TNG in Widescreen?

[Haytil]

Sometimes I watch the TNG re-runs on the Sci-Fi channel on Mondays at my girlfriend's house. She has a flatscreen TV, whose aspect ratio is different than my (older) TV - it's more widescreen.

Yet I notice that TNG fills the entire screen - there are no black bars. It doesn't appear to me as though the image is stretched horizontally - the characters faces don't look stretched, for example, and neither does the text in the opening credits. Yet I was under the impression that TNG was filmed in the 4:3 aspect ratio that was standard for TVs at the time.

So how is the show filling the entirety of the wide, flatscreen TV without distortion?

 

[Hober Mallow]

TNG wasn't filmed in widescreen, and has never been shown in widescreen. It's definitely the TV.

 

[SonicRanger]

The TV is zoomed in on the picture, filling its width, but chopping off part of the top and bottom of the frame, possibly stretching it a little too.

TNG wasn't filmed in widescreen, and has never been shown in widescreen. It's definitely the TV.

Except, of course, for the scenes from "The Pegasus" that made it into ENT's "TATV", but that required some fancy frame-melding to make it widescreen ratio.

 

[milo bloom]

The TV is zoomed in on the picture, filling its width, but chopping off part of the top and bottom of the frame, possibly stretching it a little too.

Also, some widescreen sets have a stretch function that progressively stretches a little bit more the further you get from the center and fills the screen that way. If you don't know to look for it, a lot of folks don't notice it. (It's most evident in panning shots, esp with geometric shapes, like if you start with a rectangle on the right side of the screen, and as it pans towards center, it shrinks to a square, then back to a rectangle on the other side of the screen.)

 

[SoM]

Except, of course, for the scenes from "The Pegasus" that made it into ENT's "TATV", but that required some fancy frame-melding to make it widescreen ratio.

Nothing of the sort - firstly, there were no scenes from "The Pegasus" itself in TATV [The only actual TNG shots were establishing shots of Ten Forward, and they were taken from "Ménage à Troi".]. And secondly, they just cropped and stretched the footage to get it into widescreen, rather than doing additional work to preserve the aspect ratio & height.

See here for more detail: http://www.ex-astris-scientia.org/inconsistencies/ent_vs_tng.htm