Anamorphic attraction

[Barend Onneweer]

🙂

Actually, there’s no such thing as an anamorphic aspect ratio. It doesn’t exist. It’s nonsense 🙂

But “aspect ratio” exists. In film, it means the relationship between width and heigth of the image. Your old TV-set was 4:3. Your newer widescreen display would be 16:9.

For feature film, there are many many many different aspect ratio’s in use, from 1:1.77 to 1:1.85 and 1:2.35 and a lot of other variantions between and beyond them.

Now…

Anamorphic.

In the film and video world, an anamorphic image is stretched. Imagine this: you have a 1:1:85 gate for 35mm film. But you want to make an epic western picture, that really needs to be wider than that. You can crop off the top and bottom of the image, but that way you’re really throwing away 1 third of your film. So you get a lens that projects the 1:2.35 scene onto a 1:1.85 negative. Of course this makes your actress look ridiculously thin and long. So in the theater, a similar lens is used, to stretch the image back into 1:2.35.

For DVD releases “anamorphic widescreen” means that they took the widescreen image (16:9), and stretched it to fit the NTSC or PAL 4:3 image. To make sure that all of the pixels are effeciently used, and not just for black bars. The DVD player then stretches back the image upon playback.

Hope that clears up some of your questions 🙂

For further reading: https://www.thedigitalbits.com/articles/anamorphic/aspectratios/widescreenorama.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anamorphic

Bar3nd

Forum COWmunity leader for:
ADOBE AFTER EFFECTS
MAGIC BULLET SUITE
INDIE FILM & DOCUMENTARY