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This page is designed to illustrate why
widescreen, or letterbox, movies are superior to pan-and-scan movies.
You probably have noticed that movies in a
movie theatre are much wider than they are in height. On the other hand,
television screens are relatively square. How do they fit movies onto a TV
screen then? There are two methods. It is recommend that you have at least
a 19' TV set to view a Widescreen video. (whoops 19") |
Pan & Scan
Scene from STAR WARS from FOX |
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Standard TVs: On
most TV sets the video is displayed in 4:3 format (standard TV shape). The
width-to-height ratio of standard televisions is 4 to 3; in other words,
1.33 times wider than high.
Pan & Scan: In order for the movie to be
shown on the TV a process called Pan & Scan is used. The most common
method is to literally chop off the edges of the movie scene so that the
movie fits into the TV screen the second is to move the scene from the
left to the right, cropping or selecting the best portion of the picture.
This is known as pan-and-scan (which typically shows only 2/3rds of the
picture) and it is the most common format that video movies come in. This
method loses 1/3 of every scene.
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Widescreen or Letterbox
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Widescreen: The other method is to
fit the whole width of the movie on the television screen. This is known
as widescreen, or letterbox. This has the side effect of placing empty
space above and below the image. However, none of the film is lost in this
method. When you rent a movie these days that is not in widescreen, there
is usually a warning indicating that the movie has been
"modified" (chopped up) in order to fit on your screen.
New widescreen televisions, and those
specifically designed for HDTV, have a ratio of 16 to 9; that is, 1.78
times wider than high. |
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