This is topic When is 1.85:1 not really 1.85:1? in forum Film Handlers' Forum at Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE.
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Posted by Mitchell Cope (Member # 32) on 03-23-2002, 06:55 AM:
I saw a print of "Scent of a Woman". This is supposed to be a flat, 1.85:1 aspect ratio film, right? While I didn't measure the exact aperture height of the hard matte, it was less than it should have been. What's the deal with this? Are there other flat films that were made just a bit wider by hard matting? 
Posted by Michael Brown (Member # 890) on 03-23-2002, 07:08 AM:
You mean the picture height wasn't tall enough for 1.85?
Thus projecting it at perfect 1.85 would give a letterbox effect on screen?
Posted by Mitchell Cope (Member # 32) on 03-23-2002, 08:15 AM:
That's right. You would have to mask more vertically to not project the hard matte.
Posted by Darryl Spicer (Member # 711) on 03-23-2002, 09:24 AM:
Yes I remember playing this one when it was originaly released. We had it on one screen that you had to make sure that you framed precisely because of the hard matte. I seem to remember that on different reels the framing would change causing the black bars to change the distance between the picture image and the masking.
Posted by John Walsh (Member # 168) on 03-23-2002, 10:13 AM:
Possibly there was a mistake (a mic boom in the way) so they hard matted it out?
Posted by Steve Kraus (Member # 476) on 03-23-2002, 10:30 AM:
Perhaps it was matted at exactly 1.85? Most films that *appear* to be matted at 1.85 actually have a hair more height to avoid tiny framing issues. Then again maybe it really was matted slightly too small.
Posted by Dave Williams (Member # 299) on 03-23-2002, 01:48 PM:
The hard matting on that film was exactly as stated, because of the boom mic in the scene. Many directors actually put the mic and other things in the frame so that they can see that the mic is there and close enough while they have thier head in the camera.examples of soft matted films where the same thing is there is BowFinger. When we ran this after one week, someone made a horrible error and burned the lense for this projector. The only one we had left was a 1:33 lense, so what the hell, we ran it. HOOOHAAAA. The mic was in the movie most of the time, and when heather graham takes off her top to the dumb eddie murphy, she is not NUDE... she is instead wearing a tube top. The audience was dumbfounded!!! WE laughed our asses off.
Dave
Posted by Darren Briggs (Member # 1071) on 03-23-2002, 03:12 PM:
'Tears of the Black Tiger' is another very tight 1.85:1 print. And on reel changes the matte would move up and down, making us have to rack the image every 20 mins.
Also why can't the distributors mark the films up as 1.85/1.66/scope etc, as would save us alot of time pissing around rehersing them to make sure it is 1.85 not 1.66 etc, here in England we show quite a few british made films which are made with 16:9 tv in mind, such as Billy Elliot, looked very tight in 1.85, but 1.66 look great.
Darren
Posted by Bernie Anderson Jr (Member # 410) on 03-24-2002, 06:35 PM:
What I find is that what people think is 1:85 is not. 1:85 is actually very wide, remember 1:85 was developed as an alternative to C-scope. The aspect ratio is somewhere probably between 1:85 and 1:75 and even possibly 1:66. At my theatre, I cut the plates to 1:85, the only time, you get black bars (letterboxing) is when a trailer is flat and it's promoting a 2:35 film. That's really annoying. But I would take a guess that the plate is cut alittle too big. I've known tech to cut plates at 1:75 to help get a little more light on the screen.
Posted by Gordon McLeod (Member # 33) on 03-24-2002, 07:25 PM:
Bernie said"What I find is that what people think is 1:85 is not. 1:85 is actually very wide, remember 1:85 was developed as an alternative to C-scope. "
Not true 1.85 was the median of the VistaVision cropped ratios
VV was to be projected between 1.66 and 2:1 if cropped at all
1.85 was the average
Posted by Steve Kraus (Member # 476) on 03-24-2002, 07:52 PM:
I don't know if I agree with that. Flat widescreen as a way to make greater use of those huge (2.55 : 1) CinemaScope screens was inevitable with or without VistaVision. Some theatres were cropping Academy ratio films and showing them in ersatz widescreen even before Scope came along.
Posted by Leo Enticknap (Member # 534) on 03-25-2002, 04:04 AM:
I too had a '1-85 in Academy' episode. There was a very tight turnaroud (2-3 minutes) between The Big Sleep on the early evening show and Clueless following it. At the time I was really short of running spools (this being with 2,000 foot changeovers) so in the rush to rewind I just completely forgot to change the lenses and plates. As the feature certificate hit the screen I thought 'Oh well, it's too late now' and let the first reel run in Academy. The projectors were DP-70s and you can't change the plates while the machine is running. There were boom mikes everywhere, and in one close-up a hand comes into shot and removes a wind baffle from the mike!
Posted by Charles Everett (Member # 889) on 07-22-2002, 05:40 PM:
Together is another film on which the framing changes from reel to reel. If you don't ride the framing knob at the reel changes the subtitles will be all but hidden at the start of R6. That's what happened when I saw Together at a 12-plex in a New York suburb.OTOH Billy Elliot looked OK in 1.85 for its US release.
Since those 2 pictures are imports -- Together is a Swedish film, Billy Elliot is from the UK -- it's fair to say they were filmed in 1.66 with the action framed to fit 1.85.
Posted by Frank Angel (Member # 248) on 07-23-2002, 03:18 AM:
The Europeans wisely stuck with 1.66 as their standard for spherical cropped wide screen -- they chose quality over size...the opposite of the US choice. Many times imports that are acquired for US distribution have their subtitles printed so if they are projected here at 1.85, you won't loose the subtitles, but the actually image composition is for 1.66 and many times it is very obvious, even though the distributor may call the picture 1.85. Miramax did that with CINEMA PARADISO and if you used 1.85 as was stated on the cans, yes the subtitles would played OK, but in one particular long shot, where a character was standing close to the top of the frame, his head would be chopped off. And you couldn't rack down because if you did, you'd dip the subtitle below the bottom mask. Run it in 1.66 and everything is fine. I once ran a gawdawful Matt Helm movie -- can't recall the name it was so bad. As I walked into the theatre to start my shift, I noticed not only a microphone in the scene swinging back and forth between the two actors who were sitting in a car, but the top of the car roof was sawed away and there, in plain sight was a big 2x4 plank clamped to the sliced rooftop so it wouldn't fall down. Behind the car you could see the gromets on the top of the rear screen and the moving background being projected on it. In another scene, Dean Martin is supposidely hanging from a rope from a helecopter - you could see the rope wrapped around a pipe, and again the rear screen rigging. The print was printed totally open frame -- right out to the scope frameline without even a 1.37 septum. My co-worker had misframed that reel so you were seeing the very top of the frame. Actually, I must say, it made the film a lot more interesting that if it had been projected correctly framed.