The nice thing about widescreen presentations of mainstream films is that you get to see exactly what the director intended to be seen in the primary place for viewing the film (in this case, a movie theater).

You can't make that case with adult films. They aren't shown in movie theaters any more (even when they were they were shot in a 1.33:1 aspect ratio.

The (current) primary viewing location for adult films in in the home. Most people have conventional 4:3 Tv's in their homes. Filming in 1.85:1, would only reduce the available viewing size of the picture for the vast majority of viewers.

That having been said... personally I agree with you. I already own 1 HD Widescreen TV, and will shortly purchase another one for my bedroom. I would love for adult titles to correctly fill up these screens.

But widescreen TV owners are currently WAY at the beginning of the curve, and there is currently no reason for adult manufacturers to piss off the majority of the public in order to make a few of us happy.

Edited by - Bill Broderick on Mar 25 2001

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I watched Austin Powers #2 on widescreen dvd and also on a regular vhs tape. There is one scene in the movie where the blond female lead (I can't remember her name) is walking away from Autin Powers and looking back at him over her shoulder. As she is walking away, on the vhs tape you can clearly see her body from the top of her head down to below her ass, on the widescreen dvd you only see form the top of her head down to her waist.
Widescreen? No thanks!

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There are two (primary) ways of filming movies. One way involves an anamorphic lens, which compresses a widescreen image onto a standard 4:3 piece of film. When the movie is played at a theater, the reverse lens stretches the picture out to a 2.35:1 ratio. In order to put a movie filmed this way onto a 4:3 source, the ONLY option is to cut image from one (or both) sides of the original image.

The other option is known as matting. The picture will be centered vertically on the film, and there will be extra image filmed outside the part of the film that will be shown in the theater. This is known as the "safe area". This area is blocked out at the movie theater which created the widescreen image. When putting a matted image onto 4:3 video, the area outside of the original image is also transferred to the tape or DVD.

There are two primary problems with this methodology. First, since this area outside of the movie frame often contains things that you shouldn't be able to see (like boom microphones). A great example of this is "PeeWee's Big Adventure". There is a scene where PeeWee pulls an endless chain out of the basket on the back of his bicycle. When the mattes are removed the joke is completely lost, because you can clearly see a hold in the bottom of the basket and a pile of chain on the ground.

However, for newer releases that are filmed in this methodology, the director knows that the movie will be transferred to video, and usually tries to account fr this when framing a picture (but that's not always the case).

The other problem has to do with Computer Generated Images (CGI) and many other special effects. These are expensive to produce. The vast majority of the time, these images will be created in the aspect ration that the movie will eventually be shown in. There will be no "safe area" on these effects. Therefore, although the majority of the movie will have extra images on hte full frame version, all of the special effects will need to be cropped. A good example of this was "Back to the Future" which used many special effectts that didn't make it to the video tape.

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