2.35:1 movies reframed at 1.33:1/1.78:1 on DVD (1 Viewer)

[Damin J Toell]

It still seems to me like you'd be losing the benefits of the additional horizontal exposure when squeezing it back into the narrower 4-perf projection aperture. Anyway, at least you'd maintain the benefits of the less-severe anamorphic lenses (lower lighting requirements, probably lighter cameras, etc.). I know you think the cons of 2x anamorphic lenses are overstated, anyway, but surely some benefit could be gained.

DJ

 

[Vincent_P]

Damin:

Actually, you'd still gain, because print stocks and intermediate film stocks are slower and more finely grained than the negative stocks used for shooting. This is one reason that if a film is shot in 65mm, even the 35mm reduction prints will look sharper and more detailed than a film shot in 35mm anamorphic from the get go. So even though you're "reducing" the width of the negative image in the DI conversion, the print should still retain the extra detail and sharpness of the negative, since the print stocks and intermediate stocks are so much more finely grained.

Vincent

 

[SteveJKo]

Recently the original 1958 "Auntie Mame" was on INHD. At the sight of the opening credits, I could not believe how lovely was the picture. Visions of a future with movies on high definition disc danced in my head. Suddenly at the end of the credits the picture went to hi-def full screen (1.78:1).

Why are movies the one art form in which some people think the device to view the art is more important than the piece of art itself?

 

[Gary Palmer]

Visions of a future with movies on high definition disc danced in my head.

Steve, as I've said before, there will come a day when home theater enthusiasts will watch their movies on H-U-G-E 21:9 screens as big as their architecture and wallets will allow, with upwards of 4K resolution, reproducing 'video' images that are indistinguishable from 35/70mm negatives in terms of quality and resolution. Current hi-def is merely a step on the road to this technology - Ultra-HD (with 4000 lines of resolution) is currently being tested, and future generations of DVD-based technology are already under development (HVD, for example, is already the subject of another thread). The technology is scattered and unfocused at the moment, and it may not come together for some time yet, but there's no question it's headed the way I've described. It's inevitable.

So one day you'll view a SuperDuperUltra-HD DVD (or whatever they decide to call it by then) version of AUNTIE MAME that will look better than the original theatrical print, on a 20 foot (or wider) screen that retains every bit of detail in the original negative. Me? I can hardly wait...

 

[SteveJKo]

This is wonderful, as long as AUNTIE MAME is presented at 2.35:1!

 

[Gary Palmer]

This is wonderful, as long as AUNTIE MAME is presented at 2.35:1!

From what I understand, 21:9 is actually 2.33:1, so a 'full-screen' version would miss the tiniest, most insignificant sliver of the original frame, but only the most die-hard curmudgeon could possibly complain about that !! Hopefully, those CinemaScope-shaped TV monitors will also eliminate overscan, so that we get to see everything we're intended to see, whether it's AUNTIE MAME (filmed in Technirama, so that should look pretty good at 4K and higher resolution!) or the latest Hollywood blockbuster.

 

[SteveJKo]

Gary this does indeed sound like the ultimate home theater screen. I must admit though, that my inner curmudgeon started to fidget. Then I realized the difference in screens you describe is even less than the difference between theatrical flat widescreen and the 1.78:1 of my home theater screen. All will be good for me.

 

[Vincent_P]

2.33:1?

NO OAR = NO SALE!!!



Vincent

 

[Gary Palmer]

2.33:1? NO OAR = NO SALE!!!

Well, since you put it that way, I'm beginning to see your point of view...

Seriously though, 21:9 will provide a unique opportunity (to say the least!) for home theater enthusiasts to view movies with an 'equal height', similar to theatrical screenings, eliminating the need for letterboxing (to be replaced by 'pillarboxing', for movies at 1.85 or less). But given the width of the screens, DVD producers will have no excuses for altering the AR of films shot in Cinerama (2.59) or Ultra Panavision 70 (2.76), or early CinemaScope pictures (2.55) - they'll all need to be letterboxed, but only to a piddling degree. Similarly, spherical 65mm movies should also be pillarboxed at 2.21 (that's if the material used for the transfer is 65/70mm in origin, of course - 35mm reduction prints should stick to 2.35).

But this is a premature debate, I suppose. With ultra-HD resolution already in development, and DVD's with high storage capacity in the offing, I'm just impatient for the first 21:9 TV stirrings. Excuse me while I wipe the drool off my keyboard...

 

[PeterTHX]

21:9?

I, for one, don't think this is a good idea.

We're fighting over a hundred years of material NOT shot in 2.35. Unless the display takes the entire wall (like the one at the end of "Bicentennial Man" or the Enterprise-E viewscreen in "First Contact") 1.33 or 1.78 material would be severely pillarboxed. I always thought the 16:9 idea to be a good one, the exact middle between 2.35 and 1.33.

Mild letterboxing doesn't bother me. It's the resolution & color accuracy that counts. I'd rather have a huge super hi-res 16:9 screen than a ok res 21:9 one.

 

[SteveJKo]

I assume that a 21:9 screen would have to be a front projection system. I believe I've read somewhere that a tube TV would be impossible with a ratio over 2:1 (would it perhaps implode?). In any case, for a front projection system a 21:9 set up would indeed help to perfectly recreate the theatrical experience.

 

[Vincent_P]

They could easily encode HDTV's 1.78:1 aspect ratio with a 1.33X squeeze for 2.35:1 material, and then a front-projector could use a 1.33X anamorphic projection lens to unsqueeze it, resulting in 2.35:1 movies with the full HDTV 1080 X 1920 resolution, elliminating the loss that letterboxing entails.

While tube sets may not be able to withstand an actual 21:9 shape, could a 16:9 tube set be made that can unsqueeze an "anamorphic" HDTV signal, like the 4:3 TV sets of today that have a 16:9 mode (resulting in a "letterboxed" 16:9 image that retains all of the available resolution)? That way, you'd have black bars, yes, but no wasted resolution.

Vincent

 

[Gary Palmer]

We're fighting over a hundred years of material NOT shot in 2.35... I always thought the 16:9 idea to be a good one, the exact middle between 2.35 and 1.33.

For 'regular' TV, I agree 16:9 is probably going to be 'it' for the forseeable future. Which means 21:9 will probably be relegated to home theater applications, where the trick will be to buy the biggest screen you can afford - that's how it might be marketed, at least in the beginning. Smaller models will have to be made available, of course, for those without unlimited funds who want to get in on the revolution (for want of a better term). All of which means that every image - from 1.33 all the way up to 2.76 - will be bigger, retaining 'equal height' and eliminating the need for letterboxing (in most cases). If the central image is bigger, then it doesn't really matter whether the frame is narrow or wide. But if people are uncomfortable with such extreme pillarboxing, then I'm also assuming such discs will still be playable on 16:9 monitors. In which case, those consumers could watch CinemaScope movies on their 21:9 monitors and enjoy narrower movies on 16:9 TV's.

Of course, I'm just guessing as to how all this will work, and how it will be introduced to the marketplace, and how it will be targeted to consumers. But the market for home theater is huge right now, and getting bigger all the time. And it won't stand still at 16:9. In fact, for many people, it has replaced the theatrical experience altogether. But until home theater can match the width of theater screens, it will always be a distant second-class experience, no matter how big your screen, and no matter how fancy your set-up. I don't say any of this to disparage current systems, merely to underline my earlier points. 21:9 is already part of the MPEG-2 specs, and appropriately encoded DVD's could be manufactured today if there was any way of viewing them on regular TV's, outside of the projection/anamorphic lens system Vincent mentioned in an earlier post (distributors won't encode material in such a fashion if the only people who can see the 'full resolution' image are those with ultra-expensive projection set-ups). But it will begin to happen, probably toward the end of the decade, hopefully even sooner than that.

 

[SteveJKo]

Vincent, you took the words right out of my mouth. This is exactly how I thought this 21:9 system could possibly work. I must say you people have me REALLY intrigued by all this. Now I'm having visions of red velvet curtains working in conjuction with black side masking to ...... I'VE GOT TO STOP THIS AND GET SOME WORK DONE!

 

[Patrick McCart]

Actually, 1.78:1 is the best average between the various aspect ratios. The most used "narrowest" format is 1.33:1 (not a lot of 1.20:1 Movietone films) and the most used "widest" format is 2.35:1. The precise average would be 1.84:1, though.

 

[Ryan L. Bisasky]

i recorded "eyes wide shut" on inhd and it was presented in 1:85;1, and from at least the opening few shots, the framing looked great from what i could tell, (the previous time watching it on hbo in the full frame version, it looked like way too much dead space on the tops and bottom of hte screen.

 

[ChristopherDAC]

NHK originally chose 5:3 as the HDTV aspect ratio after extensive studies on screen shape, viewing distance and other factors. The 16:9 ratio is a modification of that, proposed because it is near as can be to the geometrical mean of 4:3 and 7:3, otherwise known as Academy Ratio and Cinemascope, so that the same area [= number of pixels] gets lost to each when the picture is matted in, and as a bonus it's close to the standard VistaVision II ratio [as well as the 7:4 used in Japan and Europe; 5:3 is also common there].

The American Society of Cinematographers complained bitterly about it, but were mostly ignored. They wanted a 2:1 aspect ratio, which suggests an intention to completely abandon Academy Ratio and all the films [and telefilms] made therein. The film people at the HDTV standards conferences didn't make any friends by referring to highly trained professional broadcast and video-hardware engineers as "a bunch of TV salesmen", nor by their positions, many of which centred on the proposition that what was possible was not good enough. They demanded progressive scanning, for instance, despite the technical problems and the major hit to the Signal/Noise ratio [much 720p material is shot with 1080i cameras and transcoded], and a 24-Hz framerate or, when the objection of a virtually unwatchable picture was raised [even with film it's a problem, requiring the use of special shutters, and a changeover to 30 fps has been tried more than once] some integer multiple such as 72 fps. They also created great annoyance by treating resolution as unimportant, reasonable to them, I guess, since 35mm film as projected in most movie-houses rarely exceeds the equivalent of an 800-line raster.

 

[Mike Wadkins]

then what about animated features framed at 1.66:1 that on a proper display (without overscan) will be boxed on all sides

 

[george kaplan]

I don't follow that. On a widescreen tv (16x9), a 1.66 film, with no overscan, will have black bars on the sides, but not on the top or bottom.

 

[Gary Palmer]

Good point, George. A 1.66 movie will be windowboxed on a 4:3 screen (without overscan), but 4:3 is slowly becoming extinct, and most 16:9 TV's still suffer from overscan, which means the 1.66 frame will fit comfortably (with mild cropping) within the 1.78 screen.