-posted by Christian Sterner

Note: the following post is based on my experience, and resulting knowledge (or lack thereof).

At Sony Electronics, we spent a ton of time, money and resources trying to sell/market High Def (high definition). At the time, if you weren’t in the electronics, broadcast, or video production/engineering world, you had no idea what “HD” was. Additionally, there were significant technical, knowledge, and financial barriers between customers and HD in the home. It’s a pleasing fact that HD did see the light day, even with the odds stacked against it.

HD on the web is a very different animal, but it definitely has one solid advantage that TV(s) did not: the buzz acronym “HD.” Around every corner, you find people using this acronym to describe quality differences between their video offering and others. However, in terms of getting web content prepped for the web, and getting that content into the hands of viewers, HD isn’t yet the solution. Many times, even if a shoot is done in HD, by the time it meets the viewers’ eyeballs on their computer, it isn’t. There are many reasons for this: most are technical (compression of HD files for web readiness, network distribution, processing power at the end user level etc). In short, HD video is a very large amount of video data. The more data there is, the harder it is to pipe it through networks, and translate at the end user’s machine.

Aspect Ratio: What is It?

Aspect ratio is a ratio used to communicate dimensions of the viewable area of a video. This is true on a TV, true in projection (projectors), and this is true on the web. Here’s how to find the aspect ratio of a video:

1) Take the width of your video, as a pixel count
2) Put your width count over your height count as a fraction
3) Reduce your fraction

Typically, that fraction will come to 4/3 or 16/9. Just interject the colon to make your fractions ratios (4:3 and 16:9 respectively).

HD is a 16:9 format natively, but 16:9 videos are not always HD. Does that make sense? HD has to be 16:9, but any video can be built into a rectangular, 16:9 video frame?

Summary

16:9 is not always HD, and-unless you are some major media company-you should not yet buy into the hype of HD video on the web. Well over 90% of end users can watch a video in flash. Make sure your videos are being displayed in Flash. Lastly, if you do choose to display videos in 16:9 and you are doing so in Flash (again…you should be), this is strictly an aesthetic choice, not a statement of clarity/quality.

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