Banish “Anamorphic”
Dear Gary: With you being so “correct” on everything home theatre, video, and audio, I’m kind of surprised that almost every DVD review still says “anamorphically enhanced” when there is no such thing as an “anamorphic” or “anamorphically enhanced” DVD, even though some of the dumber studios still put it on DVD jackets. DVDs are either “full screen” (two flavors, full frame 4:3 or letterbox 4:3) or “widescreen.” Each format is encoded that way on the disc. There is no optical squeezing during mastering, the widescreen images are encoded on the DVD completely undistorted and the projector or other display device doesn’t have to do anything to display them properly—except to be set to the right aspect ratio if that isn’t automatic. I think there was even an article in Widescreen Review a year or so ago explaining why “anamorphic” has no place in DVD labeling or descriptions of the discs. It would be more useful to readers to state that “this is a widescreen DVD with an aspect ratio of 1.85:1” or whatever the aspect ratio is. Anyway, every month I keep hoping that the use of “anamorphic” in the DVD reviews will stop - but it’s still there. Any plans to stop using “anamorphic” in DVD reviews?
Doug Blackburn
Contributing Editor Joe Kane Comments:
The term “widescreen” has been around since black-and-white television became a “threat” to the motion picture industry. It means that the image aspect ratio used to convey a story is wider than the original 1.33:1 (4:3) film (and TV) format. The term “widescreen” applies to the shape of the storytelling image and it can be used to describe images in the 1.33:1 or 1.78:1 (16:9) video aspect ratio. A separate word needs to be used to tell the reader that the edge-to-edge video format is 1.33:1 or 1.78:1. One of the original terms proposed for the new wider 1.78:1 format is “enhanced,” from EDTV; currently used as in “enhanced for widescreen TV sets.” Universal Studios started a picture graph of the format that conveyed the aspect ratio of the image and the aspect ratio of the video carrying that image. It told us that a widescreen picture of whatever aspect ratio is being conveyed in 1.33:1 or 1.78:1 video format. So how do we put that picture into words? You are correct in saying we aren’t squeezing the image in the 1.78:1 edge-to-edge video format, just redefining the active video aspect ratio as 1.78:1. So how does the word “anamorphic” qualify? The best answer we can give you is that when you look at the 1.78:1 edge-to-edge video on a traditional 1.33:1 TV set it looks a lot like the image on an anamorphic film frame. In the few years of DVD’s existence, that squeezed look, as it’s viewed on a 1.33:1 set, has become known as “anamorphic.” Just as you need a lens to unsqueeze the anamorphic film frame, you need a 1.78:1 raster or image area to unsqueeze the video image. For whatever reasons, the word anamorphic is now more closely tied to the description of the 1.78:1 edge-to-edge video format than “enhanced.” n the choice of terms to use to let the viewer know the shape of the video itself, the choices are anamorphic and/or enhanced. We are more concerned when something else or nothing at all is used to describe it.
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