Originally posted by Blade
Anamorphic widescreen is what you seek, Cyrus.. and it\'s a feature unavailable on many/most DVD\'s.
Scooby Doo 2 and Finding Nemo both have it, that\'s why they fill your wide-screen monitor. What is anamorphic widescreen?
Basically all it means is that when you pop the DVD image onto a normal TV, it\'s be letterboxed to fit the format. On a widescreen TV, depending on the ratio, it\'ll fit perfectly into the space provided with little to no letterboxing and no loss of quality.
Wrong. An anamorphic transfer indicates that the source image was recorded with an anamporphic lens. The lens compresses the image in the horizontal axis (so people appear taller). The purpose was to allow the camera to capture a widescreen image in the normal frame size on standard 35mm film stock. When the compressed image is displayed, the projector "decompresses" it with another anamorphic lens.
Anamorphic DVDs tranfer the image content directly from the film stock without adjusting the aspect ratio. When the DVD is displayed, the DVD player or television handles the decompression. For example, the "full" mode on Toshiba rptvs, which would normally strech an image horizontally, instead simply corrects it in this situation.
The anamorphic quality of a motion picture has no effect on the vertical axis of the image, so it does not have any effect on the presence or absence of the black bars. It only affects the horizontal axis.
BTW, anamorphic DVDs are very common now. They are more common than previous transfer method, which used to encode black bars into the video signal on the DVD.
