What is the difference between a Wide Screen film and an Anamorphic Wide Screen?

Question

I don't really understand what it means. At first I thought it meant it was a widescreen film that was made to fit perfectly your widescreen tv, but now I know that depends mostly if not solely on the aspect ratio of the film. I think 1.85.1 is what fills up a wide screen tv but will look letter boxed on a regular one. Movies in 2.35.1 will look letter boxed in all tvs. And well 1:33 movies are chopped up movies for regular tv sets. But what does anamorphic mean?? Thanks

Answer 1

Widescreen TVs are 1.77:1. Most movies are wider than that, such as 2.35:1.

Widescreen DVDs store the movie with it's full width. So, on the DVD, there are black bars above and below the picture. These black bars "waste" part of the DVDs storage capacity.

Anamorphic DVDs are made by placing a special lens in front of the camera which expands the picture to fill up the full frame-yes, the picture is then distorted.

When the DVD player plays back the DVD, it reverses the lenses effect electronically. The picture is now full width with top and bottom black bars.

The advantage over standard widscreen DVDs is that the full DVD storage area has been used. This results in effectively increasing the resolution of the picture beyond that for a standard DVD.

Whether this improvement is significant depends on your eye, and how well the scheme was implemented.

Answer 2

Anamorphic basically means that they have fit a widescreen image into a 4:3 format. This started when they came out with widescreen SD TVs, years before the HD TVs came about.

Older movies fimed in widescreen were transferred to VHS and DVD with the black banding included, wasting lots of image quality for the black bands. Newer ones that have been stored anamorphically do not include the black bands, the player or TV reads the aspect ratio and displays it accordingly.

Complete info can be found from Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anamorphic_widescreen

Answer 3

Widescreen means wider than a 4:3 (1.33) picture.



Most TV content is shot at full 16:9 (1.85).



Theatrical films are framed at 2.35.



Anamorphic means that the picture is adjusted to fill up the full video or film frame, and adjusted back by the player or screen (or projector lens for a film projector).