What the heck is pixel aspect ratio?
Pixels do not have any size, they are points, but when displayed on different types of display systems, the points that makes up the content is converted to some electrical (on a TV) or mechanical (when printed on paper) form to display the value of that point. This is the only time a pixel has a size. Because of the way pixels are displayed on TV screens throughout the world, they will be “shaped” differently. This is mostly an analog conversion artfact that lets the display a bit more resolution in width or height. In NTSC DV, the specifications are for a 720×480 pixel frame. This gets displayed on a 4 to 3 size ratio display. 720/480 = 1.5 does not equal 4/3 = 1.333. To account for this, the horizontal line on a TV is squeezed a little bit to fit the screen. The pixels will be smaller in width than in height. This is really just a rough explanation, but is still pretty hard to understand at first. There are many other factors that go to work in the real world of digital and analog v
