[peter_scott]

Cathovisor over on V.Rat recently sent me the BBC standards for Television Delivery:

1.8.3. Picture Aspect Ratio
Archive material that is not 16:9 should be zoomed to fill the 16:9 raster where possible without compromising the image quality or composition. Alternatively, it may be presented in a pillar-box or letterbox format, which:
• may be of an intermediate ratio between 4:3 and 16:9, but must be of consistent width across sequences;
• must be centrally framed in the 16:9 raster;
• must show no geometrical distortion;
• must have clean and sharp pillar-box edges (i.e. any video or film edge artefacts may need to be blanked);
• must be black outside the active picture, unless otherwise specified by the broadcaster.

I would assume that "zoomed to fill the 16:9 raster" would mean that the zooming applied to width and height to preserve the geometry and thus the width would be cropped.

Peter