Vertical 35mm film formats

35mm (millimeter) is the standard film size. It was first used by Thomas Edison (who invented the motion picture camera). Most cameras use film that is run vertically through a camera or a projector.

The squigglely lines to the right of the frame are the 2-channel analog soundtrack, which most general release 35mm film prints have.

Spherical

Once upon a time the movie industry standard for shooting movies was 1.33x1. It was called the academy ratio, because is was adopted by the academy of motion picture arts and sciences as a standard. The Cinematographic process is called spherical. The lens on the front of the camera gathers light and focuses it onto a strip of film, which records the image. The lens on the front of the projector it blows that light up and shoots it across the room (preferably onto a screen). When Television was introduced the designers made the screens the same as the academy ratio; after all it worked just fine for the motion picture industry.

Of course all was not well for the movie industry once TV started catching on. The industry's profits went down once a large portion of the movie going audience started staying home and watching TV instead of going to the movies. The industry scrambled to figure out what they could do to make going to the movies special again. They came up with the idea of wide screen features. They could show people a larger than life picture that TV can't duplicate. Many different camera companies and studios came up with different ways to achieve the wide screen effect.

Matted Spherical (Flat)

The simplest way to make a wide screen movie was to just blow up a spherical 35mm image. The projector will have an aperture plate that blocks light from hitting the top and bottom parts of the film frame. The resulting wide image than merely needs to be blown up enough to fill a wide screen. Their are 2 ways to shoot a movie in this form of widescreen.

One way is a "hard matte". (Note: Matte is pronounced like Matt) This means that the apperature plate between the lens and the film is 1.85x1 and anything above or below that area on the film is not exposed. When played back the film will have black bars on the top and bottom of an image. When the image is blown up it must be centered exactly or the bars will show. fortunately it is easy to fix if it is off center (you just turn a knob on the projector).

The other method is to shoot with a "soft matte". This means that there is a filter on the viewfinder on the camera that blocks off the top and bottom of the 1.33x1 frame. The camera operator just has to shoot with everything that is supposed to be in the shot in the view finder. The catch to that one is that the film gets the image for what is above and below the matte line. Frequently that means that the boom microphone and stage lights are captured on film. If the projectionist frames the picture just slightly above or below the center, the audience and to see these things that they were not meant to see.


On the left is a Hard Matte on the left is a Soft Matte. The grey lines on the Soft Matte represent what sould be seen in theaters.

Some movies, like Jurassic Park were shot in spherical without a hard mette. Jurassic Park used lots of computer graphics, which meant that the film for special effects shots had to be scanned into the computer and printed back onto film after the effects were added. Since only part of frame will be seen in the theaters the special effects frames were hard matted so that the computer only needed to render a 1x1.85 area of the frame which is about 75% less surface area than rendering the entire frame.

The only limit on the ratio of the screen is the ratio of the matte lines. Even though this is the easiest way to make a widescreen movie the industry kept coming up with other ways to do it. The reason is because a Sphericle image that is matted and blown up it is not using the whole film frame. This contributes to a loss of picture quality. The wider you make the image the less area of the film frame is used, so the more the picture quality degrades. This form of widescreen was very popular because it did not require theaters to buy any new equipment. Today is the most common way to distribute a movie; it is called "Flat". Everything from Chasing Amy to Jurassic Park has been shot in Spherical. Pobably 60% of films that are put into general release are done in this format. The long since agreed upon ratio of this format is 1.85x1. A soft-matted spherical frame can have the whole 1.33x1 frame transfered to TV with no part of the image being lost, this is one way to transfer a film without having to "Letterbox" the picture. The problem is that often the top and bottom will show microphones and stage lights; also many times the image just looks wrong because the actors spend the whole time walking around with a whole bunch of extra area above their heads. The only other way to fill the entire 1.33x1 TV screen for editors to zoom in on a specific part of the frame but this means cutting off some of the sides of the picture. The other way to take care of this is to "Letterbox" the image, which is the prefered format of many movie buffs.

The blue box represents what people saw in thaters. The red box is what they saw on the fullscreen TV version.


Anamorphic (Scope)

When the widescreen movie revolution of the 50s began many of the new widescreen techniques would have required the theaters to replace their existing projectors with new (and expensive) projectors. The anamorphic process was popular because it used the same kind of vertical 35mm film as the spherical process did. The difference is that it used a special lens to put a wide image onto the existing 1.33x1 film frame. An Anamorphic lens compresses the picture horizontally. When the compressed image on the film frame is passed through the Anamorphic lens on the projector, the lens stretches the picture back to it's original dimensions. The advantage of this format over matted spherical is that the whole frame is used which means that the picture is sharper. One drawback to anamorphic is that their is less depth-of-field than with spherical lenses; which means that the camera operator has to work harder to keep an image in focus.

This is how the image looked after the lens compressed it so that it would fit onto a 1.33x1 film frame.

This is how it looked after the lens streatched it back out for the big screen.

This is how it looked when they formated it for TV

CinemaScope & Panavision

CinemaScope was a commonly used widescreen format of the late 50s and 60s. CinemaScope was a widescreen format used by 20th Century-Fox that used an anamorphic lens and 4 track magnetic sound. CinemaScope formats used ratios of 2.66x1, 2.55x1 and 2.35x1. Walt Disney's 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea was shot in a CinemaScope ratio of 2.55x1. CinemaScope was around for many years until it was replaced mostly by Panavision lenses. Panavision is a camera company that makes the most commonly used lenses & cameras in Hollywood 35mm production. A few other companies also make Anamorphic lenses and cameras of that quality. For Star Wars: Episode I George Lucas used anamorphic lenses that were made by Arriflex.

Anamorphic is usualy called "Scope" named after CinemaScope. It is generally used by directors who are going for an epic feel to their pictures. Directors who use it want the big wide screen to fill with their creative visually. Brian DePalma (Mission to Mars) is a director who is in love with the visual aspect of film-making and wants a wide canvas to fill with his epic. John Carpenter used Scope for Halloween because he wanted make it appear that he had a bigger budget than he did. Of the 3 common formats Flat, Scope, and Super 35 (see below), Scope has a picture quality that is better than the others.

Super 35

Super 35 is the favorite format of shooting for directors James Cameron (Terminator 2 & Titanic) and Bryan Singer (The Usual Suspects). It involves shooting with 35mm film that has no lines on it for the soundtrack. When shooting the film, soundtrack lines are not used because the sound is record on tape that is synchronized with the speed of the camera. Sound lines are used only for playback. Since their is no sound lines the film frame that would have been 1.33x1 is now 1.6x1) The camera operator frames the picture with all of the action within a 2.35x1 rectangle on the film. That 2.35x1 area is than transferred to 35mm film in the "Scope" process for the theatrical release. Because more of the film than the 2.35x1 rectangle was exposed the director has some area above/below the 2.35x1 frame that he can include in the video release. Usually the extra space is mostly all at the bottom of the frame because extra space below the frame will be the actors bodies while extra space above their heads usually just contains a wall or the sky.

T2 was shot on film with no sound lines.

The stuff in the blue box was transferred to film in scope format, with sound lines. It was a 2.35x1 image on movie screens.

For the fullscreen TV presentation they went back to the Super 35 frame and reformated it, using the stuff in the red box for this shot. Notice how much further down the bottom of the picture is.


When shooting T2 they used some revolutionary computer effects. To get the frames that would contain computer work they had to scan the film into the computer. The special effects shots were done in 1.6x1 as was the rest of the movie. Because a great deal of the frame would not appear in the theatrical release they had the computer scan only the center of the frame. The reason is that a single frame of film takes about 30megabites to accurately reproduce in the computer. At 24 frames a second that adds up real fast. As the "extra" image would not be in the release film anyway it seemed a huge waste of time and money to have the computer process all of that info that would not appear on the big screen. When they printed the compleated effects frames back onto film only a 2x1 area of the film was exposed. When they formatted T2 to air on TV when the hit the computer effects shots they had no choice but to crop off a lot of the image.


Copyright 2000 by:
Brian Fitzgerald


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