Posted by Sean O'Hara on 06/06/06 17:33

In the Year of the Dog, the Great and Powerful arie declared:
> Recently, I have acquired a DVD movie "Mamma Roma" by P.P.Pasolini
> issued by Criterion, which is famous for its high-quality digital
> remastering of old movie classics. The disk is anamorphic 16:9, and the
> image fills the screen of my 16:9 LCD display (BENQ, 32") in the
> Full-screen or Anamorphic mode, supposedly undistorted. To my great
> disappointment, when the movie gets to slow horizontal panning takes of
> a static landscape (there are quite a few of them in the film), I see
> gradual distortion of the objects in the frame as they cross the screen
> from, say, the right margin to the center and then to the left margin.
> This effect is very disturbing to eyes.

This has nothing to do with the DVD -- it's how the movie was filmed.


35mm film, which most movies are shot on, have a squarish frame. To
create a widescreen image, there are two main methods. The first is
to shoot "flat" and then crop off the top and bottom of the frame to
the intended aspect ratio. The second is to use anamorphic lenses,
which capture a wide vista and compress it horizontally to fit on
the 35mm film. When it's projected in theater, a lens is used which
reverses the process. (Note that "anamorphic" in the sense of lenses
is completely different from "anamorphic enhancement" on DVDs.)

Anamorphic lenses -- and this is especially true with the earliest
ones -- create distortions that become noticeable when the camera
pans around.

--
Sean O'Hara | http://diogenes-sinope.blogspot.com
Leela: Uh, Professor, are we even allowed in the Forbidden Zone?
Professor Farnsworth: Why of course! It's just a name. Like the
Death Zone, or the Zone of No Return. All the zones have names like
that in the Galaxy of Terror.
-Futurama

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