Eh? Tony, Anamorphic has nothing to do with mastering, it's a type of non-linear lense for the camera that films the movie in the first place!

To present a movie in cinemascope, at the time it was introduced, lenses could not be ground other than in a linear grind pattern, ie. fixed radius. To project a picture onto a small, square screen, you could use a normal lense. Cinemascope boasted a wide screen, with a 16:9 ratio between width and height, giving a non-square filmed area on the negative. To project it using lenses of the time, they had to build new cinema screens with a distorted, wrap-around shape to give a linear projection from a linear grind lense.

Later on, they worked out how to grind the lenses for projectors/cameras in a non-linear (variable radius) way, which meant that cinemas did not have to invest in the expensive screen structures any more, and could get away with just a flat screen with the 16:9 aspect ratio, where the lense compensated for the distortion of projection onto a flat screen.

Don't confuse aspect ratio with "anamorphic" this is like saying "a car engine is Gerbil" (this might be funny if your Ex's engine does actually happen to have the name "Gerbil" ). A letter-boxed movie is a movie modified to provide a way to present a movie filmed with an anamorphic lense (to give a wide filmed area) at the correct 16:9 aspect ratio expected in a good cinema on a TV screen with a different (4:3, or 12:9) aspect ratio. The result is a movie where you can see the entire extent of the filmed image, but at lower resolution and with wasted display area.

As a point of note, since the majority of movies made since the 30's have been filmed with non-linear grind lenses, virtually everything that the movie studios had in back catalogue by the mid-50's when the new TV companies came knocking for content (with large chequebooks) was widescreen. This meant a problem for the TV companies. How do you show it on a TV? Which bit? The left side, or the right side? Since there was no concept of Letterboxing, or the technology to do it, a process named "shuttering" was developed for the celluloid-to-video transfer, where a skilled technician was employed to control the transfer onto tape with a Movieola conversion machine. Part of his job was to "pan the video camera" (ie. the visible viewing area of the 4:3 video "eye") across the movie's projected image to focus the viewing audience's attention on some part of the action shown on one or other side of the movie "screen". This meant that a large amount of the viewed content of a movie was frequently ommitted. If you watch a shuttered and panned movie on TV, you are probably conditioned to seeing the "viewpoint" shift on screen as the film plays (you are probably not even concious of it at all these days). This is one of the reasons why people who have only seen a movie on TV are frequently surprised by seeing it the cinema for the first time - close to 40% of the visual material of the original has been ommitted for TV viewers.

So to sum up - a letterboxed movie is already anamorphic due to the lense used to film it; the difference is in the display resolution on a small aspect ratio screen.

One of the few remaining Mk1 owners... #00015