So you just put a DVD into the player and you're ready to sit back and relax and enjoy a movie with your girlfriend. You get that FBI copyright infringement warning but then you see this, "This film has been modified from its original version it has been formatted to fit your television screen. " If you see this, then you are about to view a film that has been Panned and Scanned. Pan and Scan is a form of film editing that crops a movie from its original aspect ratio. For example, if the aspect ratio is 4:3 than this means that the image is 4 inches wide and 3 inches high therefore the width is 1. 33 times the height. This was the typical aspect ratio for television sets in the 1950's and 1960's and it was also the ratio that most films were shot in prior to 1960 but as television sets became more popular they also became more affordable and people began staying home to watch movies.
The studios didn't like this so in an effort to get people back into the theaters they started filming movies in CinemaScope and VistaVision both of these were widescreen formats which offered more of a sweeping view but these formats won't fit on a tv screen with the standard 4:3 aspect ratio. In order for a film that was shot in a widescreen format to fill a television screen it has to be panned and scanned and here's how it works! The editor chooses the parts of a scene that are the focal points and copies or "scans" them he then "pans" or follows the actors with the scanner as they move across the frame. The editor may choose to cut back and forth between the actors, if they are close together, instead of panning and scanning between them. The pan and scan technique also allows for maximum image resolution, DVD's that are sold as full screen are pan and scan. So this all sounds really good, right? A widescreen movie that has been squeezed and crunched to fit your TV screen but WAIT there is a downside and it's pretty ugly!
The main criticism of pan and scan is that it changes the way a movie was originally meant to be viewed, let me explain. Director's and Cinematographer's are very detailed oriented people, they go to great lengths to set up shots, to have the actors positioned correctly and have the camera angles just right for each scene. When they do this they do it with the film being produced in widescreen in mind. When a film is panned and scanned a certain amount of visual information is either lost or altered, it's inevitable. So here's how the numbers breakdown; a common aspect ratio for many movies filmed today is 1. 85:1 when this is panned and scanned and viewed on a standard TV screen you roughly see only 70% of a scene's images that you would have seen if you had viewed it in a theater in its original widescreen format! This percentage to me is alarming because it is redesigning the directors and cinematographers vision of how they wanted the film to look and feel.
Some panned and scanned films are actually done by competent professionals who take pride in their work while others are done by editors who either lack the necessary training to do the job correctly or are on a timetable to edit as much film as possible. Filmmaker Woody Allen flat-out refused to let his film Manhattan be panned and scanned and other directors, such as Steven Spielberg, did the same with his film The Color Purple. There is an alternative to this "rogue" type of editing and that is letterbox. Letterbox basically maintains the film's width but on a standard size TV screen it won't fill out all of the height, so you are left with black bars on the top and bottom of the picture. This can be combatted if you have a widescreen TV with an aspect ratio of 16:9 which allows films made at an aspect ratio of 1. 85:1 or 1. 66:1 to fill out most of the height, the black bars will still be there but they are very thin and practically unnoticeable. So as you can see letterbox maintains the films integrity and keeps the director and cinematographer happy and once you get past those black lines you'll be watching the film the way it was meant to be viewed.