Published: August 19, 2020 | Last Updated: November 11, 2025
Black bars frame your footage within a specific cinematic aspect ratio. Maybe you want to give it a widescreen look like 2.35:1, 2.39:1, or 2.4:1 (the current widescreen standard for movies in cinema theaters). Or you could want to create a retro look with a 4:3 aspect reminiscent of the old CRT television screens.
Read more about the history of widescreen cinema.
Whatever the case, there’s the right way to get those black bars showing up on your viewers’ screens, and there’s the wrong way. But that doesn’t mean the “wrong” way can sometimes be useful or necessary. I’ll get to that in a second.
At the end of the post, I’ll post a link to free black bar templates you can download and use in your projects.
Cinematic Aspect Ratios
To get a quick overview, here are some of the most common film aspect ratios:
First, let me get this out the way: in reality, there’s no such thing as a “cinematic aspect ratio.” What makes a movie or video is what happens within the frame, not the frame around the frame.
That being said, people associate certain CinemaScope aspect ratios with Hollywood movies. When blockbusters move out of movie theatres and into television screens and home theatres, those black bars appear.
Because viewers associate these black bars around Hollywood movies with movie theatres, you can steal some of that Hollywood mojo by framing your footage within black bars.
Here’s a table of some common aspect ratios, their resolutions in pixels, and their names:
| Pixels | Aspect Ratio | Names |
|---|---|---|
| 1280×720 | 16:9 | HD, High Definition |
| 1920×803 | 2.39:1 | HD CinemaScope cropped |
| 1920×817 | 2.35:1 | HD CinemaScope |
| 1920×1080 | 16:9 | Full HD, FHD, HD, High Definition, 1080p |
| 1920×1200 | 16:10 | WUXGA |
| 2048×871 | 2.35:1 | 2K CinemaScope |
| 2048×1080 | 1.90:1 | 2K DCI native |
| 2048×858 | 2.39:1 | 2K DCI CinemaScope cropped |
| 3840×1634 | 2.35:1 | 2K DCI CinemaScope |
| 3840×2160 | 16:9 | 4K |
| 4096×1716 | 2.39:1 | 4K DCI CinemaScope cropped |
| 4096×2160 | 1.89:1 | 4K Cinema |
| 4800×2700 | 16:9 | 5K UHD |
| 5568×3132 | 16:9 | 6K UHD |
| 7680×4320 | 16:9 | 8 UHD |
Cinematic Black Bars Done Right
There are two right ways to get black bars around your footage:
- Shoot with the aspect ratio for your final delivery from the start
- Reframe your footage in editing/post-production
You want to let the viewers’ media player (whether YouTube, Vimeo, or something installed locally on a computer like VLC) automatically create the black bars based on the aspect ratio of your video.
Modern media players can automatically determine the aspect ratio and create black bars if the footage’s aspect ratio differs from the screen.
In most circumstances, the black bars will only appear when there is a difference between those two aspect ratios when the video is viewed full-screen (this is called letterboxing). You want to do it so that the bars will appear truly black because they are created independently of the video.
Read more on exporting videos with good quality and low file sizes in Premiere Pro.
Cinematic Black Bars Done “Wrong”
If you manually add black bars to your footage using a graphics template, the graphics will be a burned-in part of the video footage and thus susceptible to the artifacts of codec compression from the codec you use for export to something like YouTube compression.
In other words, you’ll end up with a video with some noisy black bars around it with visible digital artifacts. However, that doesn’t mean your cinematic black bar templates aren’t useful.
- Cinematic black bar templates offer a quick way to understand how your footage will look reframed to different aspect ratios.
- Sometimes, a client wants the video with black bars surrounding the footage so that you can use the black space for captions, subtitles, logos, and more.
I’ve found cinematic black bar templates useful if I need to quickly check my footage for delivery in several formats, e.g., when I produce a video for a client who needs it in different aspect ratios for different social media platforms.
Sometimes, I use the black areas for additional information surrounding the video.
You might also like: Premiere Pro Keyboard Shortcuts You Must Know
Summing Up
You should always export your video using the preferred aspect ratio and let the video player handle adapting it to the screen and putting it on black bars.
That is, unless you need cinematic black bars as a way of framing additional content related to the video or quickly checking how your footage appears in different aspect ratios,
If you want to download some free cinematic bars, I’ve created this package for 1080p and 4K widescreen (16:9) footage:
Cinematic Black Bars Templates Free Download
You simply shoot in 16:9 widescreen (1920×1080 or 3840×2160) and layer the graphic template of choice on top of your footage. Feel free to use them for whatever project you want—even commercially.
I hope you found this article useful. If you have any questions, just post them in the comments below.
Read Next: Want to sharpen your editing instincts?
Start with our breakdown of the different types of video editing and learn how each approach shapes tone and flow.
Then explore how film cuts function as visual punctuation, or how scene transitions control time, emotion, and rhythm.
Still curious? Browse the full Editing section for techniques, examples, and theory.
