- [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 were all square.
You're not using as many pixels to make up the image.
There are a few options available,
and though most HD standards use square pixels,
you'll find some older footage will be non-square.
DVC Pro HD, for example,
has a 1.5 to 1 pixel aspect ratio option,
and some full anamorphic systems,
that's where the picture is squashed horizontally
in the camera and then stretched again to a normal shape
on playback, use two to one.
Ideally, you'll want to use square pixels for everything
to maximize resolution, but remember,
the ultimate goal is good perceived image resolution,
not necessarily objective real image resolution.
So, anytime references are made to square
or non-square pixels, pixel aspect ratio, or pixel shape,
it literally means the shape of the dots.
The shape of the pixels in the image.
And you'll find professional graphics
and video editing applications have options to manage it.