I have a really big pet peeve. That’s renting DVDs that are in full screen only. In fact I hate it so much that there are some movies I’ve wanted to see but have simply never watched because Blockbuster (Canada) only makes the full screen version available. I’ve complained about this to them too – not to any avail of course.
But lots of people still don’t get it. To them, they just don’t like the black bars at the top and bottom of the screen. They find this annoying, or even think that there’s something wrong with the DVD and return it.
Well, let’s start off with a graphic example. Compare the following two still pictures from the movie A Few Good Men:
- Widescreen (2.35:1)
- Full Screen
(Why it’s “full screen”, two words, and “widescreen”, one word, has always seemed inconsistent and a little odd to me, but never mind…)
I got these images above from a Digital Bits article – which also shows other widescreen vs. full screen examples, and has more discussion on the subject.
It all comes down to what “aspect ratio” the movie was filmed in. This is a measure of the horizontal to the vertical. So 1.33:1 (a standard TV screen) means that the picture is a 3rd again as wide as it is tall.
Widescreen movies have a higher ratio – the two most common being 1.85:1 and 2.35:1 (although there are some others.) But the bottom line is that there ends up being a lot more horizontal to the picture than there is vertical.
Even if you don’t have a home theatre, you should be concerned about the aspect ratio. If you’re watching something that was filmed in widescreen, but the DVD you have is “full screen”, “standard”, or “pan & scan”, then you will have lost a lot of information. (The higher the aspect ratio of the film – how “widescreen” it originally was – the more you’ll lose.) This is clearly demonstrated by the pictures above.
Depending on the actual aspect ratio, you lose from a 3rd up to half of the picture, only being able to view a portion of what you’d actually have seen if you were in the theatre. With Pan & Scan, this “viewable window” is adjusted back and forth so as to give the viewer as much meaningful information as possible.
The first image, above, is how A Few Good Men was filmed, and how you would have seen it in the theatre. (Also how you’d see it if you bought the widescreen version and played it on a home DVD player or your computer.) But if you see it on TV (unless they’re showing the widescreen or “letterboxed” version) or buy the full screen / standard / pan & scan version of the DVD, you’d end up seeing the second image.
With so much of the picture chopped off, the only way that it can make any sense when there’s a conversation going on is for things to be edited so that the viewpoint “pans & scans” left and right in order to see missing pieces of the picture as it’s needed. (When, in reality, you should just be seeing everything at once without any left and right movement.)
With some movies it’s not really a “big” deal (although it always will be for me) but with others, especially those laden with special effects and panoramic scenes, it can serve to completely destroy any sense of what the movies about and what it’s trying to portray if you end up losing all of the filmed scenery.
I should also mention that what I really want isn’t widescreen per se, but simply to see it as it was filmed. For instance, if you take something that was filmed in a 1.33:1 ratio (such as all of our early 20th century movies, or most shows filmed for television) and force it into a widescreen format by stretching everything horizontally, it can end up being even more destructive to the viewing experience than watching a widescreen formatted film cut down to full screen. At least when you’re looking at something in full screen, even though parts it are missing it you still see it in the proper proportion. Having to look at something that’s been stretched width-wise, only in order to become widescreen, can be a disorienting and very unpleasant experience. This is also true of taking a widescreen picture and, rather than chopping off the ends to make it fit, squeezing it horizontally. I’ve seen at least one spaghetti western presented in that way – with everybody tall and thin – that was just awful.
This last consideration has led me to be in a slight quandry from time to time – trying to actually determine in what format it really was originally filmed. When one of my favourite movies, Truly Madly Deeply, came out on DVD I noted that it was only available in full screen – so I didn’t buy it. Over a month later, after some research, I discovered that it had been filmed to be presented on UK television and that 1.33:1 was the correct aspect ratio to the movie. In short, that’s just fine because I wasn’t missing anything by a full screen presentation after all. It’s always nice when the back of the DVD cover issues a disclaimer to this effect. For instance, Truly Madly Deeply’s back cover says “The Director’s intent is to show this film as it was originally photographed for BBC TV. The original aspect ratio is 1.33:1”. (I’d been ordering this movie online so didn’t get a chance to view this information as I would have if I’d looked at the actual DVD in a store.) But others aren’t quite so obvious. To this day, I still don’t know in what aspect ratio the movie Door To Door was filmed. (Despite the link saying “Widescreen” – another “faux pas” of the Amazon.ca site along the lines of the one mentioned in my previous journal entry, it’s wrong. The DVD itself is actually full screen and there is no disclaimer on the back to say that 1.33:1 was its original aspect ratio. I even went so far as to write to the distributor, Warner Home Video, because I liked the movie enough I would have bought it if I could have only figured out if I was buying the right version – but they couldn’t tell me.)
So – for all of those people who keep complaining about the annoying black bars at the top and the bottom of their screens – I have two comments. First, Blockbuster, and every other rental store, should print out the two pictures from above along with a brief description of what’s going on so as to educate everybody. Secondly, I just can’t wait for all of these people to finally buy widescreen TVs and pop in their full screen movies – then complain about the black bars at the left and right of their screens…