knows about Game Boy's knows that the Game Boy Advance's resolution is much wider than the Game Boy/Game Boy Color's resolution, perhaps even more than the difference between a 4:3 TV and a 16:9 TV.

Whenever I play original Game Boy games on my Game Boy Advance SP, I keep them in their original resolution, and have always seen the "black bars" on the sides as being no different than having a black original Game Boy and seeing the rest of the black plastic around the screen.

Why do so many people care so much about black bars, but never complained about seeing the front of their TV's around the image back in the "4:3 era"?

[MetalMadness]

Pillar bars annoy me so much, I honestly can't enjoy what I'm watching because of them.

Metalwario> The edge of the televion is very thin. The pillar bars, however, are absolutely huge, and take up like 40% of the screen. So that's why they bother me.

I will take a stretched image any day over the pillar bars. A stretched image looks weird to me at first, but once i adjust to it, i notice nothing and I can enjoy what I'm watching.

Plus I think it's a waste to have a 50 inch TV and only be using less than 35 inches of it, you know what I mean?

[Metalwario64]

Metalwario> The edge of the televion is very thin. The pillar bars, however, are absolutely huge, and take up like 40% of the screen. So that's why they bother me.

Perhaps with newer TV's, but I have an older 4:3 Sony TV in my room, and its speakers are on the front next to the screen. The size of them is perhaps a little more than the black bars that you'll see on 16:9 TV's displaying 4:3 footage. That's never bothered me, and I've never heard complaints about such Television's back in the "4x3 era".

[Kendamu]

I don't really care about black bars at all. As long as the aspect ratio is correct I'm good.

[Raven]

I don't know why but I can't stand black bars on the side as well.. I wouldn't even watch the Dragon Box on a widescreen actually for that reason! I'm very happy to still have my little old 4:3 TV

[VegettoEX]

Due to your English being pretty poor, I feel like I have to almost entirely re-describe the situation for folks.

(1) We know that Kai is produced in high-definition in a 4:3 aspect ratio (the original aspect ratio of the underlying DragonBall Z footage it's based on)

(2) The Japanese Blu-ray release is in HD, and is 4:3

(3) The Japanese DVD release is cropped to 16:9, exactly as the TV broadcast is done

(4) The FUNimation DVD and Blu-ray releases are both 4:3; no cropping is done on either release

Now, onto some technical aspects:

The image on a DVD is saved as, by standard, 720 pixels high by 480 pixels wide. Whatever it's being broadcast through figures out that the pixels need to be square instead of rectangles, so it squishes them back to the right aspect ratio (640 x 480) when it's displayed. Awesome. All cool there...


(click for full-sized PNG)

...but what about something that's in a widescreen aspect ratio? One of the great things about the DVD standard was something called an "anamorphic" flag that could be set. The image would be encoded as the standard 720x480 on the DVD, which means that the raw encodes looks very odd, since everything is stretched to be too tall. However, since it's coded as anamorphic, the playback devices recognizes this if you're watching on a 4:3 display and ON THE FLY adds letterbox mattes at the top and bottom to "fill up" the screen so everything's not all stretched out -- nothing is covered up or cropped, and everything is displayed as it's supposed to look.


(click for full-sized PNG)

What about if you're watching on a widescreen TV, though? Well, it recognizes that, and instead of adding bars to the top and bottom, it displays it as-is in a widescreen aspect ratio (~854x480) to fit the widescreen TV -- again, nothing is covered up or cropped, and everything is displayed as it's supposed to look.


(click for full-sized PNG)

Amazingly enough, it sounds like we took a step backward with the Blu-ray standard. There is no corresponding "flag" for something that is in a 4:3 aspect ratio -- video producers have to physically add in pillar bars on the left and right of the video stream to fill up that 1920x1080 window size (which, without the pillar bars, would otherwise be 1440x1080).


(click for full-sized PNG)

Where the problem comes in is that, when viewing a pillar-barred 4:3 show that's encoded on a Blu-ray on an older 4:3 display, it does this since the black bars are actually encoded as a part of the picture:



It's resized the widescreen footage (which INCLUDES the left and right bars) to 360 pixels tall and added pillar bars at the top and bottom (which it adds ON THE FLY; they don't exist in the video stream) to fill up the 480 vertical pixels. There's no "problem" in that you're still seeing all of the footage. Nothing's cropped. Nothing's removed. You see it all. The only "problem" is that, unlike pillar bars EXCLUSIVELY on the top+bottom or left+right, you're ACTUALLY wasting real-estate space like this, since you could theoretically expand the image in all four directions equally and still not lose anything or stretch things out to look ridiculous -- except we've got those pesky pillar bars being encoded as a part of the actual image getting in the way.

So now for some stories.

Back in high school and a little bit into college, I worked at Blockbuster. A movie called The Insider was released to VHS, and I believe the story was that the director insisted that it be released as letterboxed-only (no cropped "full screen" or "pan-and-scan" version) -- this meant that it looked like example #3 up above with Piccolo from DBZ movie 1 with bars on the top and bottom. People returned the movie after renting it in droves because it was "cut off" -- try explaining to people that they're actually seeing ALL OF THE FOOTAGE when there's black bars somehow making the video "smaller", and well... that was certainly fun.

But that's the whole point -- no-one was "losing" anything, because the footage was ALL RIGHT THERE IN FRONT OF THEM.

That's what pillar bars achieve. You see everything. You see it as it was supposed to be seen. That's how it looks. That's it. It's that "state of being" that I often talk about.

I've posted about this recently -- my eyes entirely tune out pillar bars. I don't see them. I just see the image as it's presented to me. I wouldn't watch a 4:3 show stretched to 16:9 on my widescreen TV just like I wouldn't watch a 16:9 show stretched to 4:3 on my old CRT TV. It looks ridiculous. Circles aren't circles anymore. People are either asininely thin or asininely fat. It's ridiculous.

My 50" widescreen TV is still showing that 4:3 image "bigger" than my old 27" CRT even with left and right pillar bars, so what's the problem...?

[dan2026]

there are 2 black bars, each one on the left and right

As has been already stated, this is entirely correct.
You are viewing a 4:3 show on a 16:9 TV.
There is going to be blank space to the left and right.

[TheGreatness25]

If you have such a problem with this, you can stretch the image, but it will be... stretched and unnatural looking, or you can zoom in and crop the top and bottom off. So you get to pick the lesser of three evils since you hate the "black bars."

[Adamant]

Or just buy a 4:3 TV to watch your 4:3 stuff on. They're cheap.

[AgitoZ]

Although the black bars did annoy me at first, they still do but not as much, I've grown past them. When watching a 4:3 show on my HD TV the quality is great.

Not to mention the alternative is to stretch the footage. Which just bugs the hell out of me. I'd rather have pillars then having the footage look like crap.

[Taku128]

Stretched footage looks absolutely horrible. I don't understand why someone would rather have everyone look inconsistently wide, depending on how close or far they are to the camera, then have two bars on the side. Why are you even looking at the bars? That's like looking at the TV frame, why would you ever take your eyes off what's happening? Just watch the show!





Look at him! His head is so wide! Everything is horribly stretched, how can you watch this?

[Gaffer Tape]

Yeah, I don't get it either. Looking at a stretched image makes me cringe, yet so many people just do it and either never notice or don't care. It's gotten to the point that I just don't want to watch television with other people anymore because I'm too polite to say, "What's wrong with you, you fucking moron?! If you don't know how to use a TV you shouldn't be allowed to own one!"

I'd say we've taken a step back from the old days. Sure, all the idiots back then were complaining about letterboxing, but now that widescreen is the new "in" thing, they're complaining about pillarboxing. They're just liking whatever the companies tell them to like. But at least back then you didn't have people fucking around with their TVs to purposely make it look like ass. I honestly don't really know why they started making televisions with easy ways to do that.

But, yeah, like Kendamu succinctly said, I don't have an aspect ratio preference, just as long as whatever I watch is in its original aspect ratio and presented properly.

[Goku100xKamehameha]

Or just buy a 4:3 TV to watch your 4:3 stuff on. They're cheap.

VegettoEX already made an example of how it would look, If you watched Kai Blu-ray in 4:3 TV and I prefer the black bars on the sides over it because it look waayyyyy worse.

[Codarik]

People complaining about the black bars on the left and right side of the screen is one of the reasons why FUNimation cropped the series for their season box sets. So people who don't like those bars should be in love with the season box sets.

[Choice195]

Just use your PS3 as a DVD/Blu Ray player if you have one, it will show up in 4:3 Ratio on a 16:9 Widescreen TV's.

[Rod]

Don't worry I absolutly loathed black bars when I first saw them, but when I realized they were good and not bad, I loved them

[Kendamu]

People complaining about the black bars on the left and right side of the screen is one of the reasons why FUNimation cropped the series for their season box sets. So people who don't like those bars should be in love with the season box sets.

Those people who would love the Season Sets who want to see the Kai dub in 16:9 could just mess with the "Zoom" function on their TV to crop it to a 16:9 picture themselves. People who would want to see Kai as it is cropped for the Japanese TV broadcast would be out-of-luck, but if we're comparing to FUNi's "just crop the top and bottom without any regards for what's in or out of the picture" method of cropping then they should be fine.

[Kingdom Heartless]

I much prefer black bars over a screen full of obese Saiya-jin.

[PuppetDoctor]

I don't mind the pillar bars because once I start watching a show I just tune them out. The side of my television is black so it matches the bars anyways.

It looks terrible when an image is stretched out.