If i were to shoot a video on standard....damnit i think of the ratio. forgive me. anyways if i were to shoot it for an average NOT widescreen TV, and then give it a 16:9 Matte, how is that different from shooting it on actual 16:9 video. i guess what im asking is, besides having to guess-frame normal video as if you were shooting it in 16:9 and then matting it later, what is the difference? I don't understand why someone would want to get a 16:9 camera if they could fake it...other then it's totally badass. lol.

Matte 16:9 means you cut off the top and bottom of your square 4:3 image to fit the 16:9 scale. Native 16:9 in-camera means no resolution loss, wysiwyg, what you see on the camera in widescreen is what the sensor is capturing. You can "fake" it afterwards but you're losing a ton of your resolution.

i was just watching Misery on DVD and ayou can choose between widescreen and normal. I paused it on a shot of kathy bates, and remembered that the sides of the screen met her eyes exactly. i put in the widescreen DVD and put it to that exact part, expecting to see a wider space between the edge and her eyes, but low and behold, the space was the same, there was just a mate over top. does this mean that didn't shoot it in native widescreen? i thought ALL films were shot that way? does that mean what we saw in the theatre was matted?

also- if i were to shoot video on 16:9, and watch it on a TV that wasn't widescreen, would it just squish the image? or would it automatically know to put black bars on top and bottom so the image isn't distorted.