Okay, so we’ve seen what happens to widescreen film when it’s modified to fit a traditional television using pan and scan, and as many of you know, the good news is that the days of pan and scan are numbered, if not totally dead. This is true for a number of reasons, mainly having to do with the wider 16:9 aspect ratio being the new standard for high-definition television displays.  But the imputes to change the crimes of full screen modification came about long before digital and high-definition television were even a dream in television engineer’s minds.

Let’s take a look at another face-off scene from The Good The Bad and the Ugly. Now, remember in program 4 we talked about the first two ways to get this whole image to fit on a 4:3 display, re-scaling both dimensions unevenly, which distorts the image, and scaling evenly so the vertical dimensions are the same, which crops the image.

The third way to make the image fit is to evenly scale the image so the horizontal dimensions are the same. And, in the case of a traditional 4:3 display, because the film’s aspect ratio is significantly wider than the television’s, there will be some vertical space on the screen that will be blacked out and not used. While the physical picture will have to be smaller on your screen - remember, something’s gotta give - what we gain is the ability to see the entire picture as it was originally intended. This technique is popularly known as “letterboxing,” presumably named because shape resembles the proportion of the opening of an old American post box.

Now a big reason for the letterbox method getting traction was due to filmmaker Woody Allen and the 1979 release of his film Manhattan. Having a reasonable amount of control over the distribution of the film, Mr. Allen was the first filmmaker who stipulated that when Manhattan was released to VHS or broadcast on television, the picture could not be panned and scanned but letterboxed to maintain the integrity of the Gordon Willis’ cinematography.

notes:

Remember, VHS was an analog technology and the playback of the picture in those days almost 100% in the 4:3 aspect ratio. To create a letterboxed movie, the video is actually still in the 4:3 aspect ratio, but the upper and lower horizontal bands are filled with a black or grey video image.

I don’t know about that, but outside of Wikipedia I’ve had no luck finding a satisfactory answer as to the origins of the word letterbox in this context. If anyone out there knows, or if you were the one who originally coined the term, drop me a line - I’d love to find out and share it with everyone.

Like everything else, there are some critics out there of the letterbox method, arguing that we are missing out on a full picture, and that aliens are encoding messages in the black space or some such nonsense. We’ll let that go.

From there the trend had a rocky start in the broadcasting world, because the general public was never really educated on the subject. When they saw a letterboxed movie on television, they thought something was wrong, and television stations would come to expect complaint calls during the broadcast of a letterboxed movie.

Thankfully, DVDs changed all that. By the time this technology was in the consumer sphere in the 1990’s, the new standards for digital television were in place, and the DVD specification included the ability to encode the movie image in the wider, 16:9 aspect ratio. The nomenclature for this type of picture on your DVD will typically say widescreen, and will sometimes have the original aspect ratio of the film listed. If you couldn’t tell by now, if you’ve got the choice, I strongly encourage everyone to watch the widescreen versions of a film.

Now right now you might be saying, “Wait a minute - if a film is in the 2.35 aspect ratio, that’s wider than the 16:9 shape of my HDTV.” To which I would respond, “Good point, you’re right.” And so as we begin to say farewell to any more deep discussions about the 4:3 aspect ratio, in program six we’ll talk more about how all these different aspect ratios relate, and sometimes conflict, with you new widescreen television.

WAY before videogrunt...