I recently finished fifteen videos from the Social Matchbox event held on April 2, 2009. They were greenscreened, so I doodled with a piece of green fabric, pinned it to the nearest wall, and sat down my interviewee in front of it. Later, I removed the green screen, creating a transparent background in order to manipulate images behind people.

Usually this turns out very cool, and you can make the cat fly over New York City or put yourself in a shot at the beach when you're actually at home and it's snowing outside.
There is a problem, though, and that is when I used a black background. Oddly enough, this seems like it would be fine, right? Wrong- YouTube automatically adds pillarboxes whether you like it or not.

I actually couldn't believe that when I saw it. I'd sat for two days straight, carefully removing backgrounds, manipulating the positions of each person so they sat near the edge of the 4:3 video I was making- you know- squareish. And then when I uploaded it, YouTube decided that 16:9 (also known as "widescreen" or "that long skinny stretched out looking box") was the preferred format.... so each one of my carefully placed videos now looks like I cut arms off!

In the case of Robert and Juliana Neelbauer's video, a very interesting white line appears on the right. It's not in the one I uploaded... wow. So I poked around through YouTube and guess what! I can't turn it off! It's a default 16:9 whether I like it or not.
Um. I guess I'm going to start editing things in widescreen, or not use YouTube, because the unwanted pillarboxing is thwarting all my careful efforts :(