Be it known (I think) that I was the first one to suggest Dina have a title.

Tom,

I’m so glad you ID’ed horse-face. Most over-rated actress ever. I lol’ed in the office at that one. Thanks~

Chris

“140 characters or less”

Really, Tom?

Really?

Can you count “characters”?

Yes.

Therefore?

“140 characters or…

fewer.”

I know that you know

😉

LOL! Pretty soon, I’ll have Dina and Tom so worried that that’ll end up saying “fewer” when they actually should use “less”!

And since Dina wondered aloud:

the plural of “bias” is just “biases” or “biasses”.

There is no unusual pronunciation.

On a completely different note, some other great, exclusive games for the PS3 include:

Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune
Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction
Motor Storm
Metal Gear Solid 4

and God of War 3 should be coming out in late 2009 to serve as another Killer ap.

Regarding black pillars and using the full 1080P resolution of a screen – wouldn’t it be most cost effective to simply buy a scaler such as DVDO? I thought the anamorphic lenses Etc are a dated hardware technology now superseded by cheaper digital technology.

lesser evil – using every pixel of a 1920 x 1080 resolution projector to show a 2.35:1 aspect ratio image requires a two step process:

1st – you do indeed need to scale the image. You can do this scaling with an outboard scaler (such as one from DVDO as you mentioned), but these days, there are quite a few projectors that have the necessary “anamorphic stretch” scaling included, and there is no need for a seperate outboard scaler.

When the 2.35:1 aspect ratio image is run through the “anamorpic stretch” scaler, the resulting image that oomes straight out of the projector looks tall and skinny.

So now comes the second part of the process:

That tall and skinny distorted image is passed through an anamorphic lens. Anamorphic, by definition, refers to an optical distortion where the height of both the original and the distorted image remain the same, but the distorted image is wider than the original image.

In other words, the anamorphic lens takes the tall and skinny image that’s created by the scaler and “stretches” it out width-wise.

End result: all 1920 x 1080 pixels are used and after the projected image is passed through the anamorphic lens, it has an aspect ratio of 2.35:1.

Anamorphic lenses are certainly not “dated” or obsolete technology. There is no “digital” method of altering the aspect ratio of the source without cropping or otherwise discarding some part of the source image.

Bottom line is this – there are a whole bunch of different aspect ratios. Standard Def TV was is all 4:3 and HDTV is all 16:9, but movies come in many many different aspect ratios. And because of that, when we’re talking about any modern display that has a fixed number of pixels (such as the standard 1920 x 1080 pixels of “1080p”), unless the aspect ratio of the source is 16:9, there are going to be black bars of some sort, somewhere on the screen.

You can digitally distort the image using scaling in order to eliminate any black bars, but this results in a distorted image of some kind.

The whole “anamorphic lens” setup really is just a specific setup for movies that have a 2.35:1 aspect ratio. There are a lot of movies that use the 2.35:1 aspect ratio, so it makes sense that the anamorphic lens solution came to be. But if you don’t want to go to the trouble of digitally scaling and distorting the image so that it is tall and skinny and then running that distored image through a special lens so that the end result is a 2.35:1 aspect ratio image again, there are alternatives:

a) you could just zoom in the image. This will crop off the left and right sides of the image, but it will not distort the geometry.

b) You could buy a 2.35:1 aspect ratio front projection screen and just zoom in for 2.35:1 aspect ratio content and then zoom out for 16:9 content. When you zoom in for 2.35:1 content, the projector is still casting black bars above and below the image, but they will be hitting the wall above and below the top and bottom edges of the screen. When you zoom out for 16:9 content, the left and right sides of the screen itself will simply not have anything being cast on them.

Hi guys,

Just found the podcast, and have enjoyed the last few. I am one of those users who has cut the cord (or satellite) to go with Netflix and Hulu. I am saving about $65/month which will let me put together a nice HTPC. The only thing I lose is ESPN 🙁

Regards,
Mike from Colorado Springs

You da man, Mike! For those of you with a gaming system, check this out for streaming Hulu to your TV:

http://www.themediamall.com/playon

Of course I can’t test it because my Xbox 360 decided to take a dump… but I was about to before it failed.

Oh, how I wish we had Hulu available in Canada!

Tom, you’re right the SATC movie was awful. However, the Blu-Ray did pop with vibrant (oversaturated) colors. Moreover, fabric weaves, glitter, sequins, buttons and other details of the fashions are the only reasons to own this movie on Blu-Ray. It’s like explosions for women.

Rob – I have a DVDO VP30 ($378 used w/ AB102), it zooms (stretches) horizontal and vertical aspects separately. You always set the output resolution to native display resolution and manipulate the content within that frame.

Am I missing something? Why isn’t this considered a simpler and more accurate alternative to anamorphic digital compression in your projector and subsequent stretch in your anamorphic lens?

No no no, I don’t need an intervention Dina. LOL I listen to you guys here at work. You guys are my AM Radio. lol. Finally im catching up.

lesser evil – sorry I never noticed your second question – good thing Raul in HD bumped this back up :p

What you’re talking about with using the DVDO VP30 will end up with either a change in geometry (by stretching or squishing the image in some way) or else you may still end up with black bars or else crop part of the image.

The idea behind using a digitally anamorphically “stretched” image and then using an anamorphic lens to correct the geometry is that no part of the image is cropped, there are no black bars, the final geometry is correct and every pixel of the display is used. It’s that last part that is the key to understanding why you might use an anamorphic lens.

With digital zooming/scaling alone, you can’t use every pixel of the display while maintaining all of the other facets of the image.

Rob – Clearly you are happy with your purchase of an anamorphic lens for your projector.
I humbly suggest that you may want to have someone demonstrate the features of a full function scaler to you before you recommend that others follow the path of purchasing an anamorphic lens for their projector. End please.

o…k?

I’m not at all sure where the tone of slight indignation came from. Perhaps lesser evil thought I was “putting down” digital scaling in some way? I assure you that I was not. I was only trying to help.

There is no other way to say it – a scaler cannot do the exact same thing that a scaler + anamorphic lens can do. A scaler alone can do a lot of things and be totally acceptable and look great! If a scaler meets all of your needs, that’s good – I’d recommend one in a heart beat.

But you’re way off in telling me that I ought not to recommend using an anamorphic lens setup. I’m very familiar with the capabilities of a “full function” scaler, as you put it. Apparently, lesser evil, there is just some knowledge lacking on your end. Perhaps you were misinformed by someone you trust and that is why you do not want to accept the facts about what is going on with your image. But there is just no way around it.

I’ll try once more to get this all straight for lesser evil as well as anyone else who may be reading this:

We start with a 1920 x 1080 resolution source – let’s say it’s the image coming off a Blu-ray disc.

Now, while the Blu-ray disc is pumping out 1920 x 1080 pixels at all times, if the original format of the movie is a 2.35:1 aspect ratio, a lot of those 1920 x 1080 pixels are going to be black. You can think of a 1920 x 1080 resolution output as being 1080 horizontal lines made up of 1920 pixels each. If the movie has a 2.35:1 aspect ratio, 263 of those 1080 horizontal lines are going to be black.

So here’s what’s coming out of the Blu-ray player with a 2.35:1 aspect ratio movie:

131 lines of black at the top followed by 817 lines that make up the movie image followed by 132 lines of black at the bottom for a total of 1080 lines – and every line has 1920 pixels going across.

So that’s what goes into the scaler.

Now let’s transition to the display. The display also has 1920 x 1080 resolution. This pattern of pixels never changes. If the Blu-ray output goes straight into the display, you get exactly what I described:

131 black lines at the top of the display, 817 lines that make up the movie image and 132 black lines at the bottom.

So…some people hate seeing all those black lines on their “widescreen” display. What can a scaler do to fix this?

Well, it could “zoom in” the image. If you “zoom” the image, the 817 lines that make up the 2.35:1 aspect ratio movie’s image are “expanded” to fill the entire 1080 line height. Make no mistake, the original signal only consists of 817 lines, but the scaler interpolates (a fancy word for educated guess) new lines by analyzing the existing 817 lines and then figuring out 263 “new” lines that it can “weave” into the existing 817 lines.

The scaler take what’s there, analyzes it, adds to it and “grows” the image’s height to fill the entire 1080 pixel height of the display.

However, if it only added lines to the height, you can imagine that the image would “stretch” in height, but not width. That would end up making everything look all tall and skinny. That is a distortion of the geometry and doesn’t look like you simply “zoomed” in the image.

So, in order to keep the geometry correct, if you are using a “zoom” mode, the scaler “throws away” some of the sides of the original image. This is called, “cropping” the image.

Basically, we’ve expanded the image height wise, so the image also gets expanded width-wise a proportional amoount. If the original 1920 pixel wide image gets expanded, some of the newly expanded image “falls off” the side edges of the screen and cannot be seen.

End result, the geometry is correct, the originally 817 pixel high image now fills the full 1080 pixel height of the screen, but some of the sides of the image are lost – cropped off – so we “lose” part of the original image – cannot see it because it is off the edges of the screen.

So what do we do if we do not want to lose any of the original image? The only thing a scaler can do is to alter the geometry of the image. The original image started as being 1920 pixels wide and 817 pixels high. If we have the goal of eliminating “black bars” at the top and bottom, but we also do not want to “lose” any of the original pixels, we cannot make the image any wider and yet we have to make the image taller some how. There is no way to do this without distorting the image.

Now, some scalers can distort the image in such a way that it is visibly less noticable. The scaler still has to “stretch” the image height-wise – there is no way around that in this scenario. But instead of just cropping off the sides of the image, the scaler may “adjust” the width of the image in a non-uniform way.

The scaler might “stretch” the width of the image in the centre portion of the screen. Typically, it won’t stretch the width to be exactly proportional to the stretch in height, but it will basically look close to being correct, rather than extremely tall and skinny. Meanwhile, at the sides of the screen, the scaler may “bunch up” the image width-wise so that all of the original image is still shown, but now the very sides of the image are extra tall and skinny so that the centre portion of the image looks roughly correct.

No matter what though, something about the geometry is getting messed with. We cannot change the original source and we cannot change the number of pixels in the display. All we can do with a scaler is move the original source pixels around, add to them or subtract from them so that all of the display’s pixels get filled.

There is no “magic” here. A scaler cannot take a 2.35:1 aspect ratio image and eliminate the black bars on a 1920 x 1080 display without cropping off part of the image or messing with the geometry. You may not necessarily notice the changes. Without comparing to the original, you may never notice the parts that were cut off the sides or you may not notice that people are a little taller and skinnier than they should be. But never-the-less, a change is being made if all you are using is a scaler.

Now, if you use a scaler + an anamorphic lens, here is what happens:

The scaler takes the 817 lines in the height of the original image and expands them to the full 1080 pixel height of the display. Now the image is tall and skinny, but it completely fills the 1920 x 1080 display and nothing has been cut off the sides. The scaler has messed with the original image – it has added to the height – interpolating new lines and thus changing the geometry of the image so that it is taller and skinnier than it should be.

Now you put an anamorphic lens infront of that image. The lens distorts the image – making it wider, but not taller. The thing is, now the geometry is back to what it was originally. The scaler “stretched” the image vertically and then the anamorphic lens “stretched” the image horizontally. The orignal image got “stretched” both ways and there’s just no way that a scaler can do that on its own. A scaler alone is limited by the display.

Let’s be clear on one final thing – all of this talk of using an anamorphic lens only applies to projectors. You can’t use an anamorphic lens with a plasma, flat LCD, tube or rear projection TV display. If you have anything other than a front projector and you hate “black bars”, then using a scaler of some sort is really your only option. You have to cut off some of the sides or else mess with the geometry, but that’s the best you can do with any display other than a projector.

If you have a projector though, you can put the anamorphic lens inbetween the projector and the screen. Let’s also be clear that you will need a 2.35:1 aspect ratio screen for this to all work out!

So, lesser evil – a scaler can do a lot of tricks these days. It can make distortions of the image less noticable. And perhaps that is what you mean by seeing a “demonstra[tion] of a full function scaler” in action. I’ve seen a lot of scalers. I know full well what they can do. Some of it is very impressive. I might even be satisfied with some of the distortion trickery in certain situations.

But at the end of it all, a scaler is confined by the original signal coming in and the fixed number of pixels in the display. If I do not want to “lose” any of the original information, but also do not want to alter the geometry in any way, I have only two options:

1) I can leave the image alone. This is what I do with any plasma, flat LCD, tube or RPTV. I leave the image alone and if it happens to have “black bars”, then so be it!

2) I can use a scaler to “stretch” the image vertically and then use an anamorphic lens to “stretch” it a proportional amount horizontally.

If you don’t want to hear it – okay…I can’t change that. But I am right, so I will continue to inform others with correct information.

And now we can end 🙂

You’re absolutely correct, Rob.

I was a part time film projectionist in my army days, and “70mm widescreen” worked in exactly the same way. The original camera had a anamorphic lens that took a 2:35:1 image and squeezed it into a 3:4 frame 35mm film, and the projector’s anamorphic lens undid that (shouldn’t one of these two lenses be called anti-anamorphic ;-))?

I’d love to hear from someone currently working in the movie/Blue-ray industry: is the original movie always in a 35mm anamorphic frame? Is film used anymore?? What about 16:9 movies, what “film” and anamorphic lenses (if any) are used in making the movie? And if all-digital, are the CCDs in the cameras (or whatever the new capture chips are) in a default 12:9 (4:3), 16:9 or 2.35:1 ratio?

Cheers!
skris88
Sydney, Australia

Thanks, skris88.

Film stock itself has a 4:3 aspect ratio. When sound was introduced, part if the film on the right hand side was used to store the analogue audio tracks. As a result, the image became almost square. Movie makers compensated and made the blank area between frames larger, creating a more rectangular image with the “Academy” aspect ratio of 1.37:1.

When Cinerama (three Academy images pieced together side by side to make a very wide image) was a hit, studios looked for a cheaper way to recreate the “widescreen” experience. The result was “Cinemascope”, which used an anamorphic lens on the camera to “squeeze” a wider image onto the 1.37:1 aspect standard 35mm film stock and then a second anamorphic lens on the projector to “stretch” it back out. 2.35:1 became the standard Cinemascope aspect ratio. Once Panavision more or less dominated the lens market, 2.39:1 became the standard and that is what we have today.

Some studios didn’t want to pay forbthe more expensive anamorphic lenses though, so they simply blacked out the top and bottom of the standard 1.37:1 film and created the 1.85:1 aspect ratio in the process. Finally, some movie makers started using the entire width of the film stock again (not saving any space for the analogue audio tracks) and then blacking out more of the top and bottom. This created the “Super 35” format, which can have any aspect ratio that the film maker likes!

Digital movie cameras tend to adhere to the “K” pixel formats. ie. 2K or 4K resolution. The movie maker can choose to crop the final image to whatever aspect ratio is desired. Sometimes, they still use an anamorphic lens on the digital camera though, giving them that much more field of view with which to play 🙂

I should have enter Dina’s Title contest.

Wos lots of comments !!! Yeah!