I am clueless

[MikeQ]

my movies have black bars across the top and bottom of them.

are they supposed to?

[mattepntr]

my movies have black bars across the top and bottom of them.

are they supposed to?

Hi Mike,
Here's a somewhat simplified explanation...

In the movie theater, movies come in two varieties: widescreen and Panavision.

A widescreen image is 1.85:1, meaning if the screen is 10' high, it's 18 1/2 ' wide.
A Panavision frame is 2.35:1, meaning if the screen is 10' high, it's 23 1/2' wide.
Movie theaters vary somewhat in how they present these, but these are the actual
dimensions of the film image.

These different frame sizes are called aspect ratios.

Televisions come in two varieties: standard and widescreen.

A standard TV image is 4:3. A widescreen TV image is 16:9.

You can see that these two types of presentation (film and video)
don't match each other in terms
of image size. So in order to present a complete film frame on one of these 2 types
of displays, a certain amount of each screen will be left unused, hence the black bars
you see at the top and bottom of the TV screen.
On a standard TV, a 1.85:1 movie will have small black bars visible, and a 2.35:1
movie will have thicker black bars visible. More of the top and bottom of your TV
screen will be unused to display the wider image.
On a 16:9 TV, a 1.85:1 movie will more or less fill the screen. You may see very very
small black bars on the top and bottom. A 2.35:1 movie will show somewhat thicker
bars, but not nearly as much as a standard TV will.

Movies on DVD are usually available in two varieties: Full Screen (also called pan
and scan) and widescreen. Full screen crops the sides of the film image off in order
to make it fill the screen vertically. This annoys some film purists, so DVD's also
come in Widescreen, which leaves the dimensions of the film image intact, but
shows a certain amount of black at the top and bottom.

Does that help?
Rick

[sensibull]

Great explanation, Rick! Now, if only someone could explain to me why they continue to make films in 2.35:1 aspect ratio. Don't they realize how much it annoys owners of 16:9 televisions?

[mattepntr]

Great explanation, Rick! Now, if only someone could explain to me why they continue to make films in 2.35:1 aspect ratio. Don't they realize how much it annoys owners of 16:9 televisions?

Not as much as it annoys owners of 4:3 televisions...

[mattepntr]

The history of how all this came about is pretty fascinating, but if
you're not in the mood for a history lesson, just skip this post....

Back in the dim dark days when motion pictures were invented, they
settled on 35mm film shot and projected at 24 frames per second.
35mm film is 35mm's wide. It has perforations running down each
side, called sprocket holes. These sprocket holes fit in gear teeth
inside the camera or projector. The gears spin, pulling the film through
the camera from the feeder magazine to the takeup magazine. Each single
exposed frame is 4 perforations high. The dimensions of this frame (ironically)
are 4:3, also called Academy ratio.
So all the old classics like "The Wizard of Oz" and "Gone With The Wind" will
fit perfectly on your standard TV: no cropping and no letterboxing required.
It's a perfect 1-to-1 fit. The Academy ratio is one of the reasons why standard
TV's are 4:3 to begin with.
Along comes the 1950's, and movie exhibitor's start to see audience attendance
fall as more and more people buy TV's. Why go out when you can enjoy entertainment
in your very own living room? They get scared and begin to scheme. "How can we
get audiences back? We'll have to give them something they can't get at home!"
And WHAM! Cinemascope is born. A Cinemascope film frame is 2.35:1. Interestingly,
it is created using a standard Academy ratio film frame. What's different is the lens
used to shoot and project it. During photography, a lens (called an anamorphic lens)
is put on the camera. This lens puts a 2:1 horizontal squeeze on the image. If you
examined a piece of film shot this way, everything looks tall and skinny. When you
project it, you use an anamorphic lens that does the exact opposite: it expands the
the image in a 2:1 ratio. This gives you a pleasantly wide image to watch in the
movie theater. This format has persisted to the present day, now just called Scope
or Panavision. A non-anamorphic movie is sometimes just called "flat".
(Side note: one way to tell which kind of movie you're watching is to look at light
flares in the picture, like headlights and flashlight beams. In a flat format film, lights
will be surrounded by a circular flare (like the flashlights in "E.T.") and in a Scope
picture light flares will be oval shaped. This is because the aberration that creates
light flares is behind the anamorphic element in a lens. So even in a scope film,
lens flares are circular. But when expanded during projection, they are stretched
out to ovals. The flashlight flares in "Alien" are oval-shaped.)
Now, Cinemascope movies are more expensive to make. You have to rent special
lenses, and you have to build more set, since the camera sees more of it. So somewhere
along the way, somebody came up with a compromise. This format displays a 1.85:1
image, and it's created much more simply. You simply crop the top and bottom of
the Academy ratio off, blow up the image a little bit and you have 1.85:1. That's
what they still do today.

Over the years, there have been a lot of variations on this theme. There's Cinerama
(three cameras each shooting Academy ratio images), 70mm (a larger film frame
with higher definition), Todd-AO (using a 30 frames-per-second frame rate), Showscan
(70mm film using a 60 frames-per-second frame rate), Vistavision (35mm film
running horizontally through the camera exactly the same way that 35mm still cameras work),
Imax (70mm film running horizontally) and on and on. 3D comes in and out of
fashion every couple of decades.
But for the present, we have 35mm 1.85:1 and 2.35:1.

Rick

[MikeQ]

wow!!

I guess that means that there is nothing I can do. Which makes me feel better cause I tried everything.

Thanks a lot for your insight!