I’m really new to this DVD thing, having just recently gotten myself a player. In the settings on mine there are 3 formats to choose from. 4X4 PS (pan & scan), 4X3 LB (letterbox) and 16X9 (wide screen). Which one do I set it on? Right now I have it on 16X9 but is that the correct setting? Also, what is meant by “pan & scan”?
I’ve got Casablanca on DVD and it only has the 1.33:1 aspect ratio on it. I was rather disappointed at first, until I found out that that was the only way they filmed movies at the time. Bill, if widescreen bothers you, you could just stick to movies from before the mid-fifties. That way you won’t even miss anything.
Cheezit, I think you want it set to 4:3 letterbox. 16:9 is for if you have a 16:9 TV. This will usually look the same as letterboxed, but will probably be better for watching a 4:3 movie like Casablanca. Pan & scan means what others were talking about with having a 4:3 (1.33:1) box that moves around to capture the important part of the scene. This is probably what Bill would want, assuming it doesn’t accomplish it by stretching.
A movie screen is noticeably rectangular (it’s wider than it is tall). Your TV screen is much closer to being square (although not quite). If you shrunk a movie screen to the size of your TV you’d see the right and left edges of the movie screen extending out past teh sides of your TV. In order to fill the picture on your TV someone has to decide which parts of the movie screen to show on the TV.
Imagine a movie screen where in the movie a car enters from the far right side of the screen and travels left across the screen. Now imagine a box that conforms to the shape of your TV. The guy producing the movie for video will move the ‘box’ to the far right of the screen to get the car entering the picture. As the car travels left across the screen the guy moves the ‘box’ to follow the car all the way across the screen. This, of course, leaves the viewer missing the picture that is outside of the box. Often this is ok as in my example all you’d get to see os more of the road the car is travelling which isn’t really necessary to the movie. However, imagine that as the car gets far left on the screen a guy jumps out on the far right and starts shooting at the car. The ‘box’ cannot get both on screen at once. Now the editor has to decide which is more important and can jump to the guy with the gun or keep following the car or jump back and forth between the two. In the end no matter what the editor does the movie is no longer shown as it was meant to be shown (if the picture follows the car you might wonder why he’s swerving all of a sudden, if the picture shows the gunman you are wondering if he is hitting the car, if they jump back and forth you get vertigo as pld mentioned).
Anyway, that’s Pan and Scan.
AS for which DVD format to choose I’m not sure. Play around with it and see what you like best. 16:9 would be for those of us fortunate enough to have a widescreen TV. The other two I’m not so sure of.
I see a flaw in your reasoning dantheman. What happens when you get your movie-screen-shaped TV, and you watch old movies / television shows shot in the “square” format? Then both sides of your screen will be blank, and you will again be kvetching that the image is too small.
Letterbox - learn it, live it, love it.
I will fiddle around with the different settings to see which one is best. Thanks.
Incedently, just for curiosity sake, is 16X9 the same thing as HDTV?
cheezit: if you have a widescreen TV, use widescreen mode. If you have a regular TV, you must decide if you want to see the full frame which will leave black bars at the top and bottom of the screen (4:3 letterbox), or if you want it formatted to completely fill the screen (4:3 pan & scan).
HDTV’s are all 16:9. But not all 16:9 TV’s are HDTV. My local Circuit City has three large 16:9 TV’s set up next to each other. They are HDTV, Digital, and regular.
Folks here is a great page that explains How Film Is Transferred to Video.
If anyone’s interested check out the Official DVD FAQ at DVD Demystified. It’s very comprehensive and touches on these issues, as well as many others. Also, check out Scott Moran’s Widescreen Mini-FAQ for a more detailed look at widescreen issues.
Cheers,
Hodge
I can’t believe no one has posted a link to Uncle Cecil’s column on pan-and-scan:
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/981120.html
He seems to be all for it. I agree that with many movies nothing significant is lost in the transition, although many movies don’t have anything significant in them to begin with.
pldennison is right about “A League of Their Own” – everytime I see the movie on TV I am appalled by the shoddy pan-and-scan job. I often do not notice these things, but in “A League of Their Own” it is so jerky that it could practicaly induce seasickness.
My mom despises movies that are letterboxed, she claims that they don’t look right on her TV, and that she would never watch a movie that was letterboxed because it bothers her. She was suprised when I was talking to her halfway through the second letterboxed ER that it was letterboxed. I guess if you don’t realize something is letterboxed it is easier to take. Personally I figure if the director went to all the time and effort to compose a picture a certain way then we should honour his intentions and watch the movie in letterbox format. If you complain about losing part of the screen then you should make the effort to see the movie in the theatre.
Keith
I hate pan-n-scan with every fiber of my body.
My GF was an extra in this movie, and was clearly visible in a couple of scenes in the theatrical version (or so she tells me–it was before we knew each other). You can’t see her at all on the video, thanks to the pan-and-scan. 
Dr. J
O Sovereign Moderator (brownie points never hurt, he thought),
Well, I’m not up on the technology of the rectangular TVs that are out there now, but if the movie was edited to fit the standard square TV, why wouldn’t it (meaning the older ones, the pre-letterboxed ones) be edited to fit the rectangular ones? And if they can’t or won’t edit the films to fit the rectangular screens, then I don’t want such a TV - I’ll stick with my rinky-dinky Sharp circa 1990. 
A petty argument, I know, but can I help it if I want the best of both worlds? And to be honest, if those new-fangled TVs don’t allow for viewing of the old movies, I probably wouldn’t want them because I watch a lot of old films.
Letterbox is here to stay, no doubt about it; I just want to see the technology progress a little further than it has. Believe me, for many years I worked in video retail and constantly had to explain to people that their screens were NOT screwed up - that they were seeing more! But at the same time, I did see their point.
Because, while you can take away information to make a rectangular frame fit a square screen, you can’t add information to make a square film fit a rectangular screen. You can only stretch it, which reduces the resolution.
Interestingly, a good indicator of what will happen appears on the Fantasia 2000 DVD. The movie contains the “Sorcerer’s Apprentice” segment of the original Fantasia from 1940. Fantasia 2000 was shot at 1.85:1. Fantasia was shot at 1.37:1. When they get to that segment of 2000, which is of course letterboxed on the DVD, it appears in a nearly square frame in the center of your television. At first, I couldn’t figure out what was going on, then I realized it was letterboxed at the top and bottom as well as the sides.
The only way they could do it would be to take movies in Academy (1.37:1) format and matte them at the top and bottom to a widescreen ratio, which means you’d get less than you originally did. In any case, it’s academic; after 2006, broadcaster will not be sending anything out on the current channels, which means your old Sharp will pick up nothing but static.
Pl,
Where did you here that date to stop analog signals? And I thought TV stations would send out both an analog and a digital signal?
The Graduate is certainly an enjoyable movie as well, although I must admit to having never seen it on DVD. I was more referring to the great Hollywood epics (and if you look back to the 60’s, you could certainly include movies like Ben-Hur and Spartacus) and how the thousands of extras that they hired to fill out the extravagant war scenes make the letterbox format much more fitting to the picture. I agree that the classic scene shot over Mrs. Robinson’s leg certainly is a lot more of a close-up shot. Perhaps the companies putting out DVD’s have to decide what best fits the individual picture in question
Well, let’s see. The choices, then:
-
View the letterbox format on the current square TV, noticing that it’s taking up less space than the pan-and-scan.
-
Get the new rectangular TVs, but realize that the older films (pre-1950?) that are so near and dear to me will look as icky as the letterboxed ones presently do on square TVs.
So what’s the prognosis? I’ve noticed that a lot of the older films (especially the epics) are being converted to letterbox on DVD and even VHS. I can’t imagine that they would go to the trouble of converting every single pan-and-scan that was ever made to letterbox - there are a lot of not-so-great films that no one outside of film lovers would want to see. To me, this means that for at least the time being, there will continue to be pan-and-scan tapes done (and let’s not forget all those crappy direct-to-video films that are released now - my guess is they’re not letterbox!). So who knows? My opinion is that while letterbox might be the wave of the future, it’s not the standard right now, and it will be a very long time before it becomes the standard. Until then, there’s a big market (and incentive) for companies to release the pan-and-scan method (although I suppose it costs less or the same [?] to release a movie in both formats on DVD).
Yikes! I rambled there. Sorry. Anyway, this is a long-winded way of saying I won’t really have to make the decision about letterbox as long as there’s a market for the pan-and-scan format. And maybe by the time I doneed to make that decision, the technology will be such that I will have the best of both worlds - the entire picture and a full screen!
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by RugbyMan *
**
[QUOTE
The Graduate is certainly an enjoyable movie as well, although I must admit to having never seen it on DVD. I was more referring to the great Hollywood epics (and if you look back to the 60’s, you could certainly include movies like Ben-Hur and Spartacus) and how the thousands of extras that they hired to fill out the extravagant war scenes make the letterbox format much more fitting to the picture. I agree that the classic scene shot over Mrs. Robinson’s leg certainly is a lot more of a close-up shot. Perhaps the companies putting out DVD’s have to decide what best fits the individual picture in question **[/QUOTE]
I it’s a mistake in assuming that widescreen composition is somehow more important in movies with an epic scope. In addition to retsin’s example of the Graduate, my own recent experience was with the Inspector Clouseau movie A Shot In The Dark. In a scene near the end, a couple of jewel thiefs dressed in gorilla suits are trying to break into a safe, one on each side of a wall dividing the screen in half. A long complicated pantomine routine follows with the gorillas circling the wall, doing mirror gags, etc., all the time each thinking that they are alone in the room. This was filmed in widescreen with a static camera, allowing both gorillas to be on camera at the same time. This scene was completely ruined in the pan & scan version because the camera had to keeping panning back and forth from one gorilla to the next, destroying the intricate choreography of the scene. So you can it’s not just large Hollywood epics that can benefit from letterboxing but also goofy, slapstick comedies too.
I dug up another link with some visual examples.
BTW, the upcoming DVD release of Ben Hur is going to be 2.60:1!! There are going to be a lot of unhappy people in the pan&scan camp.
Cheers,
Hodge
They will for a time, and there will be (expensive) set-top converters available. But 2006 is the FCC target date for cessation of analog broadcasting. One reason is that, in order to help balance the Federal budget, the FCC will be auctioning off that portion of the spectrum for other uses, so it simply won’t be there to use for existing TV broadcasters. However, in markets where HDTV has less than 85 percent penetration, broadcasters will be allowed to retain their analog channel.
I shouldn’t say that the sets will be completely useless, though. They’ll still be fine for cable, satellite, VCRs, video games, etc.
You are missing the point, dan. Pan-n-Scan is a bastardization of the original 1.85+ theatrical ratios. There is no corresponding process to convert anything shot in 1.37:1 or 1.35:1 (that is, old movies and TV shows) to anything wider for full-screen viewing on HDTV without distorting the picture so that when I watch “Friends” reruns, Courtney Cox ends up looking like Danny DeVito. (I don’t even want to think about what Danny DeVito would look like). When you get a HDTV set, you will have blank space on the sides of the screen when you watch old movies and TV shows, period. Live with it.
If people start complaining too much, the broadcasters may decide to fill up that space with ads just to shut you up.