Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE: Here's a great video about why wide-screen is better than full screen

This is topic Here's a great video about why wide-screen is better than full screen in forum The Afterlife at Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE.

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Posted by Justin Hamaker (Member # 2165) on 08-25-2009, 02:13 AM:

I know the people on Film-Tech don't need to be convinced on this issue, but I thought it's a great link to share with people who "don't like the black bars".

Wide Screen vs Full Screen

Posted by Joe Elliott (Member # 4006) on 08-25-2009, 11:40 AM:

Very good video. My son hates letterbox movies, I'll have to have him watch that, and maybe he'll change his mind.

Posted by Paul Mayer (Member # 355) on 08-25-2009, 12:04 PM:

Some people will just not listen to the arguments for letterbox. My brother cannot stand blank areas on his 32" 16:9 plasma flat screen. He stretches the image coming from the cable box and often zooms the display as well. It never occurs to him that he's seeing only about half of the total image when he does that.

And he often only watches the SD channels - he does not see the difference between SD and HD other than the AR difference. He's paying for the HD channels but doesn't like having to remember press the extra channel numbers on the remote.

I have a long-time acquaintance who also can't stand the black bars. In the laserdisc days she used to go out of her way to buy only the full-screen versions of titles. Funny, she's married to a Steadicam operator...

Posted by John Lasher (Member # 968) on 08-25-2009, 12:09 PM:

more complete version

When I get into feature filmmaking, I intend to shoot anamorphic, and shoot anamorphic often, and if a "full screen" version is ever demanded of me, I'm going to

make damn sure it's on the same (single-sided) disc with a widescreen version
make sure that widescreen version occupies no less than 2/3 of the available disc space
tell the transfer facility to just do a center-scan, sure the film will be reduced to a nonsensical jumble, with empty rooms talking to themselves and the like, but the mantra of the full screen junkie is always "I don't care what I'm missing, I just want my screen filled." :shrugs: If they don't care what they're missing, why should I? I already composed the picture once, I'm not spending one second in a telecine bay doing it again.
make it so that picking the full screen version plays a non-skipable video showing why the widescreen version is better (actually, you can skip it by pressing enter, which will play the widescreen version)

Now, I just have to find a way of raising about $200,000 so I can get started.

(Hey, my post count is now the same as the house number where I was living when I first registered here.)

Posted by Julio Roberto (Member # 4976) on 08-25-2009, 08:53 PM:

John, the telecine operator will be more than happy to do the pan-and-scan w/o you in the room, don't worry. That's basically what they did all day long back in the good old chemical "films days".

If you find someone to give you $200k to go shoot movies, make sure they understand you are not planning on giving them a single cent back and they are not from the "family".

Since TV's are nowaday's (mostly) widescreen-ish 1.78:1, it's not so bad. A little letterbox, which, if you insist can be streched out of the picture, is fine with most folks for flat content.

But Scope still poses an issue for many.

Oh well. Thankfully, there are also wide-widescreen TV's, like the Philips 21:9 one.

But it then becomes an issue for many trying to strech a square 1.33 SD image to 2.35 and we get into "I hate pillarbox images" territory ...

It IS somewhat of an issue though to have 4 "standard" formats still in use (1.33, 1.78, 1.85, 2.35).

The movies sent through the phone cable over here are SD. When they are widescreen, they are letterboxed. When fed through HDMI, most TV's are not smart enough to resize the thing and you end up with a tiny image in the middle of your +42" screen surrounded by black .... you know, á lá G-force ...

Posted by John Lasher (Member # 968) on 08-25-2009, 11:13 PM:

I think you misunderstand me. I want the full screen version to be a nonsensical center-scanned jumble, included (if it is at all) as an afterthought. I want it to be frustrating and confusing to watch. I want it to be as obvious to a full screen junkie as it is to me that there is something potentially important in this frame that I'm not seeing. If necessary I will supervise the full screen transfer to make sure that scan stays in the center. The whole point is to drive home the folly of the above mantra of "I don't care what I'm missing."

Posted by Frank Angel (Member # 248) on 08-26-2009, 04:10 PM:

John, I love it. If you REALLY want to drive it home, you can direct the P&S version so that you PURPOSELY miss all the main action so scenary is always talking to itself and actors only wind up in the shot (if ever) ONLY by accident! [Big Grin]

Posted by John Lasher (Member # 968) on 08-26-2009, 07:51 PM:

I don't want to go to that much work.

Posted by John Lasher (Member # 968) on 08-26-2009, 10:01 PM:

another video made by a student at Temple. He gets 1 or 2 nit-picky things wrong, but the ending is the reason to watch this video.

Posted by James Westbrook (Member # 3690) on 08-27-2009, 03:37 AM:

You mean the fellow's "Melt Down" at the end? *laughing*

Posted by Martin McCaffery (Member # 37) on 08-27-2009, 08:46 AM:

Now someone needs to do a similar video, faked out to look like it was shot in 1959, explaining why NOT to show a 1:33 film with 1:85 plates [Wink]

Posted by Mitchell Dvoskin (Member # 751) on 08-31-2009, 03:23 PM:

> Now someone needs to do a similar video, faked out to look like it was shot in 1959, explaining why NOT to show a 1:33 film with 1:85 plates

By 1959, most flat films were shot protected to 1.85. Of course there were exceptions, but 1953/1954 was the cutover years.

1:33 is primarily a video and 16mm aspect ratio. 35mm was standardized to 1.37 sometime in the 1930's.

Posted by Jesse Skeen (Member # 586) on 08-31-2009, 03:57 PM:

That video needs to be cropped so I don't get those annoying black bars on the SIDES. [Wink]

Posted by Martin Brooks (Member # 1269) on 09-18-2009, 10:29 PM:

I think that piece (with Scorcese, Mann, et al) originally played on either TNT or TCM. I remember being really happy they played that.

The problem with the YouTube presentation is that because they make the widescreen images so small (because the whole frame of the YouTube presentation is far wider than 16:9), it's not going to convince anyone who is not already convinced.

Here's another one. I'm not sure if it actually came from the same video or whether it was separate:
Nimoy Widescreen Explanation

Posted by Bobby Henderson (Member # 840) on 09-18-2009, 11:13 PM:

Yeah, the video originally played on Turner Classic Movies. I really wish the Turner company (Warner Bros. or whoever has it now) would get a HD-quality version of TCM launched.

I have a HD-only programming package with Dish Network right now, so I don't get TCM at all. But I pretty much stopped watching that channel anyway when I had the old SD-only programming lineup. Watching a movie both letterboxed and pillarboxed is pretty aggravating.

I like Curtin Hanson's take on the panning and scanning issue by offering The Last Supper painting example. Cinematographers are composing within the frame just like photographers, painters and illustrators. The shape of the frame means a lot. When you crop that frame you are screwing up the composition.