Will 1080p be the next misnomer (wrong labels)? Are 2.35/2.4:1 films REALLY 1080p? (1 Viewer)

[Aaron_Brez]

Short-sightedness, along with the fact that there are no native 2.35:1 devices in mass production-- or even planned in the near future.

But to play the Devil's advocate, they'd have to incorporate extra scaling capability in the 1st generation devices to accomodate display devices which *might* come forth in the future, and have to deal with videophiles who believe (rightly or wrongly) that the scaling in-player is inferior to the results of having this letterboxed in the mastering stage.

And the demand for such a feature, while it does exist, is too low right now for them to bother.

 

[Joseph DeMartino]

Because then 90% of the films and TV shows produced from the silent era until earlier this afternoon would have to be broadcast with giant black columns on either side of them, and very little material would actually "fill" the native screen format? How about because most new material for the 2.35:1 screen standard would, perforce, be shot at that ratio - and it simply doesn't work for most non-epic material. Who wants to watch the evening news in 2.35:1? Or a football game, or an intimate character drama, or a sitcom? 1.78:1 is a good compromise precisely because nothing quite matches it but everything can be easily ajusted to it, and that both the NBA playoffs and How I Met Your Mother "work" at those proportions in a way that neither 1.33:1 nor 2.35:1 would. Hardly "shortsightedness" - unless you believe a mass-market TV system that will be used to broadcast material shot in many aspect ratios created over the course of more than a century should have been designed to optimally display a particular subset of theatrical movies while screwing up everything else.

Regards,

Joe

 

[JediFonger]

yeah, it'd be weird to see the news in 2.35. on the other, this is where market and product differentiation can occur. you could market 2.35 native displays to people who *only* watch films made post star wars .

that's another topic for another time. the point of the entire thread is just there's TOO MANY ASPECT RATIOS!!! =).

 

[Dan Buckley]

Using any other aspect ratio other then 16x9 with black would be useless. There are no widely available devices that use an AS greater than 16x9. Any "extra" resolution that would be gained in using the entire 1920x1080 field would be waisted when it had to be rescaled to a 16x9 monitor possibly introducing artifacts to the image depending on how well your player scaled the image. So anything gained would be lost. Just like how the quality of an anamorphic DVD can slightly vary on a 4x3 monitor depending on the in player letterboxing.

 

[DaViD Boulet]

Dan,

many serious HT enthusaists have "constant height" 2.35:1 systems and scale and project all their material that way.

These high-end viewers would have loved to have used the full vertical 1080 pixels of HD media to represent active picture information for 2.35:1 scope films.

 

[Joseph DeMartino]

Fine, for the .0001% of people with front projection systems. But you don't design mass media systems for such people, and a 2.35:1 cabinet mounted or flat panel TV set would be ludicrous. And that's what we've been discussing here.

Regards,

Joe

 

[DaViD Boulet]

What's esoteric today is a comoddity item tomorrow.

Remember how few people had ever heard of 16x9 in 1997? Now it's common place.

Soon we'll have displays with greater-than 1080P resolution. The added vertical detail from enhanced 1080P transfers could be used on displays of that kind even if they are 16x9 in shape.

In 10 years everyone will be saying "Why did we ever think that a 16x9 frame with 1080 vertical pixels was good enough?". Yes...it's great. But it would have been even *better* with full vertical resolution for 2.35:1 films.

Your local digital theater will be getting it. Why not your HT?

 

[JeremyErwin]

Didn't computer setups support this from the beginning? (Of course, if you want to quibble, the constant height 1.2.35 folks already use computers to scale their video, so...)

 

[DaViD Boulet]

Yes, because computer screens had more resolution than 480i/p televisions...so they could get all the scan-lines inside the 16x9 area of the 4x3 computer screen for enhanced quality (like 4x3 TVs with the "squeeze").

Not many computer screens are higher than 1920 x 1080 at the present...but it won't be long before there are.

 

[Ray Ruggaurs]

Okay what about the actual film source?
Aren't most 2.35:1 movies made from 70mm film and the top and bottom "cut off" for that extra wide 2.35:1 shape? E.g Terminator 2 Full screen and widescreen versions or Harry Potter and the P's Stone Full screen and widescreen versions. You can see that the director filmed the scene on a larger film canvass then cropped the top/bottom or sides to make it widescreen or full screen.

The source material isn't anamorphic enhanced but matted.

So if 1080p is very close to how a 1.78:1 film source looks like and if the 2.35:1 movie is simply a 77mm film source with some of the top and bottom cut then wouldn't 1080p still be very close to how a 2.35:1 film source looks like?

 

[Lew Crippen]

Most 2.35:1 movies are shot on 35mm, not 70mm.

Terminator 2 for example was shot on 35mm stock using anamorpic techniques (to get the widescreen effect).

The 70mm screenings you may have seen are from 70mm prints, blown up from the 35mm negatives.

Likewise Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s/Sorcerer’s Stone was shot on 35mm stock with anamorphic techniques.

 

[Joseph DeMartino]

*Whew* So many wrong assumptions, so little time.


1) A 1080p frame looks damned good, but no consumer video system looks "very close" to what actual film looks like. Video has improved by leaps and bounds, true. But let's not kid ourselves about how far we've come.

2) In a way, in spite of everything, you're almost right. On a 1.77:1 TV screen a 2.35:1 source will look almost as film-like as a 1.77:1 source if both are presented in 1080p. But DaViD is right that on a 2.35:1 screen in a constant height arrangement, you'd get a better image if you had more lines of resolution availble for such a screen. Which practically nobody has and which I don't see very many people getting in, say, the next 10 years. 20 years from now we'll probably be dealing with multistandard displays that adjust on the fly and follow us from room to room. (Forget that "pause live TV" nonsesne. I want a TV that will come with me to the kitchen while I get a drink or make a sandwich, or to the bathroom if I have to make a pit-stop during the Big Game. )

Regards,

Joe

 

[Joseph DeMartino]

Nope. Shot "flat" with spherical lenses in Super35. See my reply below yours.

Regards,

Joe

 

[Ray Ruggaurs]

Cool! I stand corrected! Thanks for not ripping me new one on the mistakes!

 

[Joseph DeMartino]

Well, I'd be a poor one to do that since I made many of the same mistakes when I started out with this hobby. I think you'll find very little of that sort of thing goes on at the HTF, although I hear it is common on other boards.

I've never understood why that happens. You were obviously doing your best to figure something out based incomplete information. The obvious solution is to supply you with more information. I don't see how yelling at someone for an honest mistake improves the learning process. (Other than to feed the yeller's ego. )

Plus you correctly phrased you post in the form of a question. If you'd said: "You guys are all wrong. Everybody with a brain knows that all 70mm films are just matted to 2.35:1, so they've already lost resoultion and will look just the same as 1.78:1 films. How can you not see that?" the replies would probably still have been polite, but maybe a little sarcastic.

Regards,

Joe

 

[DaViD Boulet]

Hey Ray,

it's all confusing... and with the many differenent techniques that can be used to capture film for 2.35:1 movies, it's no wonder there would be some head scratching.

In laymen's terms there are two basic ways to make "widescreen" movies on film:

* Shoot the film in basically a 4x3-shaped film-stock and then matte the top/bottom for the theater. This is what you were wondering and to some extent it's true about both T2 and Harry Potter... to get the 2.35:1 shape a little bit of image is matted on the top bottom in general (depends on the scene)... but the idea you have that the entire vertical range of the actual film print is not being used for active picture for the theater is true.

* Shoot the film so that the entire widescreen image is captured on the film-frame using the entire surface to get the best resolution. This is what is called anamorphic filming... because usually the film frame itself isn't the same shape as the movie and so a distorting-lens is used to "squeeze" the picture onto the film print to use the entire available space.



Now... how does this relate to video?

Well... the first thing to realize is that when we talk about "anamorphic" with film we're talking litterally... there's an image and a physical film stock and we use a lens to distort it (and then another one to undistort it when projected). However, with digital video, we've just got "pixels" and so we're really just changing the ratio of horizontal pixels to vertical when we digitall scan or convert the image. Since digital image have no native "shape" but are just representations of a shape based on a flag in the meta-data of the signal, I usually don't like the word "anamorphic" at all... but rather like to say things like "4x3 encoded" or "16x9 encoded" or "20x9 encoded"... that means that whatever pixel matrix you have (like 720 x 480 or 1920 x 1080) is just being used to express that frame shape.

There's no one right "shape" to a frame though convention leads us to usually think of the shape that makes the pixels square as the "native" shape if we had to pick one to be the default. With a 1920 x 1080 image, that would be the 16x9 frame-shape (the pixels are perfectly square). Though with standard-def DVD that doesn't work because the pixels are *never* square with any frame-shape that we use... in 4x3 encoded images the pixels are tall and narrow and with 16x9 images the pixels are wider than they are high. Pretty interesting, hugh?

Ok... so where is this going...

well, the basic idea is this:

You've got an image on film. In theory it has much more resolution than the pixels you're about to scan it into. And so you want to use as many pixels as you can to minimize the loss of detail when converting to digital. Therefore, you pick whatever frame-shape you can to get the most pixels used for active picture area... any pixels that are used on static black-bars will be "wasted" and won't be able to provide additional picture detail... detail that was in the original film print.

Yes, believe it or not, even a grainy 35 mm "open matte" movie (one that gets matted in the theater) has more "detail" in it than you can scan into a 1920 x 1080 pixel array. That's why you don't want to skimp if you don't have to... just like with 16x9 encoded DVD, you still want to use all the pixels you can.

Now, when they came up with HD for BD and HD DVD, they just made things simple and picked a single 16x9 frame-shape as a "one size fits all" HD matrix. IMO, it would have been better to have allowed for a wider frame shape to scan 2.35:1 movies so that we wouldn't have to waste *any* pixels on black bars. In home-theaters with large screens like front projection systems, it would have made a visible improvment for these scope movies. It would have required a more complicated signal path to process it down to 16x9 for regular viewers without fancy 2.35:1 projection equipment, but in the long run it would have been worth it... in my opinion.

Ok... hope that all helps.

 

[DaViD Boulet]

Joe,

I know the poster your talking about. But I'd hate to rob you of the HD mystery...

 

[Lew Crippen]

I'm not in disagreement Joe--I did not make the distinction between Super35 and 35mm.

I am probably wrong, but even though shot flat, I believe that some anamorphic techniques were used in going to the prints. On purpose I did not say that either movie was shot with anamorphic lenses.

 

[Joseph DeMartino]

Well, in both cases you said, "shot on 35mm stock using anamorpic techniques" which certainly sounds like you meant anamorphic "techniques" were used in shooting the films rather than used in creating prints. So you can see why I interpreted your post as I did.

Anyway, as we used to say in the Bronx, "No autopsy, no foul."

Joe

 

[DaViD Boulet]

I should have added that some film techniques make use of BOTH anamorhpic squeezing while at the same time "masking" the prints for 2.35:1 projection. Super-35 is such a format. I think that the "squeezed" image comes closer to 1.85:1 in shape... so that 1.33:1 "TV" modified versions can open up the matte a little though they still trim off the side.

The catch is that with many special-effects sequences... the work may be done at the 2.35:1 aspect ratio filling the additional vertical film-frame space with black matting... so some scenes get hard "panned and scanned" for TV while others are more mildly panned/scanned with added vertical image as well.