Starting to rip my family’s #Christian movies, and I’m noticing that some of these aren’t in a proper film ratio, they’re in either 16:9 or 4:3.
Did they not understand that films have their own ratios? Or were they going for a #TV #film vibe?
@realcaseyrollins what are you ripping them from? Even if the original's in a cinematic aspect ratio, it often gets adjusted for home release to better fit consumer equipment. It was pretty typical in the CRT era to have a message saying, "The following film has been modified from its original version. It has been formatted to fit your screen."
Straight from the disc, using #Handbrake
I’d like to note that yes home releases are reformated for home use, that’s usually done by adding letterboxes to fill in the empty space, while the video itself remains in 16:9 or 4:3
@realcaseyrollins ah well pan-and-scan (i.e. cropping) used to be much more common, because CRT screens already had relatively few scan lines (i.e. low vertical resolution) and were physically small. So cutting the frame down to its most-interesting 4:3 rectangle was considered a better tradeoff than shrinking everything down. I wonder if your movies were older, or at least had older editors whose judgement was based on outdated cost models.
Even later on, early DVD players had to be backwards compatible with old tech, which usually didn't have a way to advertise its capabilities to the video source. So if you were lucky you'd have a setting for if you had a widescreen or fullscreen monitor, and another for what to do in case you got the other kind of input: letterbox it, crop it, or distort the aspect ratio to fill the screen. If you were unlucky the manufacturer only implemented one choice and that's what you got. Sometimes this could lead to double letterboxing, if you had a cinematic film with baked-in letterboxing top and bottom for fullscreen, and then your fancy new widescreen TV automatically "pillarboxed" the sides; or the reverse where the home-release editor cut the sides off to fit fullscreen and then your TV went ahead and trimmed off the top and bottom.
One movie is old, one isn't. The old one is in 4:3, the new one is in 16:9.
They're both #Christian movies so I'm guessing it may be due to a lack of a theatrical release, or a lack of understanding of standard #film aspect ratios.