If anything causes the average consumer more confusion than the concept of "letterboxing" movies on TV, I don't know what it would be except maybe setting the clock on his or her VCR. Many people think that they are actually losing picture when they see the black bars at the top and bottoms of their screens. Others just get confused by why some movies have this formatting and others don't and why the heights of the black borders vary so much from film to film. To understand this, we are going to need to take a short look at the history of the movies and the history of TV.

When Thomas Edison invented the motion picture, he specified that it use 35mm wide film with sprockets down both sides. He further specified that the actual picture area of each frame would be 18mm high and 24 mm wide (between the sprocket holes). That means that the ratio of picture width to picture height (called the picture's aspect ratio) is 4:3 or 1.333 to 1. Edison was smart, he realized the international potential for motion pictures so he chose a metric film format. By so doing, he insured that as fledgling motion picture industries burgeoned in Europe and Asia, that they would adopt his standards and films could become a universal means of communication. He also had good artistic instincts, as 1.33:1 is close to the proportions that visual artists such as painters, have, for centuries, referred to as the "golden rectangle."

The Academy
As motion pictures developed as a commercial art form throughout the teens and twenties, many technical innovations were tried. Various color processes were tried, as were a number of schemes to add sound to movies, and variations on the standard film size and aspect ratio were experimented with. By the end of the decade it was realized that for these and other reasons, it was necessary to form an organization, made-up of industry members themselves, to oversee the standardization of the technical side of filmmaking. In the spring of 1927, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was formed. One of their first tasks was to formalize many of the practices used in making movies. Thus the "Academy Aperture" was born, fixing the standard frame aspect ratio at 4:3 on 70mm, 35mm and 16mm film.

Along Came Sarnoff
Over at the Radio Corporation of America in New York, the late twenties and early 1930's were a time of extreme growth. Commercial radio, which started tentatively in the mid 1920's, was becoming big business and RCA was the parent company of the fledgling broadcasting giant NBC (National Broadcasting Company). RCA, had also bought the Victor Talking Machine Company in the late 20's to become RCA Victor and they had also formed, in conjunction with Joseph P. Kennedy's FBO Studio, and the Keith-Orpheum theater chain, a movie production and distribution company called RKO (for Radio Keith Orpheum). The head of this vast communications empire was an elfin little man named David Sarnoff, who became obsessed with the idea of broadcasting both pictures and sound to the public. He set up RCA Labs to begin work on a viable television system. It was decided that the picture area should mimic that of film because it was thought that a lot of the programming for TV would be in the form of film and so 4:3 or 1.33:1 became the aspect ratio for TV as well as for film. It remained so for the next 50 years.

TV Kills the Movies - Almost
Television didn't actually take off in the United States until after World War II. The system that Sarnoff had come up with was shown to an enthusiastic crowd at the RCA Pavilion of the New York World's Fair in 1939. By 1941, NBC was broadcasting a few hours a day in New York and there were RCA brand sets on the market there. Plans were for new stations to come on line in Chicago, Washington D.C, Boston, Philadelphia, etc. over the next few years, but in late 1941, Pearl Harbor and World War Two occurred and TV development was shelved for the duration (although some broadcasting continued). When hostilities ended and the country switched from a wartime to a peacetime economy, TVs became one of the most important new purchases for many returning GIs. By the early 1950's there were tens of millions of TV sets in living rooms across the nation and movie attendance plummeted. Before the war, ninety million Americans went to the movies at least once a week. By 1952, that number had dropped to fewer than 10 million. People were staying home in droves to watch the new kid on the block, television.

Something Has To Be Done!
The motion picture industry was not going to take this lying down. They figured that the only way to lure dwindling audiences back to the theaters was to give the viewer something he or she could not get from the small screen. Lots of ideas were tried; things like 3-D, wide-screen, more color productions, stereophonic sound. All of these promised the moviegoer an experience that TV couldn't provide. Amid the curiosities and failures, one innovation clearly caught the public eye - wide screen color motion pictures with stereophonic sound.

Enter Darryl Zanuck and Cinemascope
In the 1950s while Darryl Zanuck, headman at the 20th Century Fox Studio was looking for ways to lure back lost audiences to the theaters, he remembered a wide-screen technology invented by Frenchman Henri Chrétien in the thirties and purchased the rights to the process he named "Cinemascope." Fox was already in pre-production for a new project to film Lloyd C. Douglas' best-selling Biblical novel, The Robe. Zanuck decided to hedge his bets and simultaneously shoot the film in Cinemascope and normally or "flat" as 1.33:1 came to be called. He needn't have bothered. The film opened in Cinamascope to huge crowds and enthusiastic critical acclaim and Zanuck announced that henceforth, all 20th Century Fox productions would be in Cinemascope, Technicolor, and stereophonic sound. The widescreen stampede was on.

Aspect Ratios Galore
Originally 2.55:1, Cinemascope had its sound track recorded on a magnetic tape recorder which was synchronized optically to the film. When a method adding six narrow magnetic sound tracks directly to the film was developed the aspect ratio of Cinemascope was reduced from 2.55:1 down to 2.35:1 where it remained. Rival studios had their own versions of Cinemascope, often with different apect ratios. Paramount introduced VistaVision at 1.66:1 then Technirama at 2.5:1 and later at 2.35:1. Other wider formats were on the way. In 1957, MGM remade the 1925 blockbuster epic, Ben-Hur in a 2.76:1 format, the widest picture to date.

Throughout most of the 1960s 2.35:1 was the standard wide-screen format for most releases. Occasionally, a new system such as Panavision's Ultra-Panavision (an outgrowth of MGM's Camera 65 with the same aspect ratio, 2.76:1) was used for some epics like Lawrence of Arabia, Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, and Mutiny on the Bounty, but as the decade of the "flower children" wound down, tastes were changing and smaller low-budget films with youth-oriented themes started to gain favor. The industry slowly began to converge on a less costly, less wide format for film. It was unlikely that filmmakers would ever return to the old Academy Aperture but they did start to slowly adopt the modest 1.85:1 which was cropped.. This remains true today.

What Happens When Wide-Screen Movies Get Shown On TV?
When these films get transferred from the silver screen to the small screen, one of two things happens. Either the films have the sides chopped off or they are shown with their correct width and black bands are used at the top and the bottom of the picture content of the frame to fill-in the blank spaces on the TV screen. The former solution is not as brutal as it seems. The technician doing the transfer to video can move the TV camera (or pan it as the jargon goes) to stay focused on the major action This technique works fine in some cases, but many of the big blockbuster epics were filmed to utilize the entire wide screen with action taking pace, often, on both sides of the screen at once. The TV camera cannot focus on both sides of a wide-angle image, so naturally this technique is going to miss some of the action.

Somewhere along the line, video producers got the idea of simply "backing away" from the film for these transfers until the entire frame fits the TV aperture. With this method, called letterboxing, as the picture gets wider, it also gets shorter and black bands start to appear at the top and bottom of the picture to make up the rest of the frame. A movie such as Mutiny on The Bounty, for instance, with its 2.76:1 Ultra Panavision aspect ratio would end up with the actual picture occupying only slightly more than a third of the screen. It would basically look like a small ribbon of picture in the center of an otherwise black screen. Not so terrible, perhaps, on a 60-inch projection set, but definitely not something that one would want to watch on the average 19-inch television! To further complicate matters, most 1.85:1 widescreen movies are actually shot in the Academy Aperture of 1.33:1, or "flat" and are then masked-off, top and bottom to give a wide-screen effect. which means that a 1.33:1 video transfer can be made of these films with impunity. The only difference between letter-boxed and flat video transfers would be that the flat transfer would show a bit more background and a bit more foreground than the 1.85 print.

Enter DTV and the Era of Widescreen TVs
At the Winter Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January of 1980, this writer saw three things that were truly new and exciting. The first was a tiny silver disc called a CD.

The second was a huge projection screen much wider than 1.33:1 aspect ratio and showing HDTV from a huge two-inch studio VCR in a room occupied jointly by the Japanese broadcasting company NHK and Sony. I was mesmerized by the quality and I also liked the wide screen.

And third, in the RCA booth I saw several rear-projection TV sets with this same shaped screen. One of the booth personnel explained to me that this was the new wide-screen format being proposed by the American Advanced Television Standards Committee. It had an aspect ratio of 16:9 in television parlance or 1.77:1 in film terms.

I asked why they had settled on such an odd ratio. The answer was that it was a compromise. Most movies were shot at 1.85:1 and it was felt that the amount of image cut-off required to make such films fit was insignificant. It was also felt that if a 1.33:1 image were expanded to fit a 1.77:1 frame, it wouldn't chop too much from the top and bottom.

Of course, it took another two decades for digital signal processing and compression to come of age before HDTV became practical for consumers, and in the meantime the Japanese had gone ahead with uncompressed, full bandwidth HDTV on a limited basis via satellite. Since the Japanese electronics industry drove HD from its beginnings, its only natural that they had settled on 1.77:1 (or 16:9) for HD video. This virtually assured it as the world standard for wide-screen TV, high-definition or not since most of the equipment for this new TV standard would be made in Japan.

Letterboxing and Widescreen Monitors
So, now we have projection and flat screen as well as direct-view (picture-tube based) monitors being sold at almost all price points. Many are HDTV ready and will display a progressive-scan picture from a DVD which will virtually look like film. Waiting in the wings is a new DVD format which will allow us to collect and watch our favorite movies in true HDTV as well. As we have seen, movies have been made in all types of wide screen formats from the barely wider-than-normal (1.66:1) all the way to ultra-wide where the picture is almost three times as wide as it is tall.Even 2:1 aspect ratios can be essentially cropped without losing too much picture area, but beyond 2.0:1, letterboxing is, I'm afraid, still with us. At least progressive scanning, line doublers, and other picture aids make the images good enough (even at 480 lines) that the letterboxing one seen on DVD is not going to play havoc with the picture like it did in the old NTSC analog days and widescreen TVs do limit the amount of letterboxing necessary.

Enhanced For Widescreen TVs
Have you ever purchased or rented a DVD of a movie to find that it has a banner announcement on it stating that it has been "Enhanced for Widescreen TVs"? Have you ever wondered what it means? Well what it refers to is the fact that in order to fill the wide screen of a modern monitor, the movie in question has been electronically squeezed to fit the standard 4:3 TV frame. A standard TV frame is still the same as it's always been, and there are two ways to present a letterboxed movie. One is to letterbox the 4:3 frame, in which case, there would be no difference showing this film on a regular TV or a widescreen TV. The other way to do letterboxing on a Wide Screen TV is to put an anamorphic squeeze on the picture and let the circuitry available in any widescreen monitor stretch it back out again. This is not too difficult to do because part of the HDTV standard calls for the HD picture to be anamorphically squeezed anyway. Applying this methodology to DVD or broadcast films allows them to be naturally wider than 1.33:1 and therefore to have smaller letterbox bars at the top and bottom for any given aspect ratio. By increasing the active picture area onscreen, letterbox films avoid the poor picture quality that extreme letterboxing imparts on a straight 1:33:1 image. This reduces viewing fatigue, artifacts such as moiré patterns, and increases definition.