I found a view more annoying then fullscreen.

I'm sorry in advance, but I just couldn't figure out where to put this, so I picked the place with the most posts.

I bought Austin Powers on DVD today, watched it, laughed my ass off, and noticed something: The view was a little wierd. I look on the back of the box, and it says that the view is 1:93.1. Hmm, never heard of a camera that does that. I know of some movies like TRON and Lawrence Of Arabia are in 2:20.1, but i've never heard of 1:93.1. I looked it up on the internet, and it turns out that my Austin Powers DVD is something I will call "not so widescreen".

You see: AP was originally filmed in 2:35.1, but for the DVD, they actually went and made the widescreen smaller. What? This is the stupidest thing i've ever heard of. Granted, it's Austin Powers and i'm not missing anything, but that's just stupid. Especially since it's a flipper, and you can watch it in fullscreen on the other side.

Has anyone else experienced anything as repugnant as this?

Which "Austin Powers" was this?

The widescreen may not necessarily be smaller. Rather, they may have opened up the picture at the the top and bottom, so the width is still technically the same.

The whole issue of aspect ratios on DVDs is confused and misleading. In the transfer of a movie to DVD, a bit of the sides of a widescreen movie is inevitably lost. Then, a modern television will overscan the picture slightly. The result is, under normal conditions, a loss of about 5%-8% of a widescreen image left to right. (And I'm not even going to go into what the various "stretch" and "zoom" modes do to a picture on a widescreen TV set.)

Add to this the fact that some transfers, as Eddie says, open up a matted theatrical widescreen (ones originally shot at 1.33:1 or 1.66:1 for instance) at the top and/or bottom and allow even more information to be shown than was seen in theaters.

So not all so-called "fullscreen" presentations are pan-and-scan affairs. It's the P&S butcherings that cut out up to 50% of a screen image left and/or right that are to be avoided.

John

Eddie, it's AP #1 (I also got AP #2. Total: $15.98 8))

John, upon further study, the picture looks just fine. As a long time owner of the Star Wars Trilogy on VHS (Will upgrade to DVD soon), I know the distortion and stretching that you speak of. This DVD has none of that. No joke, this DVD just had it's sides cut off and it came out to this weird view. It's not distorted, it's just stupid.

Also, a friend of mine told me about how on the original Raging Bull DVD, to make the widescreen, they actually just cut off the top and bottom of the fullscreen and made it look widescreen.

Who makes these stupid and pointless decesions?

(PS: I'm new here, and I like what i see so far. You're a lot more informative then the average movie message board. Good show guys, and I think i'll stay around.)

Jarrod,

Actually, "Raging Bull" was intended to have its top and bottom cut off. This is known as "soft matting", with cameras and monitors having lines drawn to indicate where the theatrical black masking would hide parts of the picture. You're not meant to see the top and bottom of a "soft matte" movie.

As for "Austin Powers 1"...the sides weren't cut off. They shot the movie in Super 35 and opened up the soft-matting to reveal more of the top and bottom.

Eddie