Page 1 of Mega Widescreen

am i the only person who doesn`t like mega widescreen

There is no TV in England that is 2.35:1
Yes,yes, i know original theatrical blah blah blah

but most movies are shot with extra space above and below the height that is seen at the cinema
Gladiator is a good example!!!
i have the video and the DVD
i see more on the VIDEO,
some of Russells head is missing on the DVD
i calculated that they could have fitted the width of the DVD image and the height of the Video image to make a perfect 16:9 production
same for American beautyand Practical Magic
so why mega widescreen!

Because thats how the director wanted it to look.

Changing the ratio normally ruins the framing of movies.

James Cameron is on record as saying he prefers open matte
versions of his films!!!!!!
i just think widescreen is fine on a 30ft screen
but my 32" widescreen has a bit of a problem, thats all

i would like to think with all the technology
they could release a special edition 16x9 for us DVD owners

Finally a sensible idea about WS. Why couldn`t they have put an option in on DVD for showing movies open matte? Be able to frame the image to your own preference, and encode pan and scan into the image (I know the system is supposed to do that already, but has anyone encountered a movie with properly done p&s?)

thanks Mark
i appreciate that
i agree, i think they could encode different aspect options on the disc
or at least a 16X9 version!

the only discs i`ve seen with encoded P+S are the film four movies,
East is East, Shes all That and Snatch are the only ones i`ve got on R2

Adding Pan&Scan flags to a disc has a large over head of disc space.

Also the discs that tend to have it are normally not real Pan&Scan but crop sides off instead as it`s to expensive to go through frame by frame setting the correct Pan&Scan position.

Also Pan&Scan flags can only be added to anamorphic discs, they don`t work on non-anamorphic material.

"James Cameron is on record as saying he prefers open matte", thats because widescreen is very rare in the US (compared to UK, Europe etc) and he is catering for TV broadcasts as well on which most networks refuse widescreen screen broadcasts due to lack of widescren tvs. This view of his is also the reason why most of his films on dvds are non-anamorphic (he is considering changing his policy on anamorphic dvds now that he has seen Titanic in anamorphic widescreen on HDTV at max resolution)

I noticed that on some DVD`s, by stretching the picture to fit a 16x9 tv screen it contains a 1.85:1 ratio version of the movie.
I found this on the Thomas Crown Afffair (1999).
(or was it stretched?)