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Posted by jayembee on 11/12/05 02:28
Walter Traprock <wetraprock@hotmail.com> wrote:
> Note that it is standard practice when preparing full screen
> transfers of soft matted films to ZOOM within the full frame,
> thus losing substantial parts of the left and right sides of the
> theatrical presentation; there being no truly full frame
> transfer.
Not at all true. The whole point of soft-matted films is that
they are matted in the projector. The film itself is full-frame.
Back in the early days of widescreen films, a fair number
of soft-matted films were also circulated in fullscreen prints.
Through the 60s and 70s, though, directors and cinematographers
often did not protect the to-be-matted-off portions of the frame,
so that boom mikes, lights, and the like would often show up
if the print was left unmatted. In these cases, then, yes, the
frame would have to be zoomed in a bit.
Since the advent of the home video market, there's been more
of an effort to protect those areas of the frame so that full
screen transfers can be made from open-matte sources.
Now, *hard*-matte films are a different matter. Since those are
matted in-camera, they have to be zoomed in order to create
a full-screen transfer.
> Now, how often, or, is it also standard, to prepare widescreen
> versions for home video that were ALREADY prepared as
> full screen versions for TV/video, thus actually cropping
> all four sides for a correct aspect ratio but zoomed widescreen
> picture?
Pretty much never.
> The vast majority of films from the mid-1950s to the mid-1990s
> are soft-matted, and first transfered for TV/video without any interest
> in retaining the widescreen theatrical ratio, and the world of film
> transfering is so secretive; IS IT SAFE to assume that no new
> transfer is generally made at all, and older movies are simply
> the ZOOMED IN un-matted frame and then further cropped to make
> the resulting widescreen versions that are widescreen but
> reduced on all four sides from the theatrical version?
Most DVD transfers are new transfers. Which means that they go
back to (usually) an interneg or interpos to transfer from. And if
the widescreen transfer is anamorphic, they *have* to do a new
transfer.
With some early widescreen DVDs, the studio used a widescreen
transfer already prepared years earlier for LD, but that rarely
happens anymore. It still does, on occasion (MGM's done it
several times in the past few years), but it's rare.
-- jayembee
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