If you are reading this, it probably means that you are new to the Home Theater Forum and have asked the members about widescreen movies on DVD. In this thread, I hope to do four things: First I will explain in simple terms the differences between movies presented in widescreen and pan & scan (or full frame). Second, I will lay the groundwork for an understanding of "aspect ratios." Thirdly, I will describe the advantages of viewing a widescreen movie on DVD (or VHS for that matter). Finally, I will explain why the vast majority of the members at this forum prefer widescreen over full framed or pan & scan titles.

THE BASICS

To begin, I think it's necessary to explain that in the opinion of many, the ultimate goal of any home theater enthusiast is to recreate, as closely as possible, the presentation of a movie in the theater under the best circumstances with the audio/video equipment you have. When I say "best circumstances" I refer to a theatrical presentation in which the quality of the theater's audio and video equipment can accurately present the respective information stored on a clean, new reel of film.

With all this in mind, let's take a trip to our local movie theater. Now, I'm sure we all realize that the screen at the theater is bigger than your average television set; that goes without saying. However, most people don't realize that the shape of the screen differs as well. In pretty much every theater, the screen is shaped like a rectangle. That is, it is much wider than it is tall. Here's an example of a typical movie screen:

In this instance, the width of the screen is more than two times its height. Filmmakers use these wide frames to create images that play off of our peripheral vision and thus seem more natural than an image that might be contained within a tight square.

Now take a good look at your standard television set. In most cases it should look something like this:

As you can see, it is not nearly as wide as the theatrical screen shown above. It is more square-like, although it is not a perfect square (it is a tad wider than it is tall). This presents an interesting problem. When a film is converted to home video, how do you fit that wide image you saw in the theater into a square? Traditionally, movie studios have adopted a technique known as pan & scan (P&S), which locates the "center of interest" of the image and fits in it the space available on your TV like this:

As you can see, this process allows the image to fill every available space on your TV. but at a price. Much of the picture's side is chopped off, destroying the original composition of the scene as it appeared in theaters. As we shall see in a bit, the lost visual information can have a tremendous impact on the movie, as it removes entire characters from scenes and reduces the overall scope of the film.

While most every film has found its way to home video in the form of P&S-only titles, an alternate method of presenting movies at home developed. This method, called letterboxing preserved the entire image as it was originally seen in theaters. Instead of trying to fill up the screen, this technique fit the width of the film within the boundaries of a typical television set, so that the image appeared to be a strip, running through the middle of the screen, with black space occupying its top and bottom.

Although the image does appear smaller and does not fill the entire screen, it does preserve the movie's original theatrical composition. When seeing a letterboxed film, many people assume that the black bars on the top and bottom are covering up part of the picture, but as we can see from this illustration, they are nothing more than unused space.

To give you a better idea of how cropping the picture for a P&S video affects the presentation of the movie, here are some examples from various movies. These are actual screen captures of widescreen and P&S videos.

All screen captures are taken from The Widescreen Advocacy Page

As you can see, presenting movies in their original theatrical format offers several advantages. It ensures that all characters that should be present in a shot can be seen. This is especially important if two characters are interacting with each other at opposite sides of the screen. It preserves the composition of the theatrical image so that scenes will feel less claustrophobic than before. Often in a P&S transfer, a close shot of one or more actors can seem unnaturally tight. A good widescreen transfer will allow for some breathing room, so that we can also see the space around an actor. A third advantage is that it allows you to see visual effects in their entirety. As we can see in the example from Star Wars Special Edition, the entire scope of Mos Eisley is not apparent until the widescreen version is viewed.

AN EXPLANATION OF ASPECT RATIOS

Now that we've established that movies are presented on a screen, which is wider than that of a standard TV and seen how destroying the composition of the original theatrical image can hurt the movie-watching experience, we should look at the subject of aspect ratios. An aspect ratio simply put, describes the dimensions of a TV or movie screen. It is usually described in terms of width by height. For example, the standard TV set is built with an aspect ratio of 1.33:1 (or 1.33x1). This simply means that if it would be 1.33 feet wide if it were 1 foot tall. (Obviously, this goes for any other unit of length as well.)

Aspect ratios are important because not all movies are filmed in the same aspect ratio. Just take a look at this comparison of the P&S and widescreen version of Monty Python and the Holy Grail:


Screen capture taken from The Widescreen Advocacy Page

You can clearly see that the image is not nearly as wide as those given in the widescreen versus P&S examples given above. Whereas those examples were presented theatrically at an aspect ratio of 2.35:1 (or 2.35ftwide if it were 1ft tall), Monty Python and the Holy Grail was filmed at 1.85:1. The filmmakers decide the aspect ratio of a film and preferences differ from director to director. Often larger epic films, such as Gladiator, Titanic, and Star Wars are filmed with the wider scope of 2.35:1 to create a sense of being larger-than-life. Smaller, more personal films tend to favor the less gigantic 1.85:1 ratio. (However, I must say that this is a gross over-simplification as there are many exceptions to this rule.)

Since films shot in 1.85:1 are not nearly as wide, the empty space at the top and bottom of their widescreen presentations on home video will not be nearly as big. Here is a listing of some of the most common aspect ratios:

  • 1.33:1 A standard television set; roughly equivalent to 4:3.
  • 1.37:1 Referred to as the academy aspect ratio. The standard for films shot before the mid-1950s.
  • 1.66:1 A bit wider than a standard TV, but not by much.
  • 1.78:1 The dimensions of a widescreen television set; roughly equivalent to 16:9.
  • 1.85:1 Popular aspect ratio for many movies.
  • 2.35: Another popular aspect ratio for movies.



MATTED FILMS AND SUPER 35MM

Now, here's where things get complicated. In the examples presented above it is quite clear that the P&S versions of each movie destroy the intended composition of the theatrical image. Using these examples alone, we see that the black bars associated with letterboxed movies do not cover up any of the picture. Now, take a look at this comparison shot between the widescreen version of The Avengers, a movie shot with an aspect ratio of 1.85:1, and its non-widescreen counterpart. (The widescreen version here has been presented in a letterboxed format as it would appear on your TV to better show the effect of matting.

Screen capture taken from Intro to Widescreen

From this shot, it appears as if the side of the image is not chopped off, and the black bars do indeed cover up a portion of the full image. Even more puzzling is this comparison between the two versions of the movie Go, which was shot in 2.35:1.

As we can see, both actors are comfortably visible in both versions. If we followed the "rules" of P&S given above, the shot should look something more like this.


Go screen captures provided by Tomas Cedven.

.with the actor on the left almost entirely removed from the shot. Again, it appears as though more of the picture is visible at the top and the bottom of the screen, with only a small portion of the sides removed.

Was I lying after all? Do the black bars really cover up part of the picture and leave you with nothing more than a half-filled TV? The answer is yes and no. To make sense of that answer, it is necessary to understand how films are photographed, and how they are transferred to home video.

Most major theatrical releases are shot on 35mm film, which became the standard film stock very early in the history of movies. On 35mm film, the frames for the negative are made with an aspect ratio of 1.37:1, (which as we now know, is roughly the shape of a standard television set), with a small strip included to the side to store audio.

Between the 1920s and the early 1950s, all films were photographed with a 1.37:1 aspect ratio. This is why you won't see older films like The Wizard of Oz or Casablanca in widescreen. They were not filmed that way.

With the dawn of television in the 1950s, many movie studios feared that no one would come to the theater anymore unless they gave audiences a new reason. So they developed several technological gimmicks including 3D movies, and more important, the concept of a widescreen filmone that is presented on a screen wider than 1.37:1.

However, the quest to present movies in widescreen faced several obstacles such as, how do you do it? The most obvious way to shoot a movie in widescreen would be to use a type of film stock that matched the shape of the screen. This proved to be impractical since it was not likely that theater owners (who were not terribly thrilled that their projectors would no longer be able to play certain movies) would want to shell out the cash to buy new projectors. The industry had established 35mm film as the standard and very few were willing to change that.

To create the widescreen effect with 35mm film, several methods were developed. Two remain very popular to this day. The first is called a matte. Basically, a matte photographs a movie using a normal lens and standard 35mm film, but the filmmakers block off the top and bottom to make the image more rectangular, and thus, creating a widescreen effect. This method is especially popular for movies shot in 1.66:1 and 1.85:1.

There are two types of mattes. The first, a soft matte, does not block off the top of the frame while shooting the movie. Only later, in the theater or on a widescreen home video, are the additional visuals blocked off to create a widescreen effect. This is why the black bars appear to be covering up part of the picture in the widescreen version. Nothing is lost on the sides, but the intended theatrical composition is still ruined. The second type of matting is called a hard matte. With a hard matte, the filmmakers have the black bars in place and so no additional video is recorded.

The second method of creating a widescreen movie on 35mm film used especially for films with a 2.35:1 aspect ratios by use of a special lens, which stretches the image vertically to fill the entire frame. This is called an anamorphic lens, and the concept is very simple. While filming a movie, the filmmakers will block a scene like this one from Tomorrow Never Dies.

Using a special lens that manipulates the light that goes into the camera the image is sqeezed horizontally.

Screen captures taken from The Widescreen Advocacy Page

In the theater, a special lens is applied to the projector to reverse the effect so that we see the image in the theater the way it actually looked on the set.

However, many filmmakers, including Titanic director, James Cameron, have taken a liking to a different process to create a widescreen image, commonly referred to as Super 35. Using this process, the image that the camera takes during filming fills up the entire width of the negative using a spherical lens. (Generally, movies shot with anamorphic lenses do not expose the area where the sound strip ends up.) The lens does not alter the shape of the image that the camera collects. The image taken then has an aspect ratio of approximately 1.65:1, which ultimately gets matted to an aspect ratio of 2.35:1 (or other aspect ratios if the director prefers. However, Super35 cannot be projected. So the image is reduced and printed in the normal part of a filmstrip, again allowing for the sound. If the film was composed 2.35:1, then an anamorphic extraction is made, and it is printed as a conventional anamorphic frame, horizontally compressed. It will require an anamorphic lens on the projector to expand the image appropriately.

When transferring the movie to home video for a P&S version, the Super 35 image is used, since the additional footage caught on film allows the filmmakers to fill up the entire space of a TV, without resorting to massive cropping. However, the composition of the original theatrical image is still destroyed, because you are losing the intended widescreen effect.

It should be noted that all special effects are shot only for their intended theatrical framing. This is due to the high cost of their development. This means that when you see a special effect shot on a non-widescreen home video, it has surely been pan & scanned, meaning that a part of the picture has been chopped off. This holds true for all movies, including all matted films and films shot on Super 35mm.

So, knowing that many movies are matted or shot on Super 35mm film, why do many of the members of the Home Theater Forum still overwhelmingly prefer widescreen? If nothing is lost from the sides of the picture, why would we still want widescreen? The answer goes back to what I said at the very beginning of this (lengthy) post. For many of us, the greatest joy in the hobby of home theaters lies with recreating the way in which a film was originally presented in theaters. This not only means using whatever equipment we have to recreate the quality of a high-end theatrical sound system or the film-like image quality of a movie. It means viewing the original composition of every shot as it was seen in the theater. We want as few differences between the presentation of a film in the theater and at home as there can possibly be. How can we do that if we violate the original theatrical composition of the images just to fit into our TVs?

SOME FINAL THOUGHTS

Now that you know what widescreen movies are all about, I hope that you see the advantages it has to offer. However, I realize that some of you may still hesitate to accept those black bars on your TV. In that case, all I can say is, at least I tried.

To those of you who still want your TV screens to be filled, let me just say that you are certainly welcome to be an active member of the Home Theater Forum. However, please keep in mind that the vast majority of members here are avid supporters of original aspect ratio (OAR), which presents films as they were originally shown in theaters. The Forum's mission statement even declares,

We believe that the purpose of Home Theater is not only to provide entertainment, but to preserve the artistic integrity of film in the video format as well. We stress the need for accurate reproduction of film and strive to create, as closely as possible, the theater experience in our homes.

While we respect your desire to watch movies in the format of your choice, we ask that you do not post any messages advocating P&S or full-framed movies in anyway, as doing this will only stir up trouble. It would be like going to the Star Wars forums at TheForce.Net and declaring that Star Trek is better. You're not likely to win many friends this way.

At any rate, we hope you enjoy your time at what many of us consider to be the best, most friendly place on the Internet!

-Jeffrey Forner
aka J.Fo

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