Again, modern wide-screened TV sets help diminish this problem somewhat, although films shot in even wider formats (such as vintage CinemaScope, Todd-AO, Ultra Panavision 70, and Cinerama releases from the 1950s and '60s) are usually letterboxed rather than cropped even in the "widescreen" home video releases.Īlthough there was some consumer resistance to the format in the early years, it has now become virtually the norm for home video, and to wish for pan and scan instead is the mark of a rube dumb enough to spend the same amount of money for up to 33% less picture. Further, some viewers claim to be distracted by the empty black bars on the screen, preferring that the screen be filled with picture. The studios occasionally tried to make the shift less distracting by replacing the black bars with patterns similar to the background of the Artistic Title or the Creative Closing Credits.Īlthough letterboxing preserves the entirety of the picture as it was shot, that picture is much smaller than a pan and scan transfer, which can be somewhat disconcerting on smaller television sets. Some movies, particularly older ones, came to VHS with letterboxing employed only on the opening and ending credits, since presenting those sequences in Pan and Scan would have resulted in some actors' or crew members' names becoming obscured from the viewers. Williams' letterbox effect was so popular that he had to abandon that style as it went "beyond being flattering." A fad popularised by Hype Williams in the 2000s was where certain music videos such as Beyoncé's "Check On It" and Ne-Yo's "So Sick" employed video backgrounds on the top and bottom bars, which amounted to a visually impressive eye candy back when most households who watched MTV had a 4:3 CRT television, making full use of the negative space left by the use of widescreen footage. Some TV channels would fill the letterbox with their network ID, like this. TV channels or some YouTube videos showing content recorded in 4:3 or vertical smartphone video would fill the letterbox with a zoomed, cropped and blurred version of the same video played in sync, like this. The original widescreen home video release of Woody Allen's Manhattan used grey bars. The two most common letterboxes involve trying to fit a 16:9 image onto a 4:3 screen or a 21:9 image onto a 16:9 screen, although now that 4:3 is essentially replaced by 16:9 the former has become less common.īear in mind that the bars that letterboxing generates are usually black, but not always. This is done by shrinking the original image until its width matches that of the screen the side effect is that the movie's height is now considerably less than that of the TV screen, resulting in black bars at the top and bottom, forming a "box" around the film (it's rather like watching the film through a mail slot or "letter box", hence the term). This term refers to a method of fitting an image onto a screen that is less wide than the image (or more square, if you prefer) in order to preserve its original Aspect Ratio.
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