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The Widescreen era
February 8th, 2006
Did you know that movies originally started out in the same format as the television? But after a short time, they went to being filmed in the widescreen format we are used to today. This was due to a combination of being a more creative way to film and better for presenting to a theater audience. HDTVs changing the television format to widescreen is definetly not a surprise. Looking back at history, the surprise is why it didn’t happen earlier. The reason it’s happening now is the fact that so many people are watching movies at home more than ever before. It only makes sense to see them in the same way as in theaters.
Because of this it also makes sense to take it a step further to computer screens and even photographs. And that’s exactly what is happening. What this means to a designer of any visual media is that these new formats have to be taken into account. Web design formats are certainly going to need to change. I’ve been following this area in particular closer and have already started putting into action. I recently redesign the website for my father’s home theater company. It certainly CSS/xHTML
following web standards, but takes advantage of the CSS capabilities with some Javascript to also transition to the widescreen format change.
The default layout is designed for a monitor resolution of 1024×768 pixels which is what a majority of users are using now. But under the side navigation, there is a widescreen button that changes the layout to fit newer widescreen monitors with resolutions of at least 1280×800 pixels.
Now, another aspect to take into consideration is how the internet is starting to also appear on television screens. So, if we were to take this same layout and make it work for the HDTV, the resolution we would need to be aware of is 1280×720 pixels, or 720p which is very close to the computer monitor format minus 80 pixels in height.
So, for this transitional period, I believe this the new web format to work with when designing a site. Basically a layout of 1000×620 pixels that uses CSS to scale to 1240×700 pixels.
One additional thing to keep in mind is the full HD resolution of 1920×1080 pixels, or 1080p. It will be what upcoming HD DVDs will be using and what HD broadcasts will move to. But with the current web format, 720p will be most likely be used for a while with internal scaling to 1080p. Next generation operating systems (OS X, Windows Vista) have been designed to be more scalable with its graphics using vector art and implementing other high-res imaging capabilities. The web will soon follow a similar path as well and the rules will change once again.
Tags: design, formats, hdtv, widescreen
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