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November 2008 Newsletter

Project of the Month

Stemulite Photo Shoot

Digital Media Services photographer Sean Deren recently shot action photos of Super Bowl champion Simeon Rice and Pro Bowl linebacker Cato June for an ad campaign for Stemulite, a manufacturer of workout supplements. Click here to check out some of Sean’s raw images. We’ll post final versions of the ads once they’re ready to go.

The time for giving thanks

What the DMS staff is thankful for

With a down economy, continual reports of layoffs and nothing but doom and gloom propagating over the airwaves, it’s easy to lose sight of the good things surrounding us. But we here at Digital Media Services don’t have to look far to find what we’re most thankful for - our clients!


To those of you who have entrusted our artistic vision, our technical capabilities and our experience and judgement for your projects both small and large, we are truly thankful. We’ll never forget that it’s our clients who provide us with our success and, without you, we’d all be in another place doing another job. It’s this year-round thankfulness that makes it a pleasure to treat our clients with the respect and professionalism they deserve.


Know that you can count on us to give you a 100% effort on any task you place before us and that we’ll be there to act as a resource in any way possible. For all of our clients, we are truly thankful!

Questions? Comments? Feedback? All are greatly appreciated! Email us by clicking here or call us at 727-512-9998. We’d love to hear from you!

Tech Tip

Aspect Ratios

Aspect ratios have recently become a heightened topic of discussion with the advent of high definition video and the transition to HDTV. Simply put, an aspect ratio is the correlation of the width and the height of an image. For instance, most people are familiar with the term 16:9 (sixteen by nine) when talking about high definition televisions. 16:9 represents a TV that is 16 units wide by 9 units high. And exactly what units are we using to measure an HDTV? Well, none, actually. And that’s where a bit of confusion comes in.


Technically, properly aspect ratios should be given in the form of x:1, or a width to height comparison where the height always equals one (1). A ratio doesn’t have dimensions; it’s only a comparison of one number to another. The proper aspect ratio of high definition (16:9) television is 1.78:1; that is, the width of the television is 1.78 times the height, regardless of the actual size of the screen. Divide 16 by 9 and you get 1.77... (repeating decimal) or 1.78. Expressing an aspect ratio in the proper terms allows a quicker and more accurate understanding of the width the height ratio and also allows better comparisons to the aspect ratios of other formats.


Thomas Edison’s original 35mm motion picture film format had an aspect ratio of 1.37:1. That same basic format is still in use today for motion and still photography. However, there are many other common and not-so-common image aspect ratios. Standard definition digital video and analog television broadcasts (which will be terminated as of February 17, 2009) have an aspect ratio of 1.33:1. The vast majority of film-based motion pictures are projected at either 1.85:1 (“academy flat”) or 2.35:1 (“anamorphic scope”). The unique Cinerama format popular in the 1950’s and early 1960’s projected three 35mm film images side-by-side to form a projected image with an aspect ratio of almost 2.6:1. Recently, RED Digital Cinema announced a 361 mega-pixel digital motion picture camera sensor with an aspect ratio of almost 3:1! Talk about widescreen!


More information on aspect ratios can be found here.

Extras

Other cool DMS projects

All imagery and content copyright © 2008 by Digital Media Services & Consulting LLC. All rights reserved.

Digital Media Services

The majority of our time in November was dominated by a single project we’ll share more about in the December newsletter. However, we did find time to shoot the Dancing with the Stars Tampa Bay event, attend the AVI-SPL University conference, shoot for Tampa Bay Illustrated and consult with a few new clients about some interesting project ideas.

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