Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE: Home video movie aspect ratio

This is topic Home video movie aspect ratio in forum The Afterlife at Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE.

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Posted by Claude S. Ayakawa (Member # 1401) on 02-02-2010, 06:52 PM:

I love to see movies in Scope in a large theatre on a big screen. Flat movies in a 1.85:1 ratio is ok but noting can compare with films in the 2.35:1 ratio especially action films. Movies on my small 26 inch HD screen is a different matter. At home I somehow prefer the 1.85:1 ratio because the picture fills the full screen. After I had adjusted the backlighting on my screen and get a good black background, scope movies look good but flat films are look much better. because all of the screen is used.

I am still in favor of movies on DVD and Blu-Ray to be in their original aspect ratio but I am afraid some studios might start releasing scope pictures on Blu-Ray and DVDs that was photographed with a anamorphic lens in the 1.85:1 aspect ratio for HD like they used to do when they put out full screen versions for regular television. I have no problem with scope movies shot in Super 35mm in 1.85:1 because I will see the full width of the scope image as well as more picture information on the top and bottom of the original 1.33:1 full frame 35mm negative. James Cameron actually released a special laserdisc edition of TERMINATOR 2 in 1.85.1 and said he preferred that version over the theatrical scope 2.35:1 version.

-Claude

Posted by Mike Blakesley (Member # 26) on 02-02-2010, 09:31 PM:

I could see where a guy might prefer to see a 1:85 picture on a TV screen because well, that's closer to the shape of the screen. A true scope picture on a TV just looks kinda smallish.

There are probably thousands of HD-TV owners who have NEVER seen a properly-composed picture on their expensive TVs because they have this psychological need to fill every pixel. And yet they see nothing wrong with a picture that's squashed or stretched.

Posted by Joe Tommassello (Member # 4632) on 02-03-2010, 10:56 AM:

HD premium cable channels like HBO and Showtime frequently zoom up on the scope picture to fill the screen. Most of the time it's not too bad. Still I'd prefer the OAR.

Posted by Claude S. Ayakawa (Member # 1401) on 02-03-2010, 12:12 PM:

Joe,

When scope pictures does not look too bad on a HDTV 16X9 display could most likely be movies that were shot open matt, Super 35. The Varsity and Kuhio theatres Honolulu were great single screen houses with 70mm and a nice wide screen but were eventually twined. When this happened, the dimension of the screen in all four of the auditoriums were almost similar to a HDTV display and movies that were photographed with a anamorphic lens looked dreadful. Because of that, I tried to avoid the Kuhio because it showed mainstream films but the Varsity was a art house and I often frequented that theatre because most of the films were in the 1.85:1 aspect ratio.

-Claude

Posted by Joe Tommassello (Member # 4632) on 02-03-2010, 03:43 PM:

Claude - I know that HBO does all their own pan-and-scan transfers so it's not like a theater which is forced to show only the center of the screen. Star Wars films come to mind that sometimes were shown in 2.35:1 and other times full screen 16x9. Properly done it's not too bad in most cases...certainly much better than losing nearly half the frame at 1.33:1. I once had a flat 16mm print of Ben-Hur. In spite of being in mint condition and with gorgeous color it bordered on frustrating to watch with only half of the picture visible at any given time.

Posted by Scott Jentsch (Member # 1681) on 02-04-2010, 11:49 AM:

I've been experimenting with constant-image-height projection in my home theater, and the results have been interesting.

Like a vast majority of enthusiasts, I have a 1.78:1 display that letterboxes everything wider than that. While a person is kind of stuck when viewing content on an HDTV, I have some flexibility with front projection to play with the display of the image.

I have a 1.78:1 screen even on that setup, but I have the ability to manually zoom the image out to have the 2.35:1 image use the same height as a full-frame 1.78:1 image, adding ~20% to the width of the projected movie.

The difference it makes is actually quite impressive! While the extra height to the image is welcome, I find the extra width to have the biggest impact on me. The viewing angle from my seating position expands from 32 degrees to about 39 degrees.

Now that my projector is going on 5 years old, I'm looking to upgrade, and the top candidate is the Panasonic AE4000, which has a zoom memory feature where you can save the zoom settings for multiple aspect ratios, and you can switch between them (like when you go from the 1.78:1 menu to the 2.35:1 movie) or the projector can auto-sense the change and automatically change the zoom setting.

When I first heard about people going to 2.35:1 screens in their home theaters, I wasn't sure that it was a practical choice. Now, with a projector that can switch between the modes (instead of having to have a pricey anamorphic lens and scaler combo) and Blu-ray players that can shift the subtitles up into the 2.35:1 image space, I'm heading in that direction.

Posted by Pravin Ratnam (Member # 1417) on 02-04-2010, 01:26 PM:

Showtime shows OAR a lot. HBO is the culprit. Except for the Star Wars movies and old transfers, HBO is really contemptuous of OAR. Starz is a mixed bag. Mostly, they dont show OAR, but they are more open to it compared to HBO.

IFC-HD is a joke. They will stretch just take their SD feed and stretch it to fit the width of the screen for the HD version for most of their movies. A lot of pan and scan. And letterbox 1.85:1 movies in SD are ugly stretched out affairs in HD instead of upconverting it and zooming it to fit the entire screen.

TCM is good at respecting OAR. Sundance is not perfect, but they are better than IFC. It's too bad there is no Sundance HD.