On 2/15/2020 5:11 PM, C.H.Ling wrote:
I understand the benefit of using anamorphic lenses on film movies as
it can use the whole 35mm frame to give better details and less grain
That's not really what it was about. A whole industry had developed
around a format close to what we would call half frame 35 mm film, with
a 4:3 aspect ratio. It was slightly different, for the audio track.
There was an enormous investment in equipment for 35 mm film, a great
deal of it by owners of independent theaters or small chains.
As film makers came to realize that wider formats simply worked better
for movies, they looked for ways to do that. The quest went two ways:
1. Anamorphic lenses allowed a wider projected images without
investments in a whole new generation of equipment. For only the
investment in a couple of projection lenses, theaters could show wide
screen formats. For most, a cheap, wider screen was also used.
In the case of the few tiny, narrow theaters, like the one in which I
projected movies to work my way through University, the screens couldn't
be made wider, but wide format movies could still be shown using our
ancient equipment.
This was the big breakthrough; because it was so affordable, it was
adopted very quickly.
2. Various different film formats were tried for higher quality and
wider formats. When I was a young man, Cinerama used 70 mm film with
three cameras and three projectors to create a close to 180° visual
field. Sitting in the front part of the theater, watching a western, the
bullets of a gunfight appeared to fly over one's head. I watched 2001
this way.
That was all extraordinarily expensive, and it was fussy to align and
sync the projectors. Cinerama morphed into a super wide anamorphic
format on larger than 35 mm film.
but didn't understand how it do better with home digital movie unless
you own an anamorphic projection system.
Yes. Even on a 70" class TV, films such as Lawrence of Arabia and Once
Upon a Time in the West, in their original, super wide formats, look
small, and lose the impact they had in large theaters. I recall the
sunrise out of the desert shot in Lawrence had a huge visual impact in a
large theater. On our rather large TV, it's not nearly as impressive.
Crossover Moose