[PCWorld]

Post your comments for Why Do Widescreen DVDs Show Less Than 4x3 VHS Cassettes. here

[rgreen4]

This item talking about the compression in the film frame reminds me of when I was in the Navy and when at sea, the various Squadrons would show evening movies in their Ready Rooms. We only had one Cinemascope lens available to us, so we would have one evening of Cinemascope movies and three nights of what we called "skinnyscope" when the compressed image information was projected through a standard lens.

It talks about the fact that the raw filming many times has more vertical information than theatre releases, and is used to make the Full Screen release of DVD's, and the theater cut is used to make the Widescreen version of DVD's. On some of the older films, that no longer had the original film available, the theatre version was used and then "pan-and-scan" was used to crop the horizontal information to fit the 4:3 format.

[E221b]

Like Lincoln said: it depends on how the film was shot. One of the ways to shoot widescreen on 35mm film without cropping off the top and bottom was alluded to by the "CinemaScope" comment above. Using an ANAMORPHIC lens, CinemaScope and other related technologies basically squeeze a widescreen image onto a 4:3 frame. In order to avoid the black bars which people used to hate, studios would then use the process of Pan-and-Scan when going to VHS. In Pan-and-Scan, the director basically chooses which part of a widescreen frame to use in each shot, so hopefully the most important visual information in each shot is kept (see many a VHS movie to see how often that failed).
Check out http://www.widescree...ct_ratios.shtml for more information on aspect ratios

[E221b]

This webpage: http://www.widescree...een_matte.shtml perfectly describes why you might see too much information like the reference question asked. It really answers the question comprehensively.

[coastie65]

Now that I've read all this interesting stuff, all I can say is that I never really paid any attention to it. I just watched the movie. [shrug] coastie65