| DVD Roundup October 2005
All About Aspect Ratios --
Part Two
Last month’s "All
About Aspect Ratios -- Part One" discussed aspect ratios in films and theaters.
This month I’ll look at the early decades of movies shown on
"old-fashioned" 4:3 analog video displays -- televisions -- and the early years
of home theater.
Television was born in the late 1940s, when all movies were
still made in the 1.33:1 (4:3), or "Academy," aspect ratio. TV screens, too,
were made in the same 4:3 ratio. However, TV proved so popular that people began staying
home instead of attending movie theaters, which cut deeply into box-office revenues. In
response, the Hollywood studios decided to offer their audiences something they
couldn’t get at home, and in the early 1950s began to make widescreen films using new
optics that enabled the projection of very wide images in theaters. In some cases the
movie images were so wide that it would have taken two TVs side by side to display the
entire image without cutting off some part of it.
The new widescreen movies being shown in theaters thus
caused, in turn, a new problem when they were later broadcast on TV. Early on, the only
choice was to cut off the left and right sides of the movie image and display only the
center portion of the movie frame. This produced annoying side effects: people talking
with only their noses visible at the extreme left and right sides of the screen, or one
person speaking to someone who was now outside the screen frame on the opposite side. In
battle scenes, you could see shots fired but not see where they struck. During horse
chases, horses ran right off the edge of the screen, leaving only their running rear ends
on the TV screen. These problems were just plain silly and distracting.
Pan and scan
 Some Hollywood genius
decided to "pan and scan" across the movie frame while copying the film to
TV’s 4:3 aspect ratio on specialized telecine equipment. The telecine operator would
follow the action by watching the movie frames a second or so before their transfer to
video to anticipate the direction in which to pan and scan the capture equipment across
the film frame. Keep in mind that the images the telecine operator was transferring might
be as much as twice as wide as a TV screen. If a horse was about to run off the right side
of the screen, the operator would pan to the right to keep the running horse and rider on
the screen. When a following rider began shooting, the operator would pan to the left in
time to catch the gunshots, then right again to show whether or not the rider had been
hit. This could get tedious if the chase lasted several minutes; all that panning and
scanning would be hard to hide from those watching the movie on TV.
Pan-and-scan was no better than a 50% solution to the
widescreen problem. Too many times, watching an early pan-and-scan version of a movie felt
as if you were in a tank turret, viewing the action through a narrow slot. If you needed
to see something to the left, you had to rotate your turret counterclockwise, or clockwise
to see the action to the right. Complaints about the abrupt stops and starts that came
with the pan-and-scan transfers were widespread.
Motion-adapted pan and scan
To head off the complaints, new pan-and-scan hardware was
developed that began a pan slowly, then accelerated, then gently slowed down again to
avoid those sudden, tank-turret-like starts and stops. This made panning and scanning
subtler but did not solve the problem of not being able to show both sides of the movie
frame at the same time when the entire frame included important action or dialogue. The
motion-adapted pan-and-scan system moved somewhat closer to the ideal of not distracting
home viewers, but still delivered nothing like a widescreen viewing experience.
Before the advent of consumer video formats such as Beta,
VHS, and laserdisc, cinematographers felt little pressure to "shoot for TV" when
they made movies. It would be the 1980s before studios began to pressure cinematographers
to concentrate their compositions more in the center of the frame, to ease the transfer to
4:3 home video formats. Fans of films from all eras will probably notice that as home
video grew in popularity, less and less obvious panning and scanning was visible in 4:3
versions of newer widescreen movies because of the adjustments and accommodations to the
4:3 home video audience on the part of studios, producers, directors, and
cinematographers.
Letterboxing
 The letterbox format was
introduced to end the need to pan and scan movie frames during the telecine transfer to
4:3 home video formats. In letterboxing, the film frame was no longer forced to fill the
TV screen from top to bottom. Instead, the frame’s left and right edges were made to
fit within the left and right sides of the TV screen, leaving unused areas at the top and
bottom of the screen. What to do with these black areas? Colors were definitely out, white
was distracting, and gray bothered many viewers. Black was the obvious and best choice.
Movie fans hailed letterboxing as the only way to view movies on TV. Education campaigns
were launched explaining why everyone should view all non-4:3 movies in letterbox rather
than fullscreen format. The laserdisc format was a stronghold for the widescreen letterbox
format.
Letterboxing seemed the ultimate widescreen solution,
except for one thing: The bigger 4:3 TVs got, the worse letterboxed movies looked. If
there were 50 lines of black at the top of the screen and 50 more lines of black at the
bottom of the screen, that meant that 100 lines of the set’s total vertical
resolution remained unused when displaying that letterboxed film. With TV’s already
limited vertical resolution, the loss of those 100 lines meant that viewing letterboxed
films on larger TV screens made it appear as if you were watching the movie through
mini-blinds. Vertical motion would flicker badly because the scan lines were so far apart,
and the complaints about "Venetian blind effect" grew exponentially as 27",
32", and 36" TVs became common. The well-heeled home-theater enthusiast could
eliminate this effect with an expensive CRT projector and a line doubler (+$40,000 for the
two components), which together could fill in the black gaps between the scan lines with
interpolated video data. But this brute-force fix was far outside the financial reach of
most home-theater fans.
The end of the line for letterboxing and pan-and-scan
VHS and Beta videotapes, laserdiscs, and early DVDs were
all limited to one of three transfer formats: a fixed-aperture transfer with no
pan-and-scan, pan-and-scan, or letterbox. Yes, even DVDs at first had these limitations,
because DVD was developed as a 4:3 video format. Widescreen DVDs came a little later. The
widescreen home-theater era and some changes in the ways movies are shot have mostly wiped
out the need to pan-and-scan or letterbox newer films.
In "All About Aspect Ratios -- Part Three,"
I’ll look at the present era of widescreen home theater, in which 16:9 displays rule
and widescreen DVD and HD are the formats of choice.
…Doug Blackburn
db@hometheatersound.com |
