what happens with 1.66:1 AR DVD's on a widescreen TV?
 

Widescreen TV's are 16x9 ratio which comes out to about 1.77:1 AR. right?

So if you get a DVD title that's 1.66:1, does it fill the screen and crop the top and bottom? Or do you see it at 1.66:1 with black verticle bars on the sides?

Can 1.66:1 movies on DVD use the anamorphic process?

When a 1.66:1 movie is anamorphically encoded, it gets windowboxed inside a 16:9 frame, with thin black bars on the left and right. Depending on the size of the TV's overscan, these might not even be visible on all TVs. The result is that the movie appears to be 16:9 on both 16:9 and 4:3 displays. I can think of two DVDs I have like this - Rocky Horror Picture Show and the R2 DVD of Sailor Moon R: The Movie.

However, a lot of 1.66:1 movies (eg. A Clockwork Orange) are encoded non-anamorphically. On a 16:9 display you have to pick between windowboxing them like a 4:3 picture and thereby having black space on all four sides, or zooming in and cutting off a little bit of the picture at the top and bottom.

My widescreen TV has a moderate amount of overscan, so 1.66:1 movies usually fill the entire screen quite nicely.

I noticed on the Star Wars DVDs that even the 4:3 special features must have been anamorphically enhanced because they were pillar-boxed while playing on my Zenith DVB318, which doesn't pillar box on its own.

Theoretically, if an image is greater than 1.54:1 aspect ratio then encoding it as
as 16:9 format DVD will give greater resolution than a letterboxed 4:3 DVD but it would have to be a pillar boxed 16:9 DVD if aspect ratio is less than 1.78:1. If the aspect ratio is less than 1.54:1 , 16:9 anamorphic encoding makes no sense at all as the image would have LESS resolution than than a letterboxed 4:3 DVD.

It makes sense to me that somewhere between a 1.78 and 1.33:1 AR it becomes pointless to use anamorphic process. Not questioning your statement at all (it hardly matters, really splitting hairs to get this specific, but it's interesting). I'm just curious as to how you arrived at the 1.54 figure. Did you get this from another source? If you did the math and it's not some massive equation with a lot of greek letters, I'd like to know how you got this figure.

Clockwork Orange not being anamorphic is a travesty! I can't believe they F'd this one up.

Nothing is F'd up except that it's not 16x9 encoded.

Here's what the remastered DVD looks like:

http://img131.exs.cx/img131/7391/clockwork4x32ud.jpg

Here's what the DVD looks like when you enlarge it as if it were 16x9:

http://img131.exs.cx/img131/2456/clockwork16x92il.jpg

HA HA!

Darth Vader's wearing a pink shirt!

Yes, that was my point.

I never knew that was David Prowse!

I don't know where the article is online, but in one of the interviews with Leon Vitali he said that it was because they didn't want a change in perspective. He compared it to a situation where a cinematographer who worked with Stanley wanted to use a different lens and shoot from a different position because it would make his job easier but Stanley said, "what about the change in perspective?"

I almost wonder if maybe they didn't understand that anamorphic for DVD transfers is completely different from anamorphic when it comes to camera lenses.

Is there a way that you can make A Clockwork Orange this on a 16x9?
Click me

Just curious...
I know there's apparently a "zoom" feature..

Yes, you can zoom on some TV's.... however, I think one problem is that it may get cropped to 1.78:1 instead of 1.66:1. I know a DVD player has a fully variable "windowboxing" feature, so you could use that.

I made the screenshot entirely in Photoshop by taking the 4x3 remastered DVD and simply enlarging it to fit the 16x9 frame. The source images (uncompressed bitmap) were captured at 1024x768 resolution.

That must have been the case. I mean how could anyone in their right mind not want a 1:66 transfer to be "enhanced" for widescreen TVs? At least "2001" didn't suffer from this ignorance.