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NEWS: Kaleidescape's New Cinemascape Aspect Ratio Management Feature!

So if Kaleidescape is doing the image processing with cinemas cape, how would it process a movie like Ben Hu with a 2.76 AR? What if someone has a masking system that can actually accommodate that AR in a CIH screen?
 
It will treat it like 2.35. You will then get small black bars on the top and the bottom. Just like you'll get window bars on 1.78, 1.85 and 1.33 content.
 
cinelife said:
2.35 is 2.35, and 2.40 is 2.40 (there are also older films (like Ben Hur) that were shot in a special "Camera 65" which was a 65mm print later converted to 70mm to be used with an anamorphic lens to produce a 2.76 :1 AR!!!!).

Whatever AR is on the disc is what will appear on the screen, there is no conversion to 2.35. My screens tend to be 2.37 because of the A-lens I use, but I just ordered a Stewart Cinecurv AT screen in 2.40 native. This screen will mask horizontally all the way to 1.33 (1.33, 1.66, 1.78, 1.85, and 2.35) automatically based on the metadata's listed AR (and programmed with the Stewart BRIC controller). Fun stuff.:)


Jim
Click to expand...

But it won't mask from the top and bottom to go to 2.76:1 for Ben-Hur? Weaksauce... ;)
 
I saw a video for a 5 screen landscape setup of AMD's eyefinity running a computer game... 5 1.78 screens.

Ben Hur has an AR of 2.76...

I'm just envisioning this huge, ridiculous screen wrapping around to accommodate games and Ben Hur. Ben Hur without any black bars on top or bottom... Some killer custom Stewart job...

And along comes The Dark Knight on BluRay with its mid film switching from 2.35 to 1.78... Destroying all my OCD AR goodness I have envisioned...

Anyone know if cinemascape will be configurable for non-standard lenses?
 
Ian, Stewart isn't the only one that can custom do that.

My Screen Research screen is a native CinemaScope screen with 4 way masking and can close down to 2.76 for Ben Hur. I think a couple years ago there was one other person who bought a 4 way masking 2.35:1 screen that can do 2.76:1 but I don't recall who it was. Since then, I have not heard of anybody getting 4-way on a 'Scope screen.
 
I am not familiar with the Stewart screen but I have spent some time in front of a 4-way Screen Research screen and I was very impressed. It is on very short shortlist for my next screen.
 
The Screen Research unit was able to do any custom aspect ratio on the fly, which at the time I ordered the Stewart unit could not do. I am not aware if Stewart has since fixed that.

I wanted to have the system use not the stated aspect ratio but the actual measured aspect ratio through the Crestron controller to match the masking for films that don't perfectly match their claimed aspect ratio.
 
Anyway cinemascape could handle 2.76 on a CIH screen in terms of the internal scaling? Assuming there was a lens that would expand the image out like that.
 
No, you are going to have bars on the top and bottom unless you use an anamorphic lens that will take you to 2.76:1 or wider and then you lose horizontal resolution on every movie except Ben-Hur and maybe 4-5 other movies that wide.

The Director's Choice screen will mask vertical and horizontal, but when I looked at it, you had to pre-program each aspect ratio. It couldn't do a custom ratio on the fly, like "2.32:1 with the right side of the image 2.1% in from the side due to the image not filling out to the edge of the video area and the enitre image area shifted down 1.5% because the video isn't centered properly from top to bottom." The Screen Research X-mask system can do that, although I seriously doubt many people really go that far into the programming for the masking system and to automate it requires a Kaleidescape as a source component.
 
Mr.Poindexter said:
........ It couldn't do a custom ratio on the fly, like "2.32:1 with the right side of the image 2.1% in from the side due to the image not filling out to the edge of the video area and the enitre image area shifted down 1.5% because the video isn't centered properly from top to bottom.".........
Click to expand...


Still cannot assign "on the fly" (Sorry Mike, I missed that aspect in your earlier comment.), you do have to preset each AR, but I personally have no problem with that limitation.



Jim
 
JerryL said:
I want to see an anamorphic 1080P format so we can get a full 1080 lines of resolution :)
Click to expand...

I still find all of this stuff about aspect ratios terribly confusing but if we did get full 1080 lines of resolution do we not get back into the problem with movies that have used the black bars for subtitles? I probably didn't say that very well but hopefully you get the drift?

Peter
 
Cinemascope movies like Star Wars or Lawrence of Arabia are 2.35:1. In the parlance of 16x9 TVs, that is like saying 21x9. Clearly its wider. So that is solved by shrinking the movie down and providing black bars on the top and bottom. I don't know the exact % but 16/21= 76% so we're looking at like a loss of about 24% of the 1080 vertical lines to black bars. Thats like a loss of 260 lines. If we could do what we did with DVDs- we'd recapture those lines. Of course, this would mean reprograming all BR players etc if this was done for BR discs. However, what if Kscape could do it for their download movies- it would require a new encoding of the source material. So the odds are basically 0 for this to happen buy a guy can dream? :)

If you were to play this back on a 16x9 display, the player would just adjust the image. As to the subtitles they would just be super imposed on to the image itself which is what those of us with CIH setups do now anyway. But this way for a movie like Star Wars, wed truly have 1080x1920 vs 820x1920 now.
 
One thing to note is that while there is a loss in resolution, there is an increase in performance of the compression because those black bars compress quite easily and take little space. If there was actual real information in there, we would have more data but all the data would be compressed a little bit more or they would have to up the bit rate which would increase the overall file sizes.
 
I can't find a concrete answer on how Kaleidescape handles mixed aspect ratio movies like The Dark Knight and Interstellar on a CIH 2.35 setup. The Kscape store lists Dark Knight as having a 2.35 aspect ratio, so is the Kscape store version actually pre-masked for scope screens? Also, if the player is set to a 2.35 native mode, will it mask the video content to the 2.35 ratio so the IMAX scenes don't bleed out of the screen area? Any insight into this would be greatly appreciated!
 
I am pretty sure those two movies have the 2.35 scenes shown as 2.35- there are black bars top and bottom. Whereas the 1.85 (I think thats the IMAX ratio) scenes are presented as 1.85- but full widescreen not with black bars on the side. I don't know if the software has the flags to adjust a movable screen/lens system during the movie playback. I have a 2.35 CIH setup and watching these movies means I chop off the top and bottom of the 1.85 scenes- but I believe Christopher Nolan framed those 1.85 IMAX scenes to still work in 2.35 playback. Hope this helps.
 
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