From the course: Digital Media Foundations

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Pixel aspect ratios: Pixels have a shape too

Pixel aspect ratios: Pixels have a shape too

From the course: Digital Media Foundations

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Pixel aspect ratios: Pixels have a shape too

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- [Instructor] When working in graphic design applications, most commonly, your pixels will be square, and this makes good sense. Intuitively, a dot is a dot, and it's square. 100 pixels wide times 100 pixels tall makes a square. When working with video, it's also possible you'll be working with pixels that are not square. The shape of a pixel is often expressed as a ratio, just like images. So, one to one is square. You can create a number of different image shapes with the same number of pixels, simply by changing the shape of the pixels. As long as the camera records this way and you display the image with the same pixel shapes, everything will look correct. Squares will still be square and circles will still be circles. For example, if you were shooting 16 by 9 NTSC standard definition video, you'd be working with widescreen pixels, which are 1.21 to 1 wide. As you might guess, this means your image has less effective horizontal image resolution than it would have if your pixels…

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