Results tagged “reference” from Final Cut Studio, Avid, Adobe, and Video Streaming

Why do your graphic supers have funny jagged edges in Photoshop, but they look fine on (television) screen?  For that matter, how can anamorphic formats cram so much width into a regular NTSC-type signal?  The answer, simply put, is that pixels come in all shapes and sizes.

Recall that pixels are the individual points of color that make up a picture on your screen.  While computer screens and similar displays usually use pixels that are square, televisions, historically, have not.  In fact, the concept of a "pixel" didn't figure into analog television signals at all -- the NTSC specification called for 480 "lines," but the signal within those lines did not specify discrete units of width.

When the notion of digital video became a reality, the standards bodies that be decided that -- for both NTSC and PAL -- there would be exactly 720 pixels per line.  Thus, the 480i resolutions we know and love: 720x480 NTSC, and 720x576 PAL.