Anamorphic Movie Letter-boxed?

MadDoc said:

I have just rippped the entire series of 24 season 6 (really good btw) and Disturbia using Handbrake. Disturbia got ripped (twice) at 1024x572.

I enabled the AppleTV preset (with Anamorphic selected) and the result for all of the discs is that when it is viewed in Quicktime they all have black bars at the top and the bottom. Is this normal? It looks slightly distorted to me (a little too wide).

I used to encode all my movies with an older version of HB and didn't use the anamorphic setting but everyone seems to say to use it. I am planning on getting an aTV in a couple of weeks and don't want to know if these black bars are only displayed on my Mac or if they will be present on my LCD TV (1366x768 pixels).

Thanks,

MadDoc

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I have the same question, I have just ripped a DVD using the same settings and am getting the black bars. Will these be present on an tv?

How about this:

I want to rip Star Wars, do I leave the anamorphic setting on? Or do I check, "Keep Aspect Ratio?".

With what kind of movies should I do anamorphic, and when should I keep aspect ratio? I know, there's a lot of discussion on the topic but quite frankly, I don't understand a lot of it. I personally, want what the director intended but I still don't know what to choose sometimes.

Thanks!

skrutzen said:

With what kind of movies should I do anamorphic, and when should I keep aspect ratio?

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Simple, if the movie was done in anamorphic, then use HB's anamorphic. If not
then use keep aspect ratio. *Most* feature films (except for some popular in the mid 90's that were hard letterboxed) are anamorphic. It will usually say "Enhanced for wide screen" or something on the cover, or may actually say anamorphic. you can always look it up on amazon or imdb where they give the details if you cannot tell from the cover.

Just about any DVD that comes out today will be anamorphic. There are, however, a lot of widescreen movies on DVD that are not anamorphic. And you cannot trust sites like Amazon or IMDB; they're probably only right about 75% of the time. You also cannot trust the packaging for the DVD itself, though they're probably right 95% of the time (I've had a few that were incorrect).

In my case, I have to manually select the mode to watch movies on my TV depending on whether it's anamorphic or not. I can tell by looking pretty quickly.

If you want to look online, I'd say go to http://www.dvd-basen.dk/uk/home.php3 and check some of the reviews to see if a disc is anamorphic or not. Beware that there are multiple versions of many movies, though, and it's pretty common for one to be non-anamorphic and another to be anamorphic.

Whoever said that most movies are anamorphic was incorrect.

There seems to be some confusion here about what an anamorphic format is. It certainly is not "any format with letterbox bars" when viewed on a 16:9 TV.

The most common format in film today is Super 35mm with a spherical lens. This format's native aspect ratio is actually 1.37:1, close to 4:3. But the image is soft-matted during projection to an aspect ratio of 1.85:1.

The only true anamorphic format in common use today is Panavision. Contrary to popular opinion this is not 2.35:1 aspect. 2.35:1 is the aspect ratio used by early Panavision cameras and lenses, and more particularly in the defunct CinemaScope format. Panavision is a 2.39:1 aspect ratio (frequently rounded off to 2.4:1), and it is only force of habit that the industry itself often mistakenly refers to it as 2.35:1.

The anamorphic lens is aspherical, and has a different compression horizontally than vertically. What's more, Panavision improves upon the CinemaScope format by varying its optical compression gradually from the edge to the center and by use of dual rotating elements that adjust the anamorphic power proportional to the depth of focus (DOF). It was the case with CinemaScope that the anamorphic compression in closeups (for obvious reasons).

Unlike 1.85:1, in which the image is matted in the projection room, 2.39:1 Panavision consists of a wide image that is optically squeezed onto a 1.37:1 frame. This is reversed in the theater, but this is different from anamorphic compression on DVD.

The confusion over anamorphic formats is doubled by the different use of the term where DVD encoding is concerned. Similar to the Panavision concept, the image undergoes compression but in a different direction. Whereas Panavision horizontally compresses the image during filming, and expands it horizontally on playback, DV NTSC maintains a 720x480 resolution that is vertically compressed for widescreen playback, whether on a 4:3 or 16:9 TV.

If a source is 1.85:1, a hard matte is added during encoding to conform 1.85:1 to a vertically taller 1.78:1 (16:9) frame. If a source is 2.39:1, a thicker hard matte is applied during encoding to conform Panavision to a 16:9 frame. This happens regardless of whether the TV is 4:3 or 16:9. The image is encoded vertically stretched on the 1.33:1 DV NTSC (720x480) frame, and then vertically squeezed by the DVD player to fit within a 16:9 frame. If the TV is 4:3, then additional matte bars are added by the DVD player to output the 16:9 frame within a 4:3 display.

That being said, AppleTV has a bit different methodology because it can downscale and upscale, supporting various resolutions unlike a non-upscaling DVD player. But in addition, H.264 is a format that is designed for multiple applications including computers. Computers generally stick to square pixels, whereas ATSC (HD) and NTSC (SD) use nonsquare pixels. So, inherent to encoders like Handbrake is the ability to carry two output resolutions in a single file... e.g. 720x480 for nonsquare pixel displays, where the pixel aspect is altered to conform 720 x 480 to a 16:9 frame. 853x480 is the output resolution one would use to output to 1.78:1 if feeding through a device like AppleTV that uses square pixels.

Why are you bothering to confuse people with the above? I am sure they are only concerned with the consumer end DVD /QT file use of the term 'anamorphic'. Whether or not their movie will be widescreen on a widescreen and auto-boxed on a 4:3.

MadDoc said:

I have just rippped the entire series of 24 season 6 (really good btw) and Disturbia using Handbrake. Disturbia got ripped (twice) at 1024x572.

I enabled the AppleTV preset (with Anamorphic selected) and the result for all of the discs is that when it is viewed in Quicktime they all have black bars at the top and the bottom. Is this normal? It looks slightly distorted to me (a little too wide).

I used to encode all my movies with an older version of HB and didn't use the anamorphic setting but everyone seems to say to use it. I am planning on getting an aTV in a couple of weeks and don't want to know if these black bars are only displayed on my Mac or if they will be present on my LCD TV (1366x768 pixels).

Thanks,

MadDoc

Click to expand...

I had the same issue, but only with movies converted on my sister's MBP. More specifically, I'd use her mac and when it was complete I'd test it and it would be fine. Then when I watched it on my MB, the window would be the correct height, the entire width of the screen and black bars above and below the movie as if the picture had just been stretched sideways. My fix was change the AR with QT Pro, but since I did software update in January it all fixed itself.

BTW, all the movies that had the issue were movies that I used DVD2oneX to remove dead cells, don't know if that's just a coincidence or not.

For a forum like this and threads like this, whether or not a movie was shot anamorphic is not important. If you're studying film history, maybe you care. However, here people are concerned about what anamorphic means when it comes to DVDs and the settings in Handbrake. Anamorphic widescreen as opposed to non-anamorphic widescreen. For the last couple of years, virtually every widescreen movie released on DVD is anamorphic widescreen, also known as Enhanced for Widescreen TVs or Enhanced for 16x9 TVs. Whether they were shot anamorphic does not matter.

mchalebk said:

For a forum like this and threads like this, whether or not a movie was shot anamorphic is not important. If you're studying film history, maybe you care. However, here people are concerned about what anamorphic means when it comes to DVDs and the settings in Handbrake. Anamorphic widescreen as opposed to non-anamorphic widescreen. For the last couple of years, virtually every widescreen movie released on DVD is anamorphic widescreen, also known as Enhanced for Widescreen TVs or Enhanced for 16x9 TVs. Whether they were shot anamorphic does not matter.

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True as many movies were made widescreen by a hard matte instead of a system of lenses; however Handbrake knows the difference between anamorphic and non-anamorphic content on the individual DVD. Regardless of wether or not the source material was or was not anamorphic is irrelevant in this case because the DVD was encoded with it's content set to output as anamorphic.
In my case (and presumably the case of the original poster) HB took the original source input (720x480) and listed it's output as 853x356. With the "anamorphic" box not selected, HB listed the output as 640x267. Both cases preserved the correct aspect ratio but only the first option takes advantage of the increased resolution provided by the DVD. Unfortunately, actual output of the file post encode was (in my case) 1280x356 with the picture extending the length of that frame but the height of it was reduced, so I had a distorted picture and black bars within my encode. Since it looked normal on one computer and screwy on the other, I figured it was just a quirk in the various software versions of the macs. Like I said, it's corrected itself since I did a software update.