DVD: Wasted?

[gbeenie]

its a wider shot but it doesnt physically make the TV any wider. 

In a cinema it does.  With widescreen movies, the screen stretches sideways to accomodate the extra length. 

Not 100% of the time, though. Two of our smaller screens where I work are actually 1.85 normally, and matte vertically for scope movies. This is actually pretty effective for auditoriums and viewing rooms that are narrow.

You know, that actually happens in one of our screens too!  I'd completely forgotten about it.   

How many screens you got at your place?

Eight. It was ten when the current owner bought it, but he gutted two auditoriums to install a huge arcade.

[palehorse864]

ON the topic of the MGM thing... As I understand it, what MGM was doing that caused the suit is taking movies that weren't filmed in open-matte, cropping them on the sides for pan-and-scan (Fullscreen). Once they had their fullscreen master, they then further cropped that and made the widescreen version from the fullscreen cropped version.  It wasn't like they brought an open-matte to it's iintended format.  Of course, I could have heard wrong.

[mrbasehart]

Eight. It was ten when the current owner bought it, but he gutted two auditoriums to install a huge arcade.

So it's an Indy theatre? That sounds quite nice...

[MrTorso]

ON the topic of the MGM thing... As I understand it, what MGM was doing that caused the suit is taking movies that weren't filmed in open-matte, cropping them on the sides for pan-and-scan (Fullscreen). Once they had their fullscreen master, they then further cropped that and made the widescreen version from the fullscreen cropped version.  It wasn't like they brought an open-matte to it's iintended format.  Of course, I could have heard wrong.

I don't think that was the case. If you look at the Miami Blues examples I posted above you can see more info on the side on the widescreen sample, and that was on the list for the settlement.