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Old 9th Feb 2019, 12:24 pm   #21
dave walsh
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Default Re: True "Cinemascope" TV.

I've found this discussion very interesting, not having really thought about the 2.35.1 composition before. To me, it links in quite nicely with the Aspect Ratio Thread although, as I said there, I tend to be fairly relaxed about presentation.

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Old 9th Feb 2019, 1:11 pm   #22
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Default Re: True "Cinemascope" TV.

Feast your eyes on this, it was recently reviewed by Silicon Chip and they loved it , 32:9, and it has a really good curvature:

http://www.siliconchip.com.au/Issue/...rawide+Monitor
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Old 9th Feb 2019, 2:01 pm   #23
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Default Re: True "Cinemascope" TV.

Loads better than those old 'flatscreen' TVs!
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Old 9th Feb 2019, 2:39 pm   #24
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Default Re: True "Cinemascope" TV.

Really interesting Argus, thanks for showing us that! Could you Brigham [or anyone else] say more about it? I'm definitely out of my depth here I realise that it was primarily designed for an industrial presentation environment and technical design work [perhaps replacing two 27" monitors] but would it be a realistic option for the domestic situation and viewing all kinds of aspect ratios

I'm not a fan of the race to pay more and more for bigger and bigger TV's to impress the neighbours!

On the other hand I have got a 50" FS but that was only £300 new and is big enough. [My brother-in-law paid at least two grand and won't say exactly how much.] This looks like something entirely different though [in the way that the products made by B+O often are for example]. It seems to be on offer at £800-1000.

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Old 10th Feb 2019, 12:01 am   #25
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Default Re: True "Cinemascope" TV.

Wait until we get 2.67:1 TVs (8:3, or 24:9 for the lowest-terms-challenged) -- then, there will be room to fit two 4:3 pictures side-by-side!
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Old 10th Feb 2019, 1:17 am   #26
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Default Re: True "Cinemascope" TV.

That would really challenge your concentration.
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Old 10th Feb 2019, 1:39 am   #27
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Default Re: True "Cinemascope" TV.

I really will need to have that explained gents [but I shall be very grateful honest .]

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Old 10th Feb 2019, 6:33 am   #28
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Default Re: True "Cinemascope" TV.

Quote:
Originally Posted by julie_m View Post
Wait until we get 2.67:1 TVs (8:3, or 24:9 for the lowest-terms-challenged) -- then, there will be room to fit two 4:3 pictures side-by-side!
Stereo pair?
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Old 10th Feb 2019, 10:55 am   #29
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Default Re: True "Cinemascope" TV.

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Originally Posted by Grubhead View Post
They don't broadcast in 16.9 either. What they do is broadcast in 4.3 with anamorphic. The picture when transmitted has a wide signal attached which stretches the image to fit your wide TV.
They could do that with 21.9 too. But the 16:9 TV would have to add black bars to fit the new picture.
If not in 16:9 A then they add the black bars to the TV signal, so they are part of the picture. One of the reasons the Philips set didn't catch on was due to the fact that the TV was zooming in on a 21.9 picture to get rid of the bands. Thus resulting in a loss of picture quality.

As I write this I am watching on a 21.9 monitor by LG and they are very good. Not just for games, which I don't use, but for other work too. Such as DTP. Where you can get two bits of text block side by side, which I couldn't on a 16:9 monitor. Not without scrolling!

The DVD's in 21:9 do have a lot of "grain" on them. A bit like watching SD TV on a big screen TV. Caused by the zoom effect.
I think you're referring to the early days of 625 PAL widescreen in the UK when we did transmit widescreen anamorphically as required and signalled*. These days signals are originated and transmitted in 1080 HD which is native 16:9.

* We had Ikegami studio cameras. When you switched the camera between the two different aspect ratios you could actually hear a very small supplementary lens being switched into the optical path of the camera if you put your ear up very close to the lens package in front of the camera. This additional lens compressed the image horizontally before it arrived at the camera's CCD sensor if it was required to work in 16:9.
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Old 12th Feb 2019, 2:07 am   #30
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Default Re: True "Cinemascope" TV.

As far as I am aware all cameras use the old 35mm format, which would give you a 16:9. The old style movie cameras used to mask sections of to give a 4.3 picture, since some of it was used for the sound system. It makes sense to send a signal in 4.3 as it would require less space to be transmitted. Then with the anamorphic system, squash the 16:9 to fit a 4.3 picture. Which is what happens. If you select 4.3 on your TV on a full screen 16.9 true widescreen picture, it will appear as a squashed picture. That way the broadcast can still send out a 4.3 picture and it will appear as a normal image on the TV. If the broadcaster was sending out 16.9 all the time a 4.3 TV would have to squash them down. And the broadcaster would have to send out black bars on the left and right to maintain a 4.3 picture looking right on a 16.9 screen. However the 4.3 on a 4.3 TV would then be unwatchable.
Black bars are still added to the signal of a 16.9 picture to show any movie of a greater aspect than 16.9.
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Old 24th Feb 2019, 11:28 pm   #31
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Default Re: True "Cinemascope" TV.

When shooting cinema films was it the case that the camera viewfinder had corner-markers for both 4:3 and 16:9 (or whatever the widescreen ratio was)? I seem to remember seeing/reading something about this. What sticks in my mind was that the 4:3 markings were higher than the 16:9 ones. i.e. They stood proud of the 16:9 height rather than being just a width marker, if you see what I mean. This is counter-intuitive and most likely a "wrong" memory!

For the short period when the LaserDisc format was the home video format of choice as far as picture quality was concerned, a number of films were presented in 16:9 ratio such that there were black bars above and below the 4:3 screen display. Selection of widescreen zoom on capable 16:9 TVs would fill the screen by applying a linear zoom to both height and width. On 4:3 screens you saw a widescreen picture albeit with borders top and bottom.
The film "Romancing The Stone" appeared as a LaserVision release originally and had the standard 4:3 aspect. When the LaserDisc era arriverd the title was re-released in "widescreen". Eager to see all of the missing detail I compared the two, only to find that the "widescreen" edition had no extra width information; Playng the original 4:3 vesion and adding black tape to the top and bottom of the screen or passing the signal through a device which inserts video black level in place of the first and last few actve lines would have achieved the same effect. This serves to reinforce my (wrong?) memory, although it maybe the case that the so-called "widescreen" version was a trick and originated from the 4:3 version with its height cropped.
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Old 25th Feb 2019, 11:35 am   #32
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Default Re: True "Cinemascope" TV.

I used to show films (16mm) and found that the 'cinemascope' prints were often blown up versions of the standard print with top and bottom chopped off and looked terrible. Mind you, the reverse pan and scan technique was probably worse.
When I worked in a studio, monitors had the safe area marked in Chinagraph on the screen because of the overscan by most domestic TVs. Nowadays customers don't care as long as the image fills the screen!
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Old 25th Feb 2019, 11:52 am   #33
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Default Re: True "Cinemascope" TV.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Welsh Anorak View Post
When I worked in a studio, monitors had the safe area marked in Chinagraph on the screen because of the overscan by most domestic TVs. Nowadays customers don't care as long as the image fills the screen!
Most modern TV content is just used as electric wallpaper so nobody will care as long as it fills the screen.
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Old 25th Feb 2019, 10:06 pm   #34
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Default Re: True "Cinemascope" TV.

Before video became the norm for TV productions, professional 16mm movie cameras were manufactured ( and many existing 4:3 ones modified) to film in wide-screen "super 16" format by enlarging the gate horizontallly so that the non-perforated edge of single perforated film could be used to record the wider picture without the need for an anamorphic lens.
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Old 26th Feb 2019, 12:05 am   #35
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Default Re: True "Cinemascope" TV.

I think I read that Minder was shot in super 16.
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Old 26th Feb 2019, 4:28 pm   #36
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Default Re: True "Cinemascope" TV.

But Super 16 does not have the standard 16:9 'TV' aspect ratio. Various TV productions were shot on it 'in the early days' as a sort of half way house future proofing excercise before widescreen broadcast electronic cameras were widely available.
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Old 27th Feb 2019, 1:07 am   #37
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Default Re: True "Cinemascope" TV.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Takapuna View Post
When shooting cinema films was it the case that the camera viewfinder had corner-markers for both 4:3 and 16:9 (or whatever the widescreen ratio was)? I seem to remember seeing/reading something about this. What sticks in my mind was that the 4:3 markings were higher than the 16:9 ones. i.e. They stood proud of the 16:9 height rather than being just a width marker, if you see what I mean. This is counter-intuitive and most likely a "wrong" memory!

For the short period when the LaserDisc format was the home video format of choice as far as picture quality was concerned, a number of films were presented in 16:9 ratio such that there were black bars above and below the 4:3 screen display. Selection of widescreen zoom on capable 16:9 TVs would fill the screen by applying a linear zoom to both height and width. On 4:3 screens you saw a widescreen picture albeit with borders top and bottom.
The film "Romancing The Stone" appeared as a LaserVision release originally and had the standard 4:3 aspect. When the LaserDisc era arriverd the title was re-released in "widescreen". Eager to see all of the missing detail I compared the two, only to find that the "widescreen" edition had no extra width information; Playng the original 4:3 vesion and adding black tape to the top and bottom of the screen or passing the signal through a device which inserts video black level in place of the first and last few actve lines would have achieved the same effect. This serves to reinforce my (wrong?) memory, although it maybe the case that the so-called "widescreen" version was a trick and originated from the 4:3 version with its height cropped.
Movies from the start used 35mm film. This is like the prints you used to get from Kodak - rectangular. But what the film makers did was turn it on it's side, then shoot the square image on to that. That's how you got 4.3. Now in Vista Vision, that turned the film on it's side, giving the same rectangle as the old photo. Cinemascope - used the same film turned on it's side, but with a special lens that squashed the image to a 4.3 frame. The projector then changed the lens to widen the image out. Some other formats such as Ultra Panavision, used much wider film, 65 to 70mm and then squashed it too!

Whenever a film is transferred to other formats a great deal of compromises are made in aspect ratio. Needless to say you can not see any movie in the aspect that was meant for the cinema on another format. A very few get close to it, but you can count them on your fingers. Many as you have found are not much better than the 4.3 Pan and scan versions!
Clues to incorrect cropping of the screen are sometimes easy to spot. It's rather like taking photo's yourself. You don't cut in half a person, who should be in frame. Nor do the film makers. Large dance routines, where some of dancers are performing, but only a portion of them can be seen, especially on a long shot (time) of the dance, are clear signs of aspect being wrong. Bit's of running titles missing. This happens more often on 4.3 pictures, since the corners of the screen are removed to make the square.

By the way a modern curved screen TV is only good for showing the modern curved screen films. The older Cinemascope pictures had a much greater curve on the screen. You can see this on some things with straight lines, such as buildings, which on a non curved screen will look weird, as though it has a kink in it!
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Old 27th Feb 2019, 10:35 am   #38
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Default Re: True "Cinemascope" TV.

A few observations.
In the 1950’s as more people had TV’s at home, cinema attendance rapidly declined. To “fight” the opposition the cinema industry had to have something different to entice people back to the theatres.
The first to be used was 3D, which for a couple pf years attracted audiences back. However it was a problem for cinema owners as the best system back then used both of the projectors in the box running together with the motors locked one showing the left image and the other the right image with a polarizing filter fitted after the lens. (there was a not so good cheaper system with both images printed on one film and colour used for separation). The public did not like wearing spectacles and the novelty soon wore off. Stereo sound was used with some 3D films.
20th Century Fox decided to bring out a wide screen format using an anamorphic lens to squeeze the image horizontally during filming onto normal 35mm film frame. The early anamorphic lenses tended to curve verticals slightly at the extreme horizontal edges of the image. Slightly curved screens were sometimes used to improve brightness at the side of the screen.
The only changes the theatre owner had to make were a new “wide “ screen, anamorphic lenses, and if stereo sound was used extra amps and speakers plus a magnetic sound head which would be fitted to the projector before between the top spool and the gate. As the films sprocket holes were made smaller to make room for the magnetic stripe on stereo prints smaller teeth had to be used in the projector. The smaller sprocket holes were called Fox Holes. Many theatres did not trouble to put in stereophonic sound at the time.
Later Paramount Pictures bough out there own wide screen format called VistaVision, this meant they did not have to pay royalties to Fox for the Cinemascope format.
VistaVision used the normal 35mm film but the camera and the projector ran the film horizontally with normal lenses. No squeezing. This gave good results without the distortion of verticals at sides of screen. Very few cinemas had projector ‘s fitted to show horizontal film so most VistaVision release prints went our as normal film but with the frame cropped to the widescreen VistaVision format.
These prints were of remarkably good quality and still show up well when shown on TV today.
Cinemascope was eventually superseded by Panavision which used the same squeezing system but the lens were much improved and the vertical distortion problem eliminated.
As for Super 16mm. Technicolor decided to bring out a widescreen system called Techniscope.
This used 35mm film but the camera had a two sprocket pull down and therefore two wide images could be placed on the area of the old 4 sprocket pull down frame. During processing the image would be optically changed to a squeezed normal 35mm print, cinemas just showed it using normal anamorphic lens. The advantages of this system were that during filming only half as much film was needed, it also did not have the vertical distortion problems that early CinemaScope suffered.
So the half frame system had been used before the days of super 16.

TV seems to follow cinema with colour, stereo, 3D and widescreen all being introduced to make more money, not as with the cinema with increased audiences but with new TV sales.

John
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Old 27th Feb 2019, 11:08 am   #39
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I had a widescreen lens converter that I used with an 8mm windup film camera in the early 60’s. It was ‘universal’ and also fitted the projector. It consisted of 4 surface silvered mirrors set at angles to compress the wide image to fit the film and expand when fitted to the projector. Worked very well for a cheap adapter.
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Old 27th Feb 2019, 11:52 pm   #40
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My old JVC VHS-C camcorder had a wide-screen "cinema" option that simply put black bars across the top and bottom of the picture!
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