1:2.35 HD Video Question (Deadline approaching)

[Daniel Christie]

You probably want to find out the exact size of the mattes used so your composition matches. ‘Scope’ hasn’t actually been 1:2.35 for decades. These days it’s actually 1:2.39 (but we call it 2.40). Who know’s what they’ve actually used, but here’s how to work it out for a 1920×1080 square pix. project;

1920 is our width, so divide that by 2.39 to get the height of the scope frame;

1920/2.35 = 803.33

to get the height of each mask (top and bottom), divide this by 2.

803.33/2 = 401.67

Which will have to be rounded to a whole number, since we can’t have half pixels. Round up to 402px, this will be the height of each of our two masks leaving us with a picture that is 276px high.

This same equation can be used for 2.35 or any other aspect ratio. If you are not sure of the exact ratio, you could just set up some guides at 402px and 678px, let your design overlap a little and let your client mask it.

Hope that helps you out.

Daniel

[Seth Hill]

Uh, if you mean the black “letterbox” mattes at the top and bottom, I think your calculation is off. If you are working in 1080 HD, you don’t want your remaining image to be 276 high, you want it to be 803 pixels high. So you would subtract the 803 from 1080 = 277, then divide that by 2 = 139 pixels high for each matte. I hope this is right.

[Seth Hill]

Uh, if you mean the black “letterbox” mattes at the top and bottom, I think your calculation is off. If you are working in 1080 HD, you don’t want your remaining image to be 276 high, you want it to be 803 pixels high. So you would subtract the 803 from 1080 = 277, then divide that by 2 = 139 pixels high for each matte. I hope this is right.

[Damien Molineaux]

This is an old thread I’m reviving, maybe I should create a new one, yet when you do a search on the internet, I searched “scope height 1920” I came upon this thread, and a few other ressources.

As we’re luck to have a set of Lomo anamorphics at our disposal, we’ve been testing them, and other lenses, see: https://vimeo.com/cside/scope-test

We’ve noticed there are many variations of scope, often refered to as 2.35, but in fact sometimes it’s 2.37 or even 2.39

To be noted the DCP standard has been defined as 2.38694638694639 (that’s 2048 / 858)

Now I have some films I’ve been handed over in HD (1920 x 1080) with black masking on top and bottom (letterboxing) to fill the frame. I have a number of films in scope and don’t want to upload them with the black masks. When I crop the black, one film results in a height of 804 pixels and another of 817.

I’ve just found out some cameras now offer to shot in “cinemascope” (if you can call it that) and use a 1920 x 810 image size, as that is in the middle of the varieties I have come across, I feel like that is a good compromise, also because it’s somewhat a round number (compared to 804 or 817).

I have therefore decided to adopt that image size for HD output, for Vimeo and such, and I would like to encourage people to do the same so we can limit the varieties of file formats out there.

My 2 cents, cheers,
Damien

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