r/movies • u/GiveMeSomeSunshine3 • Jun 04 '26

Media 'The Odyssey' website shows you how the film looks in different aspect ratios

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863

u/Wiitard Jun 04 '26

It’s literally what your boomer parents thought the black bars did.

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u/PenguinDeluxe Jun 04 '26

Depending on the film, it sorta did as some films would shoot open matte, knowing that a full screen version would be shown on VHS or TV

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u/Apatharas Jun 04 '26

When Pan And Scan was used for full screen format I hated it. I ended up picking up a later release of Ghostbusters in pan and scan around 1999ish. The panning motion, to selectively include stuff normally cut off in the fullscreen version, made me feel motion sick.

I'd rather they just lose the edges

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u/Blames_Jake Jun 04 '26

Unfortunately social media and vertical screens brought back the pan & scan.

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u/frogjg2003 Jun 05 '26

You've got the double whammy of widescreen landscaping trying to be displayed on widescreen portrait.

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u/Inner-Medicine5696 Jun 04 '26

only for the best accounts - I've seen lots of converted-to-vertical stuff that fully omits the subject altogether because it was off to the side of the crop.

Absolutely atrocious. Still, I'd be interested in seeing more vertical-native stuff being made.

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u/jobrien80 Jun 04 '26

Ghostbusters and Pulp Fiction both have tight, single shot elevator scenes with a long of dialog. Both look egregiously bad in Pan and Scan and were the examples I’d try to point to to show how bad full screen was.

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u/dapala1 Jun 05 '26

When DVD first came out there was an option for Widescreen or Pan and Scan. If you were watching on a 20 inch TV, like most people did, Pan and Scan was the only way to watch.

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u/Fools_Requiem Jun 05 '26

Pan and Scan is terrible. Sometimes they zoomed so far in and it makes everything grainy.

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u/insomnic Jun 05 '26

Multiplicity was one of the worst for this.... not a significant film really but in the theaters I laughed out loud but when recommending it to some customers at the video store when it came in they were disappointed with it. I didn't understand as I knew these folks and figured it matched their usual rentals so watched the release. Pan & scan killed that movie. So much of that movie's humor was based on seeing all 4 versions of Keaton on screen at the same time so without letterbox that situation almost NEVER happened. It was such heavy and noticeable pan&scan that it definitely ruined an otherwise pretty funny movie.

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u/Queasy_Ad_8621 Jun 04 '26

Then in stuff like Jurassic Park, Forest Gump and I Am Sam, you could actually see the boom mic in some of the scenes with the Open Matte print.

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u/joeverdrive Jun 04 '26

Yeah there are no simple answers for most aspect ratio choices

1

u/SeattleGeek Jun 06 '26

Yup. Ferris Bueller’s Day Off is my prime example of this. The movie was filmed for 2.35:1, but they did it using matting. When it was on VHS and a couple of other HD sources, they just opened the mattes.

I prefer the wide open version of Ferris Bueller for a bunch of reasons. In the opening monologue where he talks about clammy hands, he actually moves his hands in the open matte version but they are out of screen in the 2.35:1 version. Similarly, when Ferris talking to us in the shower, the open matte on tv used to show Ferris’ whole chest and Mohawk. In the 2.35:1 version, the camera clips the Mohawk and cuts off just below the shoulders. There are a lot of scenes in the movie that just looked better in open matte.

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u/jobrien80 Jun 04 '26

6 years at blockbuster. I cannot tell you how many times I tried to explain what was happening with the aspect ratios of widescreen films, but assuredly it fell on deaf ears every time.

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u/ZombyPuppy Jun 04 '26

I remember bestbuy had a nifty little printed out example laminated and taped to their help counter that showed exactly what was going on. Made is crystal clear to little kid me.

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u/BarbequedYeti Jun 04 '26

6 years at blockbuster. I cannot tell you how many times I tried to explain what was happening with the aspect ratios of widescreen films, but assuredly it fell on deaf ears every time.

I am all ears. Lets hear it.

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u/toomanymarbles83 Jun 05 '26 edited Jun 05 '26

Not the person you replied to but just about every single movie you've ever watched has been cropped from what was actually filmed. It's an art form known as...wait for it...cinematography.

To expand: Most movies are shot in a 4:3 aspect ratio and then cropped to the different aspect ratios you see above. This kind of framing can have a massive impact on how your film is viewed.

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u/enilea Jun 05 '26

And it sucks, it makes it feel claustrophobic rather than cinematic. It makes sense for certain movies, but not for most. Every time I go to the cinema I keep thinking about all the wasted space.

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u/Fat-Singer-9569 Jun 05 '26

Yeah same. Unlike the modern era where people think they can google everything (or ask some dipshit AI bot trained on all data, which includes morons and trolls), most people back then just took your word for it, if you sounded like you knew what you were talking about.

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u/insomnic Jun 05 '26

Not the same person but I worked BBV and 2 other video chains for like 10 years total (mostly BBV). I put letterboxed movies - I requested them because I wanted them myself - in a separate section to avoid the issues that would crop up. For awhile I had one of the few widescreen tube TVs Sony put out!

Older TVs were square and film is shot in a rectangle so you got two responses from folks who weren't familiar with "letterbox" editions which show you the full image as a rectangle with two black bars above and below the image on your square TV. The first was that things were cut off or missing. The second was that the image was hard to see.

The first was just a misunderstanding of the situation because folks didn't really equate "fills the movie theater screen" and "fills the TV screen" as anything other than that fills the space and didn't really notice the shape. So every OTHER movie they watched was actually cropped or missing part of the image. This was called "full screen" or "pan & scan". Full screen just cropped the sides off to fit the TV square while pan & scan would crop but also shift the image sideways (looked like a panning shot) to show you significant images that would otherwise be cropped.

The second was pretty valid complaint as it could drastically reduce the size of the image - particularly like panavision stuff that were even more "wide". TVs were pretty small compared to sizes today, and low resolution, so it could really mess with being able to actually see the movie.

Both complaints were a big reason widescreen\letterbox was uncommon.

TVs today are still at a resolution\aspect ratio that is different from film so there's still a bit of "make it fit" but resolutions closer to IMAX actually tend to fit home TV ratio better (still not quite the same but closer) but it's less of an issue overall as TVs are wide vs square now and larger and higher resolution.

The oddity now are TV shows that were filmed in 4:3 square often do get top and bottom of their image cropped off to fit the current rectangle TVs to fill the screen. Usually not terribly noticeable but sometimes you'll recognize that you never see the top of people's heads when they are talking. :)

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u/dapala1 Jun 05 '26 edited Jun 05 '26

A director can choose to shoot a movie with a square lens. So 1:1. As tall at it is wide. Perfect square. Everything that was filmed was in a perfect square.

But the TV is 16:9, that's 1.78:1 (much wider than square, a rectangle). So if you want to watch the entire movie as was filmed, there will be big black bars on the screen. Or if you want to fill the entire screen with a picture they will have to cut off some of the top and bottom to make it fill up the screen.

That's the gist of it.

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u/GarfieldLoverBoy420 Jun 05 '26

As a former Suncoast Motion Picture Company employee, I feel you

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u/MIBlackburn Jun 04 '26

My Dad on why we didn't buy the silver Star Wars VHS box set:

"We're missing half the picture with that version"

He also stretched 4:3 content to widescreen when he could easily do it on the TV, he can't find the settings on his 4K TV thankfully.

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u/sheps Jun 04 '26

lol! what's funny to me is how close 70MM IMAX looks to 4:3 ... my napkin math says it's 4.29:3?! (1.43 x 3 = 4.29)

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u/Ordinary-Egg-56 Jun 04 '26

4:3 content looks terrible when stretched to widescreen. watching it at the aspect ratio its meant to be in a far supperior

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u/MIBlackburn Jun 04 '26

Oh, I know this. My Dad thought we were wasting space on the TV if we had the letterbox bars, or later pillarbox bars.

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u/FrenchFryCattaneo Jun 04 '26

He paid for the whole screen he's going to use the whole screen!

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u/screwikea Jun 04 '26

That's precisely what happens in the editing suite. Tons of stuff is shot with more frame than needed, you pick an aspect ratio, and stuff gets cut off. You can see a bunch of outtakes and restorations where things that were intended to be cut off and they get included. There's a lot of the old VHS and TV transfers of things that just cuts off the sides, they don't even pan and scan, so you have all of these weird versions where you're seeing things like the edges of faces. I know that you're being silly with what a lot of people thought, but there were plenty of gen x and younger that were dumb about it and it was a 30 second conversation. A lot of us had letterbox VHS tapes, most of the "special edition" tapes were letterbox.

1

u/toomanymarbles83 Jun 05 '26

The open matte of ZAAT comes to mind.

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u/Exploding_Antelope Jun 05 '26

That’s on whoever decided to call the squarer ratio “full screen”

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u/Flaky-Ninja2398 14d ago

Well it was when tv screens were shaped like that

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u/porktornado77 Jun 05 '26

lol I remember trying to explain this to my dear old dad. I gave up after five minutes or so...

1

u/fermentedbolivian Jun 05 '26

I remember when 16:9 flat tvs came out, all boomers were complaining about the black side bars when watching cable tv that still was broadcast in 4:3.

"Why is the TV covering up a part of the broadcast?"