Can BR Be Pan&Scan?

Re: Can BR Be Pan&Scan?

If it's not 'original aspect ratio', then it is Pan & Scan. Thus to answer your question, technically there is nothing to stop from Pan & Scan transfers being ut on Blu-ray discs. I just hope, better sense prevails with the pan & scan loving consumer as they switch to HDTV (16:9) and Blu-Ray discs.

Re: Can BR Be Pan&Scan?

Not true. "Pan and Scan" describes a particular process for showing a widescreen movie on a narrower screen. But a film could be transferred with an other-than-original aspect ratio by opening up the mattes, cropping or zooming.

You are, of course, correct that from a technical standpoint there is nothing magical about Blu Ray that would prevent someone from putting a non-OAR transfer onto a disc. Not sure why anybody would want to, but they certainly can.

Regards,

Joe

Re: Can BR Be Pan&Scan?

No such thing as "anamorphic" in the BD standard. Any black bars you may see are encoded on the disc.

Vern

Re: Can BR Be Pan&Scan?

You are right and I was just being lazy with my usage of the term 'Pan & Scan'.

Re: Can BR Be Pan&Scan?

No 'anamorphic' support in the BD standard, is a major faux pau. After all it would have provided a similar gain in picture quality for wider than 16:9 material, just as it does on DVD, for material wider than 4:3. I am actually rather surprised that no one from the Home Theater fraternity even touched upon this issue at any stage when the BD standard was being formed. Although I do realize that the fact that HD TVs already being sold at the time had not incorporated the feature might have prevented 'anamorphic' from being incorporated int he BD standard. But then again, most tvs sold before the DVD era did not incorporate the feature either and that did not stop them from including it in the DVD specs. Also, very few, if any, of the early HD TVs sold had HDMI support and that did not stop them from making it an integral part of the BD standard. The same also applies for HD audio format support in existing receivers/pre-pros.

Re: Can BR Be Pan&Scan?

There's no need for an anamorphic standard on BD because HD is native 16x9.

Re: Can BR Be Pan&Scan?

Well, it might have been nice to be able to encode wider-than-1.77:1 movies anamorphically (the same 1.33 factor would have gotten the aspect ratio right up to 2.37:1), even though the number of devices that can handle such resolution is still small.

Re: Can BR Be Pan&Scan?

Yes but there are films that are wider than 16x9 which could benefit from an anamorphic presentation on blu-ray. It would be particularly good for those using projectors with anamorphic lenses.

Doug

Re: Can BR Be Pan&Scan?

And anamorphic film is native 2.40:1.

I have done some anamorphic encodes from 2.40:1 film to BD to satisfy my own curiosity and it can be easily done. However, unless the entire video chain from telecine/scanner to BD supports it, there is really no resolution gain to be had.

Vern

Re: Can BR Be Pan&Scan?

OK, I'm lost.

What exactly is the benefit of an anamorphic encoding on Blu-ray?

If a film has a 2.40:1 AR, displaying it on a 16x9 TV when the signal is encoded at 16x9 is the only way to do it, no? Why would you want to encode it for 4x3 and have it anamorphically enhanced to 16x9? Or are you talking about some hypothetical TV with a 2.40:1 screen instead of a 1.78:1 screen?

Re: Can BR Be Pan&Scan?

Basically, Constant Image Height projector-based setups using scalers, anamorphic lenses, and 2.35:1 screens. Not common, perhaps, but definitely not hypothetical. Anamorphic BD would allow such users to display 1080 vertical lines of source resolution for 'scope films, instead of ~842. Such scaler/lens setup would work on 16:9 screens, of course, for letterboxed presentation of 2.35 fare.

Re: Can BR Be Pan&Scan?

When the BD specs still weren't definitive, I advocated a "ratio byte", allowing for much more efficient use of the space on disc.

And, Brandon, you don't encode for 4x3. You encode for 16x9 en have it anamorphically enhanced to whatever you've chosen to be the next stop (say: 2.35:1).

But if there would have been a ratio byte, you could even have defined the ratio (height) for each specific release (or chapter of a movie).


Cees

Re: Can BR Be Pan&Scan?

Anamorphic BD would've be nice in theory, but it really would only have any practical benefit for the select few who own/use the needed display setup while also likely compromising the PQ a little for the rest of us (by requiring downconversion just like w/ 16x9 DVD on 4x3 displays).

Considering how niche that portion of the market really is, it'd probably make more sense for the industry to go for something even better than BD at some point to satisfy whatever actual demand there is for that in the future. And if the demand (and the $$$ to back that up) really isn't there, then there's no real point to saddle everyone else w/ the compromises that would be needed (both in terms of PQ in practice and the $$$ investment to produce and support the extra resolution that most would not be able to use).

Don't get me wrong. I too would love to own a great, large, constant height setup and watch anamorphic BD (or something even better) on it. But I gotta be realistic about this recreational hobby afterall -- especially since my plate is pretty full already w/ a few other serious hobbies as well.

_Man_

Re: Can BR Be Pan&Scan?

4X3 pan-and-scan would be possible, but unlikely since BD is aimed for HDTVs. The native resolution is 1:78 and any smaller AR would be pillarboxed just like higher AR is letterboxed.
You can create a pan-and-scan 1.33 and then pillarbox it in 1.78, but the result would make the BD author the laughing stock of the whole industry.
Resolutions cropped to 1.78 is the new pan-and-scan.

Re: Can BR Be Pan&Scan?

This.

I know some out there have the constant height 2.40:1 screens, but you guys are definitely in the minority. I doubt there's even 1000 set ups in the entire US.

Re: Can BR Be Pan&Scan?

Of course, there weren't a whole lot of 16x9 TVs out there ten years ago when DVD was first released, although in that case everybody knew HD was coming (and weren't there a lot of claims that anamorphic encoding would downgrade the picture for the vast majority of 4x3 sets at the time?). As much as it's a tiny niche, it's the sort of capability that might have been forward-thinking to include (along with a standard for encoding 3-D) for the simple reason that Blu-ray is expected to be the standard (if only the high-end standard) for the forseeable future.

Of course, there's no reason that you couldn't encode anamorphic images on a small-run BD, much like there were a few anamorphic Laserdiscs and are Sensio 3-D DVDs. I suppose that it's something that might be a possible firmware update for Profile 1.1+ players, too.

Re: Can BR Be Pan&Scan?

Yup and yup. No reason to throw out resolution, no telling what the future holds. I mean, they saw fit to make it a 1080p format, even though most
(?) people will be downconverting that to something else.
I think it had to do with getting the format out ASAP, what with HD-DVD and all.

Re: Can BR Be Pan&Scan?

Maybe not in the USA but in Europe there were loads. We've had widescreen TVs available to the masses since the early 90s and the BBC has been making widescreen standard definition programmes for the same length of time.

Re: Can BR Be Pan&Scan?

Hi all,

For anyone who is interested, Oppo has their first BD player coming out sometime pretty soon and its based on their very successful DV-983H DVD player platform.

One of the DV-983H features that Oppo says is very likely to show up in the final BD product is a vertical stretch for 2.xx:1 BDs made specifically for people with CIH setups.

Re: Can BR Be Pan&Scan?

Yeah, pretty cool. The fact that they acknowledge CIH setups and include features for it indicates such setups may be less esoteric and more prevalent than many assume.
I suspect we'll see even more. I mean, front-projection is getting more popular by the day and what can be more attractive to the general public than getting rid of them dang back bars?

Re: Can BR Be Pan&Scan?

The 30th Anniversary version of Close Encounters of the Third Kind has the Theatrical Version, Special Edition and the Director's Cut all on the same disc. And that's the only example I can think of, at the moment. It's not used as often as it should, I know that.

Re: Can BR Be Pan&Scan?

There were some such claims, not a lot, but they were generally ignored since they didn't really hold water. Whether through straight letterboxing or conversion from anamorphic, viewers with 4:3 TVs ended up seeing exactly the same number of active scan lines, and few would have been able to tell the difference between an anamorphic and non-anamorphic version of the same material. (In fact, I did a few of these a/b comparisons with anamorphic DVDs and letterboxed versions of the same films on laserdisc.) Whatever quality difference there might have been was lost in the fact that most people were watching on old sets that with horrendous factory settings or worse adjustments "by eye" in bad lighting conditions and from inappropriate distances. We're not exactly talking critical viewing in ideal HT conditions. The anamorphic down-conversion was the least of their viewing problems. (Although by all accounts some players did a worse job of this than others.)

More often than not this was simply an excuse for studios that were trying to save a buck by recycling old LD masters or studios that didn't want high quality digital copies of their films getting out there, like Disney. Disney was one of the last studios to release anamorphic DVDs, just as they were late to the DVD party generally, and were one of the last studios to support DIVX discs. Disney never understood the DVD market and feared it more than they embraced it. (Which is what make the "Disney DVD" tag in their ads so hysterically funny.)

Regards,

Joe

Re: Can BR Be Pan&Scan?

Regardless of what most non-enthusiasts can tell, I'd think there are still a lot more of us enthusiasts who can see the diff than there are CIH owners who can actually benefit from anamorphic 2.40:1 BDs.

And I assure you that I could easily see the artifacts on my old 4x3 CRT played back on a decent Toshiba player back then before I started visiting the HTF -- and no, I did not calibrate the set at that time and never noticed stuff like EE or CUE either back then.

Anyway, the whole thing is kinda moot now...

_Man_

Re: Can BR Be Pan&Scan?

How The West was Won, with its "SmileBox" version on Disc 2, and the regular "flat" version on Disc 1.