On old movies, in the last few frames, many times the shot is very enlongated vertically. Does this “Vertical Stretching” have a proper name, or is it just “That getting tall thing at the end of old movies”?
TIA
I’m sure others more techy will chime in, but I assume you’re talking about aspect ratio. Movies that are pan & scan need to change their aspect ratio to show the credits or else they’d look like
n Hur…Charlton Hes
(Not a real example)
The getting tall thing is the real movie, only shown weird. (How’s THAT for tech talk!!?)
Now, will some person who knows what they’re talking about come in and bail me out here?
I believe this is caused when they “pan and scan” a movie that’s in Panavision, Vista Vision, Cinerama, or some other wide screen format for televsion. The “vertical stretching” occurs when the “panned and scanned” portion of the film’s print ends toward the and it reverts back to its original wide screen format.
All the more reason to watch letter-boxed versions of wide screen films.
Sorry, I forgot to remove some superfluous words in my second sentence. It should read, “The 'vertical stretching occurs when the ‘panned and scanned’ portion of the film’s print ends and it reverts back to its original wide screen format.”
It’s not just TV…the film is made like this. I’m not talking about the letterbox or widescreen version…More like when the hero rides off into the sunset he gets real tall and skinny…
Thanks for the responses, though. Helped me to clarify wht I was talking about.
NDP has most of it. I’ll just add a couple of details.
Panavision is an example of anamorphic widescreen - a special lens is used to squeeze a wide image onto standard width film, and you need a similar lens when showing the film. Without the lens, the image is shown exactly as on the film - tall and narrow. That’s what you see at the end of films on TV or DVD. That’s usually because the credits extend over the full width of the screen and you wouldn’t see them otherwise.
I can’t remember ever seeing this occur in a theater, just at home.
Do you have a cite for a movie you saw in the theater that actually did this? Because I never have–it’s purely an artifact of compressing the widescreen picture (non-letterboxed) into a TV aspect ratio at the end of a movie to make the credits legible.
Well you can see this in a movie theatre.
Just run a cinemascope film with the ‘flat’ lens in the projector.