Does the 300 have 2:35.1 guide lines? or something that can be used as it?

  • Thread starter Thread starter G.P.
  • Start date Start date
This discussion got me thinking (and excuse my ignorance). In a theater, no matter the aspect, do they fit it top to bottom? I'm not sure if I ever noticed. For example, let's say a 16:9 film is fit on a theater screen resulting in (for ease of use) 9 feet tall by 16 feet wide. Then, if someone shot a 16:9 film, masked for 2.35:1, would the projectionist still make it 9 feet tall? This would then result in an image 9 feet tall and roughly 21 feet wide, right?

So Dan, following that logic, is that what you are talking about, the projectionist would make the image bigger to fit the height of the screen, resulting in lower resolution?

Now, on a 16:9 TV this doesn't really matter at all because it would just add more black to the top and bottom (because here it's fitting width-wise).

I feel 2.35:1 is to confined for my taste, but to each their own, I know a lot of people like the look of it because it feels more cinematic. If I ever shot a reboot of Lord of the Rings (after the first reboot that failed because they marketed it wrong) then hell yeah I would shot 2.35:1 (shot on my Green Camera that's 48K) but for now, for my straight to DVD crap, I'll stick with something a little taller.
 
No Jeremy, in the theatre they would not fit the height... but the wide.

Anyways, I think that Dan is saying that you would loose resolution because the top and bottom parts of the original 16x9 would end up being masked to get the 2.35 aspect ratio look. So, active pixels of your real image are now black.

i love 2.35... But shot with anamorphic lenses.
 
Hi Jeremy:

Most of what I wrote relates back to video, not film. The HPX300 is a 16:9 native imager camera. In order to obtain a pseudo 2.35 or 2.40 image from it, you could go two ways. Invent or mount some sort of anamorphic lens to squeeze a 2.35 or 2.40 image into the 16:9 space from the 3MOS imagers ( I am not sure if a 2/3" B4 mount anamorphic lens exists, plus you would have to use a B4 to 1/3" convertor, don't know how that would all work) OR, shoot 16:9 and crop the picture to 2.35 or 2.40 framing through matting.

If you were so inclined to try to shoot this format, it would make more sense for projection because in projection, the image can be matted and masked to whatever aspect ratio is needed, many theaters even have curtains with different aspect ratio settings so that the here is not extra projection screen showing when various aspect ratios are projected. So there would not be any need for a projectionist to blow up the picture to fill anything, but if you lay a 2.40:1 mask over 16:9, you can see that you are masking a huge portion of the active pixels in your image. I am lousy at math but I am sure someone more gifted coud give us a percentage of the cameras resolution that was being wasted.

In my mind, I would not find this very objectionable in a theater because you would still have an image that is 20 or 30' wide, just not very tall but it would be tall enough to somewhat immerse the audience.

Now run that same image on a 15" laptop. Now run it on a 42" 16:9 LCD in your living room. The image you are seeing is microscopic and kind of a waste of time IMHO, but of your goal is to play David Lean or John Ford, more power to you, it's just my personal opinion. I am willing to bet that the vast majority of projects that are ever photographed on an HPX300 will never see a theater screen. It's interesting, I just shot a project for LA Metro on a prototype HPX300 and the little film that I shot WILL be projected in a theater. While the images are looking great, if I mask the images we shot in 16:9 to 2.40:1, it would even look ridiculous in the theater being used to show my little film. It is one of those tractor trailer mobile theaters, it probably only seats about 30 people and the screen is not huge, perhaps 10-12' across.

You can learn a whole lot about all of this, the history and what Cinemascope, VistaVision and Cinerama here http://www.widescreenmuseum.com/widescreen/library.htm and how the format is intended to work by its inventors.

Enjoy!

Dan
 
Ha ha, yeah I'm tired today. I was lost in the semantics of "losing resolution". In my head all the "pixels" were wtill there just some of the top and bottom was black (losing actual image), so I didn't get it, but I was thinking of something different so:beer:

I do add matte's to my footage but not as extreme as some people, I do like the more "cinematic" look but another reason I do it is so I can play with moving the image up or down if we composed the shot badly when originally shot, it also helps if we didn't notice the mic was in the top of the shot:Drogar-Dum(DBG):
 
I really really really dont wanna get into it, but i guess I have one last thing left to say before someone else chips in... All the things that Puredrifing is saying is still completely contradicting, the original "argument" was that you are losing resolution. Resolution is based on what your eye is perceiving as sharpness at specific distances. To go back to that answer, No you will not be losing that at all when cropping the image. Only if you were to make some change to the position of the pixles in the original 1080p arrangement will you ever lose resolution (ex. blowing up, down res, frame rate convert).

The image is EXACTLY the same sharpens and resolution with regards to the original center image. So there for masking will not effect the resolution as perceived by eye. It will be just as sharp with or without mask. That goes true for it being watched in HD, SD, or on a screen, the image will not change in resolution on any of those platforms in regards to the original 16x9 image.

Just so you know, there are a lot more films than you may know that have actually been masked for 2.35/2.40 from a normal 35mm print (shooting 2 perf) and their credits will say 2.35:1, but then with your argument they shouldnt be doing that either and thats the "wrong tool for the job" because they are "losing resolution".

Just because its not an actual anamorphic squeeze doesn't mean you are wrong to do it. It is giving the audience a wider angle of view giving them a different experience to their viewing pleasure. If you are out in the desert and want the feel of wide open spaces you would do 2.35:1 to bring the audience closer to the feel of the wide and open shots, also allowing your lens choices to be different. If you were shooting something where their is a lot of shots with tall objects such as cliffs and buildings and height related, they you would do the opposite, you would shoot for the 1.85 gate size to get more height and bring the audience to look up instead of across.

Just the fact that you brought up talking to Mr. Lucas himself should suggest you would understand why they picked to do a crop. Because otherwise you are basically telling him that the last 3 film he has shot and directed were being shot "wrong" because they cropped the top and bottom.

And to the argument about an 8k camera at 1080p... guess what? that 8K camera captures more resolution nativity and more color information than the original F900 used to shoot the first digital starwars which shot to HDCAM. So again that argument cannot be held to me with understanding.
 
Last edited:
All in all I just want to say, I don't mean to have this sound like a "pissing contest" I enjoy debate and I enjoy talking about this stuff... most people have NO clue what we are talking about and would consider it geek talk. Everyone has their own way of looking at things, but when facts aren't written correctly on a website that should help others understand the things we are talking about... then that's when I sound a little angry, I just want to make sure others wont get the wrong information, because teaching wrong information heads down a bad path. That one person that reads something wrong, will then believe its right, that person then explains it to someone else who doesn't know any better and then you have an epidemic of wrong information going around.

Again, I enjoy this, its good to exercise the brain, and I hope there is more people to chip in on the whole topic.
 
I think we are into the semantics here about what I meant by the term "losing resolution". This conversation is the same one that we were having on this board years ago when the DVX100 was the popular camera and we were debating the built-in 16:9 cheat vs. using the LA-7200 anamorphic lens attachment. In that era, with the DVX100, the electronic method of shooting widescreen was a hack, and it worked but did lose considerable resolution. If you care about resolution and maximizing your signal and picture quality with the DVX-100, you use the LA-7200 anamorphic lens. Same with the HPX300, if you want the best quality, you would use a cine lens mount and rent an anamorphic lens. If you are merely cropping the 1920 x 1080 raster, wouldn't you agree that you are losing usable resolution you could retain through the use of an anamorphic lens?

Based upon my conversations and dealings with hundreds of people at many different levels of technological aptitude, I don't think that a large portion of modern HD users even understand the differences between masking/letterboxing and optical vs. electronic anamorphic processes. (I am not saying that the participants of this thread don't but undoubtedly others reading it don't and people in general don't because the anamorphic process is a bit arcane for HD only users). I think that film shooters usually have a much more in depth grasp of the optical anamorphic process, they understand more about masking, aspect ratios and anamorphic camera and projection lenses.

I have dealt with people very high in the organization with Warner Bros and Paramount who assured me that they understood the differences, yet when we delivered an anamorphic master as agreed upon since the film title I was working on was shot in anamorphic (Cheyenne Autumn comes to mind), we would always receive the phone call asking why the screeners and master looks "all stretched". To be clear, when I said losing resolution, I meant that by shooting a 16:9 camera like the HPX300 and masking off a large portion of the picture, you are losing total screen resolution from the 1920 x 1080 raster. You would not lose resolution from the retained 2.35 or 2.40 portion of the picture that is visible. We are talking about overall usable resolution here.

Here is another practical resolution factor you may not be aware of, although you probably are. You are not losing resolution from the portion of the screen displayed, the picture, but what will happen is that if the 2.40 or 2.35 signal is displayed on a typical television set, either through Blu Ray, SD DVD or broadcast, most 16:9 televisions have some sort of "fill the screen" mode. The typical viewer, when presented with a picture that fills up a tiny portion of their screen as a 2.35 or 2.40 picture would, would be inclined to blow up the picture to see what they are missing and to "get their money's worth" by filling up those back bars. This is why for decades in the era of 4:3, studios were reticent to release letter boxed titles, especially in the U.S. Viewers perceived that they were somehow "getting ripped off" if the raster didn't fill up the entire screen on their 60" old school big screen.

My family even does this on my Philips wide screen SD CRT at home. Whenever they play a title that is presented in letterbox, they have the monitor "blow up" the 4x3 letterboxed image to better fill the screen because not only is it masked top and botoom, even the sides are pllarboxed. If you want to split hairs, when they do that, the signal is definitely losing resolution. The filmmaker should have given them a choice of 4x3 LB OR anamorphic 16:9 if they care about the resolution and quality that we view the film at. It has been this way for decades which was why letterboxed presentations were pretty rare on VHS and laserdisc and few of the studios ever release anamorphic DVDs. Same issue when presenting that aspect ratio on a computer screen. Few viewers will want to have their 15" laptop screen filled up with a 4" high band of video.

It's interesting that I am being perceived as a foe of super wide screen formats as I have produced several presentations for tradeshows that were delivered to the client as 2880 x 486 (this is way before HD was popular) sequences that were designed to be played back on custom video walls that were 15-20' long and only one monitor high. I totally used it as an artistic choice, filling that super long frame with a msucial staff, floating notes and nature scenes. The client then had a live string quartet play the musical score that we had animated on the long video wall. I totally get wide screen and why one might want to use it. But when you saw that rendered AE file on a single NTSC screen, it was about 2" high, it made absolutely no sense on a single screen, it only worked when streamed through four syncronized NTSC playback decks through a custom video wall. That's all I have been saying. As an artist, it doesn't make sense to paint a painting that people can only see with a magnifying glass, unless everyone in your audience will have a magnifying glass.

I think if you want to shoot, experiment, play with ultra wide aspect ratios, go for it. But I think as a filmmaker, it is up to us to think out the entire path that our projects will have to take to be viewied most effectively by our audiences. You can be an artist and just shoot in weird formats but studios and distribution don't like it when filmmakers shoot anamorphic or in super wide aspect ratios because it makes distribution and screening problematic. Of course, filmmakers do what they want, but it can be a significant impediment to wider distribution. No different that shooting B&W film stock. It is a totally viable artistic choice but how many films a year are you seeing in B&W? All the better if you have a method to actually let people view it effectively without losing the resolution that you paid for by shooting AVC Intra on a better level of camera like the 300.

Keep it friendly guys, it's just discussion, I am not trying to belittle or berate and I apologize if I came off that way.

Dan
 
Last edited:
Canon Anamorphic ACV235 B4 adaptor

Canon Anamorphic ACV235 B4 adaptor

puredrifting said:
Hi Jeremy:

Most of what I wrote relates back to video, not film. The HPX300 is a 16:9 native imager camera. In order to obtain a pseudo 2.35 or 2.40 image from it, you could go two ways. Invent or mount some sort of anamorphic lens to squeeze a 2.35 or 2.40 image into the 16:9 space from the 3MOS imagers ( I am not sure if a 2/3" B4 mount anamorphic lens exists, plus you would have to use a B4 to 1/3" convertor, don't know how that would all work) OR, shoot 16:9 and crop the picture to 2.35 or 2.40 framing through matting.

If you were so inclined to try to shoot this format, it would make more sense for projection because in projection, the image can be matted and masked to whatever aspect ratio is needed, many theaters even have curtains with different aspect ratio settings so that the here is not extra projection screen showing when various aspect ratios are projected. So there would not be any need for a projectionist to blow up the picture to fill anything, but if you lay a 2.40:1 mask over 16:9, you can see that you are masking a huge portion of the active pixels in your image. I am lousy at math but I am sure someone more gifted coud give us a percentage of the cameras resolution that was being wasted.

In my mind, I would not find this very objectionable in a theater because you would still have an image that is 20 or 30' wide, just not very tall but it would be tall enough to somewhat immerse the audience.

Now run that same image on a 15" laptop. Now run it on a 42" 16:9 LCD in your living room. The image you are seeing is microscopic and kind of a waste of time IMHO, but of your goal is to play David Lean or John Ford, more power to you, it's just my personal opinion. I am willing to bet that the vast majority of projects that are ever photographed on an HPX300 will never see a theater screen. It's interesting, I just shot a project for LA Metro on a prototype HPX300 and the little film that I shot WILL be projected in a theater. While the images are looking great, if I mask the images we shot in 16:9 to 2.40:1, it would even look ridiculous in the theater being used to show my little film. It is one of those tractor trailer mobile theaters, it probably only seats about 30 people and the screen is not huge, perhaps 10-12' across.

You can learn a whole lot about all of this, the history and what Cinemascope, VistaVision and Cinerama here http://www.widescreenmuseum.com/widescreen/library.htm and how the format is intended to work by its inventors.

Enjoy!

Dan
Click to expand...

Canon makes an Anamorphic adaptor for the B4 lens mount. Panasonic and Canon showed this adaptor on the VariCam HPX2700 at NAB although this adaptor has been in production since 2004. Sony also showed their new PDW-F800 XDCam HD 422 camera with this same ACV235 Anamorphic adaptor at NAB. Canon's ACV235 Anamorphic adaptor costs $27,000.00 US.

In the March/April 2009 issue of highdef magazine, on page 13, Canon ran a full page ad extolling the benefits of their ACV235 Anamorphic adaptor with Panasonic's HPX2700 camera.

I have used this adaptor a few times myself. It works quite well, thank you. It even displays the same purpleish horizontal artifact when shooting into light sources that the anamorphic film lenses do. A good example of how this purpleish horizontal artifact (usually extending most of the way across the screen) appears on the screen can be seen in many sequences on the new Blu-Ray Disc 'Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.' Pretty cool. You can even purchase filters to apply this effect in post to make it appear as though your masterpiece was shot Anamorphically.

This discussion seems to be moot because many shooters either mask 16x9 to 2.35 or 2.40:1. Typically the actual cropped screen size is 1920x800 for 2.40:1 and 1920x816 for 2.35:1. Ideally the vertical dimension should be divisible by 16 as the horizontal dimension is.

The obvious choice with most conventional HD cameras including the HPX300 would be the cropping option described above, just as George Lucas did in Star Wars Episode 2.

I personally find the cinematic experience to be lost when looking at a 1.78:1 or 1.85:1 aspect ratio. I avoid purchasing Blu-ray Discs and/or DVDs that are not 2.35 or 2.40:1.

For this reason, I can not understand this controversy, or the apparent condemnation of individuals that prefer the theatrical experience rather than the MTV experience.

And as was pointed out earlier in this post, Star Wars Episode 2 was shot on a Sony PDW-F900 and cropped on the bottom and top just as I described above. I heard no complaints from the peanut gallery, but did hear complaints from the 4x3 square TV crowd when they had those ugly black bars on their screen and wondered where the rest of the picture went.

Just thought I'd ad my $0.02 worth.

--Dave
 
Giuseppe Pugliese said:
Just so you know, there are a lot more films than you may know that have actually been masked for 2.35/2.40 from a normal 35mm print (shooting 2 perf) and their credits will say 2.35:1, but then with your argument they shouldnt be doing that either and thats the "wrong tool for the job" because they are "losing resolution".
Click to expand...

Can you give any examples? Are you sure you are not thinking of old academy films being released in 1.85:1?

I mean it seems kinda crazy to make 4 perf prints cropped to 2.35:1 when you could just as easily make normal 4 perf anamorphic prints which could be projected normally at nearly all cinemas. Unless someone developed some weird step-contact printer or something?
 
puredrifting said:
My family even does this on my Philips wide screen SD CRT at home. Whenever they play a title that is presented in letterbox, they have the monitor "blow up" the 4x3 letterboxed image to better fill the screen because not only is it masked top and botoom, even the sides are pllarboxed. If you want to split hairs, when they do that, the signal is definitely losing resolution. The filmmaker should have given them a choice of 4x3 LB OR anamorphic 16:9 if they care about the resolution and quality that we view the film at. It has been this way for decades which was why letterboxed presentations were pretty rare on VHS and laserdisc and few of the studios ever release anamorphic DVDs. Same issue when presenting that aspect ratio on a computer screen. Few viewers will want to have their 15" laptop screen filled up with a 4" high band of video.
Click to expand...

To be fair to your family tho , they are not changing the aspect ratio of the image, so by doing this it is only the same as them watching the same dvd on a tv twice the size as the one they have! :)

I'm a little shocked to hear you say that most DVD's over there are letterboxed. Over here we mostly have anamorphic dvd's. The only reason I can see for making letterboxed DVD's is if they had legacy mastertapes that were letterboxed or that whoever making the discs didn't know what they were doing! Why would you even need the choice of a letterboxed dvd anyway. It's completely pointless!!!
 
Freya said:
Can you give any examples? Are you sure you are not thinking of old academy films being released in 1.85:1?

I mean it seems kinda crazy to make 4 perf prints cropped to 2.35:1 when you could just as easily make normal 4 perf anamorphic prints which could be projected normally at nearly all cinemas. Unless someone developed some weird step-contact printer or something?
Click to expand...

Since the introduction of 2 perf abilities of cameras many films have shot this way, it actually saves money on film stock, it doesn't shoot with 2 perfs blank, the gap is very small so it uses less film using only 2 pref for height.

And for your examples, heres a huge list of films at the bottom, including all the info about 2 Perf you need... and no I wasnt thinking of old academy films being released in 1.85

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Techniscope

Titanic was shot 2 pref for all underwater shots (a lot of footage). And many more that are not on the list, you can google other films that are more recent to find out. most likely ANY film that you watch that is in the 2.35:1 ratio but you dont see lens flare shooting across the entire frame, is something cropped or 2 pref.


hope that helps.
 
Last edited:
Giuseppe Pugliese said:
Since the introduction of 2 perf abilities of cameras many films have shot this way, it actually saves money on film stock, it doesn't shoot with 2 perfs blank, the gap is very small so it uses less film using only 2 pref for height.

And for your examples, heres a huge list of films at the bottom, including all the info about 2 Perf you need... and no I wasnt thinking of old academy films being released in 1.85

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Techniscope

Titanic was shot 2 pref for all underwater shots (a lot of footage). And many more that are not on the list, you can google other films that are more recent to find out. most likely ANY film that you watch that is in the 2.35:1 ratio but you dont see lens flare shooting across the entire frame, is something cropped or 2 pref.


hope that helps.
Click to expand...

The prints for titanic etc were all 4 perf anamorphic scope however.
I've not ever heard of cropped 4perf prints being made from 2perf films. (I could be wrong tho)

2perf itself is natively 2.35:1 so no cropping there either.

The wiki link is not very helpful on projection formats which is a shame, also doesn't seem to say much about the original techniscope process either.
 
My point was simply that there is no resolution loss by cropping the top and bottom in a 1920x1080 frame. That is fact, not opinion. Unless you are altering the way its viewed there is no loss of sharpness by cropping the top and bottom of a screen... only if blowing it up to then fill a different size.
 
This argument can and can't be equated exactly to 2-perf 35mm cinematography.

The effective resolution of a 2-perf frame is 2195 x 945 "lines" based on the long accepted 100 l/p/m formula for figuring effective resolution. The 945 lines are resolving exactly (given a proper lens) as they would in a 1.85:1 ratio, which would have the equivalent of 2195 x 1860 "lines".

Scope squeezes more information into precisely the same negative or imager area, but captures a wider frame within same. Still, you've got an image optically mapped into what is still effectively and roughly a 4:3 or 16:9 imager. Whether you do it on traditional top-loading film or video / digital acquisition. VistaVision, naturally, can work differently, with effectively no limits to the size of the horizontal image.

It is better to equate post-cropping and spherical 2-perf and 3-perf techniques (in camera cropping) with loss if information - but not loss of resolution. After all, the camera is still resolving at exactly the same rate.

The cropped areas, if framed as such during production, are waste and nothing more. In digital, unlike 2-perf and 3-perf or post-crop in film, there is no actual waste of material in any part of the process. Well, okay there are wasted zeros and ones, but nothing between the frames as there is in the release prints of any 2-perf / 3-perf acquired film.

e
 
Erik Olson said:
Well, okay there are wasted zeros and ones, but nothing between the frames as there is in the release prints of any 2-perf / 3-perf acquired film.
Click to expand...
And even then, the zeroes and ones aren't necessarily wasted. Most compression algorithms from DV onwards can apply savings in the "black bars" to other areas of the picture, thus reducing the overall compression ratio of the footage. My side-by-side tests of "letterbox" vs. "4:3" on a DVX showed cleaner footage with less compression noise in the "letterbox" footage.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top