In addition, recent years have seen an increase of "fake" 2.35:1 letterbox mattes on television to give the impression of a cinema film, often seen in adverts, trailers or television programmes such as Top Gear. When using a 4:3 television, it is possible to display such programming in either a letterbox format or in a 4:3 centre-cut format (where the edges of the picture are lost).Ī letterboxed 14:9 compromise ratio was often broadcast in analogue transmissions in European countries making the transition from 4:3 to 16:9. Most television channels in Europe are broadcasting standard-definition programming in 16:9, while in the United States, these are downscaled to letterbox. When HIT Entertainment in North America released the Wiggles’s “Cold Spaghetti Western” video on DVD and VHS on March 30, 2004, it was presented in 16:9 widescreen but in 4:3 letterbox format to accommodate full-screen TV's, which were still fairly common at the time of its release in the United States and Canada.ĭigital broadcasting allows 1.78:1 (16:9) widescreen format transmissions without losing resolution, and thus widescreen is the television norm. With the widespread adoption of anamorphic DVDs, widescreen VHS releases quickly began to be phased out, with some noteworthy exceptions (for example, the 2004 Disney film Home on the Range was only available in letterboxed format on VHS) Every major studio maintained a special "Widescreen Series" of titles available this way, with releases from 20th Century Fox packaged in small black bulletcases with bronze backgrounds used for the cover art to help distinguish them from pan-and-scan releases. These usually carried a disclaimer that the films were presented in widescreen and that the black bars on the top and bottom of the screen were normal. įrom 1996 until 2000, it was common for studios to release special widescreen versions of VHS releases. The image is produced by using a map projection-like technique to approximate how the picture might look if projected onto a curved Cinerama screen. The term "SmileBox" is a registered trademark used to describe a type of letterboxing for Cinerama films, such as on the Blu-ray release of How the West Was Won. Each disc contains a label noting the use of "RCA's innovative wide-screen mastering technique." In cinema and home video The first fully letterboxed CED release was Amarcord in 1984, and several others followed including The Long Goodbye, Monty Python and the Holy Grail and The King of Hearts. Initially, letterboxing was limited to several key sequences of a film such as opening and closing credits, but was later used for entire films. The first use of letterbox in consumer video appeared with the RCA Capacitance Electronic Disc (CED) videodisc format. The term refers to the shape of a letter box, a slot in a wall or door through which mail is delivered, being rectangular and wider than it is high.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |