What Is Letterboxing?

While letterboxing is common, it's also one of the most misunderstood. It's important to understand that letterboxing is not something that happens in movies—it's something that happens in movies. Letterboxing is shrinking a movie or video to fit a smaller screen and adding black bars at the top and bottom to compensate for the missing resolution. Most movies or films are recorded in a widescreen format for movie theaters, with a more comprehensive structure than regular 4:3 TVs and 16:9 HDTVs. The black bars at the top and bottom of your screen are not part of the original picture; your TV or computer adds them to ensure enough space for all those pixels. It's essential to consider the aspect ratios of the different devices you want to view your work on. If you plan on showing it on a TV, for example, there are two main formats: 4:3 and 16:9. Some films have been made in both, but not all. Choose an arrangement that matches the one used by the film industry or crop an image to fit into either format without losing any part of it. Making an image fit on a smaller screen is like folding a blanket with too many corners: it won't work. If you've got the right tools and know what you're doing, you can make it work. If we want our wide image of a luscious field of strawberries to fit on a smaller screen like ours, we need to scale down until both sides include within the smaller aspect ratio. Since the image is a rectangle, there are no blank areas on the top and bottom of the image. The most logical way to address this issue is to make these areas black so they can be largely ignored.