Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE: Configuring your digital screens, do you prefer to crop to the masking or zoom in?

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Posted by Justin Hamaker (Member # 2165) on 04-11-2012, 11:24 PM:

Today I swapped an inVision lens out for a Polaroid lens, so I had to redo my flat and scope files. On the scope picture I had to make a choice between filling the screen top to bottom and cropping the sides, or filling side to side and leaving some blank screen at the top of the screen.

For what it's worth, this screen has top movable masking and I did check to see if I had any additional range to lower the masking beyond the existing stop.

Given that the 'aperture' lines are so clean and crisp with the digital picture, I felt that filling side to side and leaving some blank screen at the top was the best solution. If I had gone the other way, I would have had to crop about 15 pixels on either side of the frame.

Posted by Joe Elliott (Member # 4006) on 04-12-2012, 01:39 AM:

I have been seeing more and more, theaters not even moving masking at all. They just open it up and let it go, since there is reduced personnel in the booth. Bugs the heck out of me. It is sad, but they are saying that customers don't complain, so I guess the general public is getting used to letterboxing on DVD and Blue-ray, so they don't notice or mind it anymore it in theaters.

Posted by Antti Nayha (Member # 4980) on 04-12-2012, 03:47 AM:

Personally, I like properly adjusted masking, even with the sharp edges of digital. I’m even willing to sacrifice a few pixels to achieve that, in case the masking cannot be perfectly adjusted to the image size.

Justin, cropping 15 pixels from both sides is nothing. You’re losing less than 1,5 percent of the horizontal image area that way. Film producers are using much wider ”safe areas” in picture composition and title placement, so you won’t be losing anything that important.

(Note that top & bottom cropping is less forgiving, because vertical framing/composition tends to be much more exact in cinema – even more so with the widescreen ratios we’re using these times. Still, if necessary, I would probably crop 2*15 pixels vertically to make the picture fit the masking.)

3D is an exception. If the film uses floating windows, no horizontal cropping is allowed at all – period. And even if without floating windows, I find that 3D is a lot less forgiving to horizontal cropping. It’s much more irritating to have an object in the foreground chopped off in a stereo image.

It goes without saying that the best thing to do is to fix the masking to accommodate the exact aspect ratios. But in theaters where this cannot be done for whatever reason, I tend to program different lens settings for 2D and 3D. So that 2D picture fits the masking exactly (cropping the sides a bit), and 3D picture is shown in it’s entirety (leaving some empty screen visible).

Of course, your mileage may vary. In some theatres seeing any empty unmasked screen can be very irritating, in others it’s kind of tolerable. Depends on your screen gain, ambient light levels, overall picture brightness, etc.

Posted by Tom Mundell (Member # 4555) on 04-12-2012, 08:39 AM:

quote: Joe Elliott
It is sad, but they are saying that customers don't complain, so I guess the general public is getting used to letterboxing on DVD and Blue-ray

Well, I've seen that happen, it drives me nuts, but I've never complained about it; I simply never return to that theater (or auditorium in the case of Imax or AMC's ETX). I think this may have been brought up before, are they really sure lack of complaints means customers don't mind and aren't simply leaving?

Posted by Mike Blakesley (Member # 26) on 04-12-2012, 12:17 PM:

There are a lot of things that the "average person" wouldn't ever notice or even care about if it was pointed out to them, but would drive people like us Film-Techers nuts. I've done a lot of improvements over the years just to make myself happy...when I've told civilians about it, they without fail always say "Oh gee, I never noticed that before!"

Posted by Monte L Fullmer (Member # 2797) on 04-12-2012, 01:13 PM:

True, even if you formatted your digital presentations to a 4:3 TV screen image size and still had mono sound, they prob wouldn't even care.

Like one time, a flat template was used for a scope feature and all was presented in "letterbox" ... and nobody said anything.

Guess, the ball falls back into Justin's court - his choice and let the public make the final call.

To echo Mike's comment: If you don't say anything on what changes you've done - either verbally, or written, they'd never would even notice. But, if a comment was made of the change, then the patrons would wonder "why you had to do the change" and it reflects on your business operations if you had to make it known.

Prob why a lot of cinemas that have done digitial conversion never have advertised it, where a sixplex I know of did do a conversion and really made the splash in the papers about how digital looks so much cleaner without any scratches or fading along with added 7.1 stereo sound.

Bet people were beginning to wonder....

Posted by Scott Norwood (Member # 30) on 04-12-2012, 01:36 PM:

In the absense of the option to fix the masking, I would crop the picture to fit. We do this all the time with aperture plates on film projectors (where there is typically zero keystone correction); I see no reason not to do it for video as well.

Note that I am not talking about cropping a 1.85 image to fit a scope screen or the reverse; I am talking about minor adjustments that do not affect the visibility of the safe title area and/or safe action area.

One possiblity (not available in D-cinema, I believe, but do-able with regular SD and HD video) is to stretch or squeeze the image slightly, such as stretching a 1.78 image out to 1.85. Personally, this is something that I would notice immediately and which would drive me insane, but some people do it and don't get complaints.

Posted by John Thomas (Member # 6509) on 04-12-2012, 02:13 PM:

Little slivers of blank screen bug the crap out of me. They scream "not quite perfect." I say fill it vertically and crop the sides, and nobody will notice the difference.

Posted by Jock Blakley (Member # 6552) on 04-17-2012, 08:21 PM:

Even with moveable side and bottom maskings I have no objection to tweaking the zoom a bit and redoing the projector maskings file to get everything nice and tight. A bit of cropping is necessary in my case anyway to correct keystone.