CINEMASCOPE part 2 of 2 - in praise of widescreen 1992

CINEMASCOPE part 2 of 2 - in praise of widescreen 1992

Category:

Film & Animation

Tags:

• cinemascope
• cinema

[davrburr49]

I much prefer CinemaScope to Panavision. I think the studios went to Panavision due to the problems with showing the CinemaScope films on regular TV's years ago. Also they went to alot of smaller ration pictures to save money...My best film memories are of CinemaScope movies.

[kevbomb]

that was some shit pan scanning at 8:03

[agfagaevart]

@MetallicBill

There were also projection TVs around in the 1970s too. Check out the film Rollerball.

[jmalmsten]

@bumtownv2 Let's just say that a lot of compositions don't look good in a square box, and the compromise of not using that composition looks even worse. This of course goes both ways. And part of moviemaking is choosing an image format that will best tell the story.

Also, zooming out to get the same result, results in a lot of dead unused space above and below even, with 1.85 films in open-frame, that the scope format simply eliminates. Again, for certain aestetics, scope is the way to go.

[jmalmsten]

@bumtownv2

I get more distracted knowing when I see a movie that I am not seeing all I am meant to see than filtering out black bars...

[jmalmsten]

@davrburr49 Don't really follow you there. Panavision was basically a sharper third party version of Cinemascope. Panavision had cameras that used lenses that were sharper, everyone else started using them because of the price of maintaining an in-house camera department was too high to justify it against just renting them instead from panavision.

I think what you are thinking of is the super35 system that just crops a scope image from a regular 4:3 and still has the negative for TV-transfer.

[MetallicBill]

Try a Sony GlassTron viewing glasses then,, I always thought they'd take off, to be honest. I love WS, even with letterboxing, and it did take some getting used to, my TVs only 32 inches, but I bought a SharpVision LCD I still own, up to 300 inch projection

[bumtownv2]

@MetallicBill If I was wearing a visor I could see a reason for it, but it's a small TV screen which can't display the film without bars which take up 50% (or at least 40%) of the screen.

My point being; people get distracted by the black bars. If they showed the back of the wall instead of the bars people would be less distracted, but it can't be done. Also you loose about 200 lines with HD video.

[MetallicBill]

People also complain about the black bars that they need to "visually filter out" in reality

[MetallicBill]

For sure, but projection TV was around in the 1980s. 70s, you had some real limitations!

[MetallicBill]

People claim it's the way the human eye sees realistically, think about that. You concentrate dead center, with two eyes, but you really see a wider scope of vision then you may think.