what is anamorphic widescreen?

Question

i bought knocked up and it says it is anamorohic widescreen. what does that mean?

Answer 1

"Anamorphic Widescreen" on a DVD means that the output picture will be in a widescreen format. The picture coding in a DVD is "square screen" (4:3), but the widescreen picture has been squeezed horizontally to fit. That is where the term "anamorphic" comes in--it comes from the name of the lens used to film widescreen movies onto regular 35mm film. The picture you get depends on the TV you have. If you have a "square" TV, and have set up your DVD player so that it knows that, then the picture you get will be "letterboxed", with black bars at top and bottom. If you have a widescreen TV (16:9) the picture MAY fill the whole screen. In many cases, there will be black bars even on a widescreen TV, since the movie is even wider than your TV. DVDs that do this are often labled "OAS" (orginal aspect ratio).

Answer 2

Hi. Anamorphic is a photographic process which uses a special camera lens (Anamorphic Lens) which squeezes a wide image onto a narrow film frame.CinemaScope which premiered in 1953 was the first process to use an Anamorphic lens .When projected in the Cinema through another anamorphic lens,the 1.33:1 aspect ratio of the film was stretched two and a half times to the CinemaScope image you saw on the screen.CinemaScope was very wide in comparison to its height.
To-day,most movies are filmed in Panavision,either using 70 mm film or 35 mm with anamorphic systems.
As far as DVDs are concerned you don't have to worry about the anamorphic information.You will still get the correct widescreen aspect ratio. They are only telling you how it was originally filmed in the first place.

Answer 3

Click this link for a VISUAL explaination: http://thedigitalbits.com/articles/anamorphic/anamorphic185demo.html

If you broke into a projector booth down at your local AMC and looked at individual frames on the film strip, you'd notice that each frame looked "squished" like the pictures you saw.

All films are recorded this way nowadays...Like they said up above, the projector "re-squishes" the image back to normal shape...If they didn't "squish" and "un-squish" the image, the picture in the movie theater would look terrible.