I recently upgraded my DVX100 to the DVX100A. Can someone tell me how the native 16:9 mode works? Is this the same as using an anamorphic adaptor? What does the anamorphic give you that this native 16:9 does not? Any help would be greatly appreciated.
well, its not really a native 16:9. native 16:9 means that you either have a 16:9 chip/s, or a chip/s so big, that you can take a 16:9 secton out of the middle , and it will still be in full ntsc, or hd resolution pending the type of cam sd or hd. the "squeeze" mode on the dvx100a should really be called "stretch" mode. all that it does is take the 16:9 are from the center of the letterbox mode apx 720x360, and crop the black bars off, and stretch it to fill the whole frame so your only getting 360 vertical lines of resolution . you could do the same thing in post by (as im sure youve heard of) cropping and stretching the center area from letterbox mode in your nle. but the in camera sqwueeze mode does a good job for you in the camera. however this is very different than an anamorphic adaptor. an anamorphic adaptor sees things in 16:9 basically it sees wider on the horizontal plane than it does on the vertical. it sees 16 units wide for every 9 units high. so the lense will actually see wider than the stock lense, but not any taller. but it squeezes that 16:9 field of view into a 4:3 shape, so the cams 4:3 ccd can record that 16:9 area looking squished horizontally. then when you import it into your nle. you load it in as a 16:9 project, and it expands back to its priginal 16:9. but its using all 720x480 pixels of resolution from your ccd. the squeeze mode looks squished too, but really its just streched tall. then when you load it into the nle in a 16:9 project, it stretches it horizontally back to a larger 16:9 proportion. .. to make it easy to understand you can just take some letterbox footage and import it to your nle then crop off the black bars, and stretch the remaining video (which is 16:9 shaped) to fill the frame. and it looks squeezed, but itsa actually stretched. then when you load it into a 16:9 project. it expands wide like the anamorphic footage, and looks proportionate again. but again, its less resolution. but works well for small format viewing, if your doing a film out, or projecting, the adaptor is the superior wasy to go
