Why Watch a Movie that Only Uses Half the Screen?
If there's one issue that splits home-theater buffs into
two opposing camps, it's the whole business with those "black bars" on
widescreen movies. That assumes that the folks objecting are watching on a 4:3 monitor, of
course.
So, what's the deal?
It's all about aspect ratio, which is a technical
term that refers to the relationship between the width and height of a film image. Like
most ratios, it is generally expressed by two numbers separated by a colon -- as in 1.33:1
-- although that same aspect ratio can also be expressed as 4 x 3.
Back in the early days of film, most movies were shot and
projected in an aspect ratio of 1.33:1. Film history tells us it was originally 1.37:1,
but it was standardized to 1.33:1 by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences by
the 1930s, which is why it is known as the "Academy Standard." When TV came
along, the National Television Standards Committee (NTSC) designated Academy Standard the
official aspect ratio for television broadcasting (and reception, of course).
When the public embraced TV, the film industry panicked and
sought ways to distinguish its product from one that people could stay home and watch for
free. Garish color, frigid air-conditioning, and 3D were all attempts to lure the paying
public into theaters, but the one that really caught on was widescreen -- stretching the
picture horizontally. A seldom-mentioned consequence of the move to widescreen by theaters
was the general expansion of screen height as well as width -- we have TV to thank for
really big film screens.
The widescreen wars began with 20th Century Fox's 1953
release of Shane in 1.66:1. Disney and MGM used a slightly different widescreen
format of 1.75:1 and then other studios opted for 1.85:1, which was gradually adopted as
the de facto industry standard, if for no other reason than that movies made at
1.66:1 and 1.75:1 still looked fairly good when cropped for projection on screens designed
for 1.85:1. (In Europe, 1.66:1 was widely employed, but that's another story.)
All of that refers to what are known as flat academy
ratios; there's also something called anamorphic scope. This gets a little tricky
because the word anamorphic is also used in referring to widescreen DVDs (and we'll
return to the subject later). When we speak of anamorphic scope, we are speaking of both
an aspect ratio (we're talking really widescreen here -- stuff like Panavision and
Cinemascope, some of which were as wide as 2.35:1) and a process. The word anamorphic
means to distort an image intentionally along the perpendicular axes -- stretching
it wider, in other words. In films, this is done with a special lens on the projector.
When an anamorphic widescreen film is shot, the camera actually shoots an image composed
in 1.85:1, but the camera lens anamorphically "squooshes" it in at the edges.
When projected through an anamorphic lens, the image expands to an onscreen aspect ratio
of 2.35:1.
How does that relate to video? That brings us back to those
black bars.
Years ago, TV dealt with this by a process known as pan
and scan. In other words, the networks took a 4 x 3-inch chunk of the bigger
image -- usually the part surrounding the main character -- and threw away everything
else. The obvious advantage to this is that it uses all of the TV screen (which is why it
was called full screen); the disadvantage, of course, is that it discards
everything from the edges of the picture.
When laserdisc developed as a film-buff's format, one of
the ways it distinguished itself was by providing widescreen versions of films. When these
were projected onto big screens by the CRT projectors really high-end videophiles tended
to use, the effect was literally cinematic. (I vividly remember how impressed I was
when I saw the THX-Certified laserdisc of Oklahoma on a 10' projection screen at Video's
34th Street test studio; at home on my 20" CRT, the 2.20:1 film looked too small to
watch from across my living room -- it was just a tiny strip of motion and color between
two fat black bands.)
Those black bands -- not to mention the reduced resolution
from blacking out all those pixels or the equally annoying reduction of scale -- simply
drove some viewers nuts. Videocassettes tended to crop the image, which used the whole
screen, but threw away all the peripheral details and that drove film purists nuts.
DVD was brought to market as a universal format, one
designed to appeal to the largest number of consumers possible, not merely film buffs.
Yet, since it was also being touted as an improved format, studios wanted the
approbation of serious cinephiles, which meant they saw the merit in including widescreen
aspect ratios. At the same time, a lot of renters actively resented those black bands
framing the image. An early approach was double-sided DVDs, which contained a widescreen
copy of the film on one side and a full-screen version on the other side.
Meanwhile, TV was evolving, too. There were many competing
proposals for high-definition television (HDTV), but one thing emerged out of the
competing standards: People were ready for a widescreen format. As a result, the old NTSC
standard (4:3) will eventually give way to the 16:9 ratio of ATSC (Advanced Television
Standard Committee -- the digital TV standard). In case you're now curious about these
things, 16:9 works out to 1.78:1, not quite 2.35:1, but not too shabby either. In the long
run, 16:9 will simplify matters, but in the here-and-now, it complicates certain things.
Most people haven't invested in the new 16:9 sets yet, so
they have to watch DVDs and broadcast television on 4:3 sets. They want a way to watch
shows on their TVs that don't distort the picture. In addition, there's a huge backlog of
"legacy" programming in the old NTSC aspect ratio. How can everybody get what
they want?
Our old friend, the anamorphic squeeze, that's how.
Televisions with 16:9 screens (HDTV, for example) take the signal from a DVD or digital
broadcast image that has been anamorphically processed at the telecine stage and
automatically "unsqueeze" it to its original aspect ratio. Assuming you've set
up your DVD player or STB properly, the widescreen image will fill the entire screen with
the entire picture. Even better, since this allows the display device to use all its
pixels, the vertical resolution of the image will be far superior to that of a standard
letterbox image.
If you're watching on a 4:3 set, you won't see a clearer
picture; in fact, your picture will be equivalent to a letterboxed image, black bars and
all. So why would you want a DVD with anamorphic enhancement? Because after 2006, when the
FCC-mandated switchover to ATSC broadcasting kicks in, we'll all be watching on 16:9 sets
(at least, that's the theory).
Actually, if you have a 4:3 TV and you don't have any plans
to change it soon -- and you hate those black bars -- you might want to buy
full-screen DVDs and deal with the 16:9 set and anamorphic DVDs at a later date. On the
other hand, having a DVD library in place for the widescreen set most of us have in our
future might be considered good planning.
Even if you do have a 16:9 set now, you'll still see
black bars occasionally. Remember that 16:9 works out to 1.78:1, so if you want to see a
film with a Cinemascope or Panavision aspect ratio, it will need to be "masked"
(that's what they call adding those black bars) in order to present all the horizontal
information while preserving the original aspect ratio. The good news is that the bars
will be much narrower.
Let's assume you have a widescreen set now or expect to get
one soon, how do you recognize an anamorphically enhanced DVD? Hooo boy, and you
thought "what does anamorphic mean" was a tough question! There's no
standard label -- in fact, some DVDs aren't labeled one way or another, although that's
getting rare. You need to look for the words enhanced, widescreen, and 16:9.
Frequently, these words are used in combination, such as enhanced for widescreen TVs
or enhanced for 16:9 television or even anamorphic widescreen. If it says letterbox,
it isn't an anamorphic DVD.
Which brings us back to the title of this article. It's one
of those foreground/field-perspective puzzles. You may have thought I was asking why
anyone would want to watch a movie that had those black bars on the top and bottom of the
screen, but now that you know all about aspect ratios, you probably realize I was asking why
would anybody want to watch less than the picture that was shown in the movie theater?
With anamorphic processing, you can have it if you really
want it.
...Wes Phillips
wes@onhometheater.com
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