I’m sure many people are confused by the term widescreen.  When they bought their shiny new flatscreen TV sporting a 16:9 format, they thought they had solved the format problem when viewing films. However, nothing is ever simple in this world.

 

Over the years the film industry has produced films in many formats, often for technical reasons. Experiments with soundtracks being placed on the film at one or both sides of the film meant adapting the projector gates to accommodate this. This has resulted in films being produced in several aspect ratios. Widescreen films first appeared around 1952 with Superscope and Techniscope. Cinemascope followed from around 1953.

 

With the advent of Cinemascope it was decided to put the soundtrack on the print. At first they decided to put magnetic stripes on both sides of the print, which shaved some of the image area off on both the left and right sides. To make even more room for the magnetic stripes, the perforations in the print themselves were made smaller. With the sides trimmed off by using a less wide gate in projector, the image when expanded by 2X was only 2.55 : 1 instead of 2.66 : 1. And the composed image was centred on the negative between the two rows of perforations.
 

Eventually they decided to go back to the traditional optical soundtrack on normal perforated print stock, where the projector gate cropped only the left side to make room for the optical soundtrack. So the unsqueezed 2X image was now only 2.35 : 1 (divide by 2 to get the real aperture) and offset to the right on the negative as it is on 1.85 and Academy sound movies.

 

This is one reason why contact prints of earlier CinemaScope movies like "20 Thousand Leagues Under the Sea" look off-centred -- the image is centred on the negative and the print, but the projector aperture is off-centred to hide the optical soundtrack added to the left edge.

So the projected ratio was 2.35 : 1 until the early 1970's when it was decided to make the projector aperture a little shorter top to bottom to hide frameline negative splices better -- the frames are so close together in CinemaScope that any poor splicing causes visible white flashes at the top or bottom of the projected image. So making the framelines thicker by shortening the height of the gate helped hide that better.

Shortening the height of the projector gate shaved the image vertically so the final aspect ratio was almost 2.40 : 1 (2.39... : 1). The aperture dimensions were changed again in the early 1980's but the final aspect ratio is still around 2.39 : 1 once unsqueezed by doubling the width of the image optically by 2X..

 

If you have an interest in the history of film making I can recommend a superb site http://www.widescreenmuseum.com/index.htm produced by Martin Hart.

 

 

So the reason we still see a black line top and bottom of our 16:9 “widescreen” TV is because it isn’t actually wide enough. 21:9 is a closer aspect ratio for “Hollywood” movies. The good news is that Philips have come to our rescue with a 52” 21:9 cinemascope TV for only 3500.00 GBP. Not to be outdone, Macrosystem have also released a software package (for Bogart) for those who film in 21:9 format (using a special camera or lens) to obtain a “real” cinema experience production. Cinemascope for Bogart