Re: Please define 16x9 and Define Anamorphic....

Okay Shannon, here goes...

1. 16x9 is the aspect ratio of so-called widescreen TV/video -- HD and HDV are varieties of the widescreen format. Native 16x9 means the camera shoots and outputs 16x9 images without any special lenses or processing.

2. Anamorphic 16x9 uses a special lense adaptor, or an onboard chip, on a SD video camera to horizontally squeeze a 16x9 video image onto a standard 4x3 video frame. When viewed, this image is distorted, and everything appears tall and thin. In post, the video image is unsqueeezed horizontally to produce a full-screen undistorted 16x9 image on a widescreen display monitor, or letterboxed, squeezed vertically top and bottom, to display undistorted on a 4x3 monitor. This technique is essentially used to fake 16x9 with cameras that are not capable of shooting true or native 16x9.

Your Z1 is capable of shooting native 16x9 HDV, 4x3 SD, and I believe, letterboxed 16x9 SD as well, but none of these requires anamorphic squeeezing/unsqueezing as mentioned above. The people in the still images that you posted earlier were distorted, with wide heads and short bodies. That indicates to me that the original images were in fact true 16x9, but letterboxed in error, by squeezing the top and bottom.

As I said before, I'm not certain of your entire workflow used to create the stills, so its tough to figure out exactly where in the chain you introduced the letterboxing. I am sure that without the letterboxing, those people in the pictures will be a whole lot better looking.

Does this help???

DRW