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Letterbox format12/27/2023 ![]() It’s why, if you look at many 80s and early 90s films, that time and time again you see the action and the stars in the centre of a frame. Horror stories of cheap conversion jobs where the technician nipped off for a fag half way through and let the process carry on automatically were not in short supply. On the pan and scan home video, the picture needed to be panned across just to get both parts of the shot in view.Īnd that’s an example of when people cared about what they were doing. ![]() In the cinema, that was all done in one frame. Try and dig out the 4:3 framing of Alien 3, for instance, and the scene where the alien comes up close to Ripley’s face. Come the home formats release, the film would be reformatted to fit, quite literally, a different shape screen.Įven when done properly, it could spoil big moments of a film. Never mind the fact the cinema releases were, by this point, almost exclusively in a widescreen format, primarily (but not exclusively) 1.85:1 or 2.35:1. ![]() It added expense and time to the release of films on VHS, and expense and time are two words that studios don’t tend to be that keen on.īut still: in the 1980s, pretty much every video release was presented in a 4:3 aspect ratio, a practice that continue for most of the 1990s too. The great irony, for a business known for trying to save a few quid wherever it could, was that the rise of pan and scan movie transfers – the most popular way to see films in the home back just two decades ago – cost Hollywood a lot of money. Yet this has been a norm for less than a decade now, in spite of widescreen TVs being around a lot longer than that, and in spite of widescreen film releases being available in the home before that. It’s now the norm for us to watch TV programmes and films in our homes on widescreen displays.
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