How Film Is Transferred to Video

i dug this up since it covers the whole original aspect ratio vs. pan&scan thing covered the previous post...

some damn good info and pretty much covers all one needs to know, though, as usual, i am not sure it adequetly explains the point of anamorphic video...

in a nutshell, your tv only has a certain number of scan lines to display the image... and those scan lines cannot come anywhere close to matching the resolution of a frame of film...
widescreen films on video have black bars at the top and bottom, taking up sometimes as much as half of your screen and thus half of those precious scan lines that weren't enough to properly show film even when you were using all of them...
now, you COULD ditch the bars and use all the scan lines, but, then you lose the shape of the image... in other words, you basically zoom in on the image, but then, of course, you either have to cut off the sides or distort the image, stretching it vertcally...
hence widescreen tv's and "anamorphic squeeze" buttons on standard tv's... the proper shape is kept, with little to no scan lines wasted on nothing but black bars...


meh, it might make more sense if you read it again after you read the article at the link... it is not the easiest thing to explain without examples...