About nine years ago I published an article in which I suggested that so-called ‘Pan and Scan’ isn’t always as bad as feared. Pan and Scan is a technique by which a widescreen movie is reformatted to full frame display on a 4:3 aspect ratio display, and the naive view was that it involved simply lopping off the left and right edges of the frame.
All this came to mind today because I am in the process of (finally!) doing a VHS vs DVD vs Blu-ray comparison to appear in Sound and Image and the VHS versions of the movies are, of course, in 4:3 format. And here’s what I find for Independence Day. First, this is the full frame for the VHS version:
and here is the full frame for the Blu-ray version:
So, what do we actually see? Both frames have been heavily cropped. In the 4:3 frame, substantial chunks of the left and right edges of the film frame have been omitted, but on the 2.35:1 version, a bit of the top and lots of the bottom of the film frame have been abandoned.
3 Responses to Pan and Scan again