If there's any movie marketing gimmick I'm tired of seeing it's CinemaScope. It's stupid and distracting, everything looks tiny, and that extra room on the sides of the screen is always wasted on showing walls, and it always feels like vertical detail gets cut off. Seeing a tall castle is nowhere near as impressive if they don't show all of it without making it seem like it's very far away.
DVDs are even worse. So many DVD movies get altered to fit into extra wide aspect ratios they were never intended to be in. Cut off more vertical picture, or make everybody fat.
Yes, I agree. I guess it would be kind of cool in movie theaters, but it's still utterly pointless anyway because most of the time, people focus their attention on the main characters that have importance to the scene. I mean, who honestly has a CinemaScope TV anyway? When I watch a CinemaScope TV at best-buy, I can never tell the difference between that and a normal flat TV. Why make DVDs with cinemascope? for most people, all it does is add black bars on the top and bottom of their screen because like I said earlier, almost nobody has a cinemascope TV.
I miss playing VHS on CRTs where everything was fullscreen. Blu-rays are good too because they're made specifically for HDTVs, but I don't have a Blu-ray player.
DVDs are a pain in the butt having to constantly fiddle with the remote to make the picture fit. It's a shame that most DVDs end up having a worse vertical resolution than standard definition TV.
What are you trying to refer to when you say "Cinemascope"? The ancient capturing/projection method to get anamorphic widescreen content on a little square piece of film? Or are you just referring to "ultra-wide" TVs, or curved ones? Or 2:39:1 aspect ratio?
Full-screen VHS movies were almost always pan-and-scan croppings of the original print. It's nice to fill a screen, but I don't miss that practice at the expense of parts of the original shot.
(wikipedia seems to think that the CinemaScope trademark was only used in the 1950s. I have no idea what the current trade name is for ultra-wide-screen formats)
VHS was low enough resolution that pan-and-scan probably was worth it. DVDs, on the other hand ... probably not.
The interlacing is way more noticeable. You only have about 136 lines per field.
ok, so it means non anamorphic widescreen.
Anamorphic scope is about 180 lines per NTSC field, same as non-anamorphic widescreen.
Then I'm confused. Over here pretty much all TVs have means to reduce scan height (either via SCART 4:3/16:9 signal, info in Cvideo and via manual aspect ratio control), and what is referred to as anamorphic widescreen content over here uses up all the lines in video signal without wasting any on the black bars that way. Some TVs can do the reverse too, increase scan height to make bordered image fill the screen (function I sometimes needed during transitioning to digital broadcast when 4:3 and widescreen signalling wasn't quite consistent yet).
non-anamorphic 2.4:1 that's been letterboxed to 4:3 NTSC should be 124 scanlines per field, AFAICT?
I mean, 224 ×4÷3 = 298; 298÷2.4 = 124.
180 scanlines per field on 4:3 NTSC would be 16:9 (298÷180) .... so if the source material is 12:5 and it's not anamorphic and it's taking 180 scanlines per field, that has to be cropped from the 12:5 master... unless I'm missing something.
180 lines on 16:9 NTSC would be 64:27, or 2.37:1
Which is why scope DAR isn't quite as much of a problem in the DVD era, when monitors are expected to offer an anamorphic mode, than it was in the VHS era, which was practically all 4:3 all the time.
But I wouldn't recommend making an NES game in scope DAR. Super NES maybe, but only in mode 5 or interlaced 7. In mode 5, at least, you at least get 512x256 pixels.
Why aren't anamorphic DVDs more popular? All the DVDs I can find have thick black bars.
That should be a confiugration option in your DVD player...
All the widescreen DVDs that I have are 720x480, and have a logical bit marking whether the content is DAR 16:9 or DAR 4:3...
Oh, but you're referring to the extra bonus letterboxing for 12:5 content. Yeah, that does appear to be baked in.
Thanks for telling me that. I can't believe my DVD player was set up wrong this entire time. I also found out I have an option for progressive scan too.
lidnariq wrote:
All the widescreen DVDs that I have are 720x480, and have a logical bit marking whether the content is DAR 16:9 or DAR 4:3...
I have several "widescreen" DVDs are are a 4:3 picture with black bars baked in. It's really terrible, but it did happen quite a bit, I think mostly in the earlier years of DVD.
psycopathicteen wrote:
I can't believe my DVD player was set up wrong this entire time.
Take solace in knowing that you
are were part of the vast legion who do the same.
I work in electronics retail and installation. I have many a time come across the situation where somebody was upgrading an old 16:9 CRT for a shiny new LCD (or plasma a few years ago), only to find that their DVD player had been set to 4:3LB, or even worse, had never been through the initial setup even though it had obviously been heavily used. At least now all the decent brand players come set to 16:9 and RGB by default.
I'm glad that some TV stations are broadcasting their old 4:3 content pillar-boxed. It's a loosing battle convincing the masses that OAR is the way to go.
More and more I have come to the conclusion that most people, when you really boil it down, just don't care about getting the best out of their equipment, or at least don't bother to explore its capabilities... For somebody like me it can be soul destroying.
Not that I'm meaning to point any fingers at anybody here... It's just an observation from when I'm on the job.
I thought movie buffs just kept their TVs in zoom mode, and never played non-HD video games.