Letterboxing is the practice of transferring
filmA film, also called a movie or motion picture, is a series of still or moving images. It is produced by recording photographic images with cameras, or by creating images using animation techniques or visual effects...
shot in a
widescreenWidescreen images are a variety of aspect ratios used in film, television and computer screens. In film, a widescreen film is any film image with a width-to-height aspect ratio greater than the standard 1.37:1 Academy aspect ratio provided by 35mm film....
aspect ratioThe aspect ratio of an image is the ratio of the width of the image to its height, expressed as two numbers separated by a colon. That is, for an x:y aspect ratio, no matter how big or small the image is, if the width is divided into x units of equal length and the height is measured using this...
to standard-width
videoVideo is the technology of electronically capturing, recording, processing, storing, transmitting, and reconstructing a sequence of still images representing scenes in motion.- History :...
formats while preserving the film's original aspect ratio. The resulting videographic image has
mattesMattes are used in photography and special effects filmmaking to combine two or more image elements into a single, final image. Usually, mattes are used to combine a foreground image with a background image . In this case, the matte is the background painting...
(black bars) above and below it; these mattes are part of the image (i.e., of each frame of the video signal).
LTBX is the identifying abbreviation for films and images so formatted. The term refers to the shape of a
letter boxA letter box, letterbox, letter plate, letter hole, mail slot, or mailbox is a receptacle for receiving incoming mail at a private residence or business...
, a slot in a wall or door through which mail is delivered, being rectangular and wider than it is high.
Description
Letterboxing is used as an alternative to a full-screen, pan-and-scan transfer of a widescreen film image to videotape or videodisc. In pan-and-scan transfers, the original image is cropped to the narrower aspect ratio of the destination format, usually the 1.33:1 (4:3) ratio of the standard
televisionTelevision is a telecommunication medium for transmitting and receiving moving images that can be monochrome or colored, with accompanying sound...
screen, whereas letterboxing preserves the film's original image composition as seen in the cinema. Letterboxing was developed for use in 4:3 television displays before widescreen television screens were available, but it is also necessary to represent on a 16:9 widescreen display the unaltered original composition of a film with a wider aspect ratio, such as Panavision's 2.35:1 ratio.
Letterbox mattes are usually symmetrical (both the top and bottom mattes are roughly similar in size), but in some instances the picture can be elevated so the bottom matte is much larger, usually for the purpose of placing "hard" subtitles within the matte to avoid overlapping of the image. This was often done for letterbox widescreen
animeis the Japanese abbreviated pronunciation of "animation". The definition sometimes changes depending on the context. In English-speaking countries, the term most commonly refers to Japanese animated cartoons....
on
VHSThe Video Home System is a consumer-level analog recording videocassette standard developed by Victor Company of Japan ....
, though the practice of "hiding" subtitles within the lower matte also is done with symmetrical mattes, albeit with less space available. The placing of "soft" subtitles within the picture or matte varies according to the DVD player being used, though it appears to be dependent on the movie for
Blu-ray discBlu-ray Disc is an optical disc storage medium designed to supersede the DVD format. The plastic disc is 120 mm in diameter and 1.2 mm thick, the same size as DVDs and CDs. Blu-ray Discs contain 25 GB per layer, with dual layer discs being the norm for feature-length video discs...
.
An alternative to letterboxing is anamorphic widescreen presentation, which squeezes the picture horizontally to fit into a narrower aspect ratio. The player or receiver must correct this distortion by either stretching the image back to its original relative width, for display on widescreen televisions, or letterboxing it (during playback) for display on 4:3 video screens. This image transformation generally requires digital signal processing, so letterboxing was the only way in which films were presented in widescreen on home video prior to the DVD format (with a few exceptions outside the mass market, such as Squeeze LD). Anamorphic widescreen video recordings are sometimes called "anamorphically enhanced", in comparison to letterboxed versions. To represent a film wider than 16:9 (e.g., a 2.35:1 film) on a 16:9 display with no cropping, both anamorphic and letterbox techniques (or letterboxing alone) are required; using the anamorphic technique, the mattes will be smaller but still necessary.
Academy ratioThe Academy ratio of 1.375:1 is an aspect ratio of a frame of 35mm film when used with 4-perf pulldown. It was standardized by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences as the standard film aspect ratio in 1932, although similar-sized ratios were used as early as 1928.The Academy ratio is...
(1.37:1) film or video is sometimes stretched to fill a widescreen (16:9) television display,
resulting in distortion in which actors appear shorter and fatter.
This horizontal stretching distortion can be avoided by
pillar boxThe pillarbox effect occurs in widescreen video displays when black bars are placed on the sides of the image. It becomes necessary when film or video that was not originally designed for widescreen is shown on a widescreen display, or a narrower widescreen image is displayed within a wider...
ing the image,
effected either in the television set or in the video player, e.g. a
DVDA DVD is an optical disc storage media format, invented and developed by Philips, Sony, Toshiba, and Panasonic in 1995. DVDs offer higher storage capacity than Compact Discs while having the same dimensions....
player.
Occasionally, video is shot in a widescreen format and encoded into 4:3 video incorporating letterboxing into the 4:3 image.
This effect is common on personal video websites and old documentaries.
If a recording is said to be
letterboxed, that implies that the letterboxing was done prior to fixing the recording on the medium. There is a difference between a letterboxed
recording (or other source) and a letterboxed
picture, as a letterboxed recording will appear letterboxed on
every screen – even one that has the same aspect ratio as the source content – while a letterboxed
picture may be produced from a
non-letterboxed
source, in which case it will appear full-screen on a suitably wide display. (The letterboxed source displayed on a wide screen will appear both letterboxed
and pillarboxed, so the active picture will occupy a rectangle in the middle of the screen surrounded by mattes on all four sides.) Anamorphic widescreen recordings may be mislabeled as letterboxed, which technically they are not.
The term
letterbox is sometimes used to emphasize that a widescreen motion picture or video has not been anamorphically encoded for 16:9 screens, thus not taking full advantage of the resolution provided by DVD,
high-definition televisionHigh-definition television is video that has resolution substantially higher than that of traditional television systems . HDTV has one or two million pixels per frame, roughly five times that of SD...
(HDTV), or other media. Because the black mattes are part of the picture, they take up space in the signal that could be used for active picture information, forcing the picture to use less vertical space in the signal than if it were anamorphically encoded. This results in less vertical resolution in the letterboxed picture than in either an anamorphic or pan-and-scan version (which have the same vertical resolution). The reduced vertical resolution is the main disadvantage of letterboxing.
Early use of the letterbox format
The first use of letterbox appeared with the RCA videodisc (CED) format. Initially, letterboxing was limited to several key sequences of a film (e.g., opening and closing credits), but later it was used for the entire film. The first full letterboxed CED release was
AmarcordAmarcord is a 1973 Italian comedy-drama film directed by Federico Fellini, a semi-autobiographical coming-of-age tale about Titta, an adolescent boy growing up among an eccentric cast of characters in the fictional town of Borgo in 1930s Fascist Italy...
in 1984, and several others followed. Each disc contained a label noting the use of "RCA's innovative wide-screen mastering technique."
In the cinema and home video
In
NTSCNTSC, named for the National Television System Committee, is the analog television system that is used in most of North America, most of South America , Burma, South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, the Philippines, and some Pacific island nations and territories .Most countries using the NTSC standard, as...
areas of the world, videocassettes often contained only pan-and-scan versions (notable VHS releases in letterboxed format include
Manhattan,
Last Tango in ParisLast Tango in Paris is a 1972 Italian romantic drama film directed by Bernardo Bertolucci which portrays a recent American widower who takes up an anonymous sexual relationship with a young, soon-to-be-married Parisian woman...
,
Ghostbusters IIGhostbusters II is a 1989 science fiction comedy film produced and directed by Ivan Reitman. It is the sequel to the 1984 film Ghostbusters and follows the further adventures of a group of parapsychologists and their organization which combats paranormal activities...
(which was released in the incorrect aspect ratio on its initial home video release),
The TerminatorThe Terminator is a 1984 science fiction action film directed by James Cameron, co-written by Cameron and William Wisher Jr., and starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Michael Biehn, and Linda Hamilton. The film was produced by Hemdale Film Corporation and distributed by Orion Pictures, and filmed in Los...
,
The Color PurpleThe Color Purple is an acclaimed 1982 epistolary novel by American author Alice Walker. It received the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award for Fiction...
,
Lady and the TrampLady and the Tramp is a 1955 American animated film produced by Walt Disney and released to theaters on June 22, 1955, by Buena Vista Distribution. The fifteenth animated feature in the Walt Disney Animated Classics series, it was the first animated feature filmed in the CinemaScope widescreen...
, and
Basic Instinct: The Original Director's CutBasic Instinct is a 1992 erotic thriller directed by Paul Verhoeven and written by Joe Eszterhas, and starring Michael Douglas and Sharon Stone....
), but DVD releases tend to be offered in both versions. In
PALPAL, short for Phase Alternating Line, is an analogue television colour encoding system used in broadcast television systems in many countries. Other common analogue television systems are NTSC and SECAM. This page primarily discusses the PAL colour encoding system...
areas, which do not suffer so much from low vertical resolution with letterboxed images, letterboxing was more common on videocassettes and is almost ubiquitous on DVDs, with very few films being offered in pan-and-scan releases today.
Movies such as
The GraduateThe Graduate is a 1967 American comedy-drama motion picture directed by Mike Nichols. It is based on the 1963 novel The Graduate by Charles Webb, who wrote it shortly after graduating from Williams College. The screenplay was by Buck Henry, who makes a cameo appearance as a hotel clerk, and Calder...
and
WoodstockWoodstock is a 1970 American documentary on the Woodstock Festival that took place in August 1969 at Bethel in New York. Entertainment Weekly called this film the benchmark of concert movies and one of the most entertaining documentaries ever made...
that made use of the full width of the movie screen often have the sides cut off and look completely different in non-letterboxed copies from the original theatrical release. This is more apparent in pan-and-scanned movies that remain entirely on the center area of the film image.
The term "SmileBox" is a registered
trademarkA trademark, trade mark, or trade-mark is a distinctive sign or indicator used by an individual, business organization, or other legal entity to identify that the products or services to consumers with which the trademark appears originate from a unique source, and to distinguish its products or...
used to describe a type of letterboxing for
CineramaCinerama is the trademarked name for a widescreen process which works by simultaneously projecting images from three synchronized 35 mm projectors onto a huge, deeply-curved screen, subtending 146° of arc. It is also the trademarked name for the corporation which was formed to market it...
films, such as on the Blu-ray release of
How the West Was WonHow the West Was Won is a 1962 American epic Western film. The picture was one of the last "old-fashioned" epic films made by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer to enjoy great success. It follows four generations of a family as they move ever westward, from western New York state to the Pacific Ocean...
. The image is produced with 3D mapping technology to approximate a curved screen.
On television
Digital broadcasting allows 1.78:1 (16:9) widescreen format transmissions without losing resolution, and thus widescreen is becoming the television norm. Most television programming in the United States,
BritainThe United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...
and
FranceThe French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
is in standard-definition 16:9 and is transmitted in anamorphic format on digital platforms. When using a 4:3 television, it is possible to display such programming in either a letterbox format or in a 4:3 centre-cut format (where the edges of the picture are lost).
A letterboxed
14:914:9 is a compromise aspect ratio of 1.56:1. It is used to create an acceptable picture on both 4:3 and 16:9 televisions, conceived following audience tests conducted by the BBC...
compromise ratio is often broadcast in analogue transmissions in European countries making the transition from 4:3 to 16:9, for example on
BBC OneBBC One is the flagship television channel of the British Broadcasting Corporation in the United Kingdom. It was launched on 2 November 1936 as the BBC Television Service, and was the world's first regular television service with a high level of image resolution...
or
ITV1ITV1 is a generic brand that is used by twelve franchises of the British ITV Network in the English regions, Wales, southern Scotland , the Isle of Man and the Bailiwicks of Jersey and Guernsey. The ITV1 brand was introduced by Carlton and Granada in 2001, alongside the regional identities of their...
in the United Kingdom. In addition, recent years have seen an increase of "fake" 2.35:1 letterbox
mattesOpen matte is a filming technique that involves matting out the top and bottom of the film frame in the movie projector for the widescreen theatrical release and then scanning the film without a matte for a full screen home video release.Usually, non-anamorphic 4-perf films are filmed directly on...
on television to give the impression of a cinema film, often seen in adverts, trailers or television programmes such as
Top GearTop Gear is a British television series about motor vehicles, primarily cars. It began in 1977 as a conventional motoring magazine show. Over time, and especially since a relaunch in 2002, it has developed a quirky, humorous style...
.
Current
high-definition televisionHigh-definition television is video that has resolution substantially higher than that of traditional television systems . HDTV has one or two million pixels per frame, roughly five times that of SD...
(HDTV) systems use video displays with a wider aspect ratio than older
televisionTelevision is a telecommunication medium for transmitting and receiving moving images that can be monochrome or colored, with accompanying sound...
sets, making it easier to accurately display widescreen films. In addition to films produced for the cinema, some television programming is produced in high definition and therefore widescreen.
On a widescreen television set, a 1.78:1 image fills the screen, however, 2.39:1 aspect ratio films are letterboxed with narrow mattes. Because the 1.85:1 aspect ratio does not match the 1.78:1 (16:9) aspect ratio of widescreen DVDs and high-definition video, slight letterboxing occurs. Usually, such matting of 1.85:1 film is eliminated to match the 1.78:1 aspect ratio in the DVD and HD image transference.
Letterbox mattes are not necessarily black.
IBMInternational Business Machines Corporation or IBM is an American multinational technology and consulting corporation headquartered in Armonk, New York, United States. IBM manufactures and sells computer hardware and software, and it offers infrastructure, hosting and consulting services in areas...
has used blue mattes for many of their TV ads, yellow mattes in their "I am Superman" Lotus ads, and green mattes in ads about efficiency & environmental sustainability. Others uses of colored mattes appear in ads from
AllstateThe Allstate Corporation is the second-largest personal lines insurer in the United States and the largest that is publicly held. The company also has personal lines insurance operations in Canada. Allstate was founded in 1931 as part of Sears, Roebuck and Co., and was spun off in 1993...
, Aleve, and Kodak among others, and in music videos such as
ZebraheadZebrahead is an American punk rock band from Orange County, California, which fuses elements of Rapcore, Pop Punk, Alternative Rock, Alternative Metal, and Funk Metal.-1996–98: Formation:...
's
Playmate of the YearPlaymate of the Year is the third studio album released by American punk rock band Zebrahead, it is also their final album released via Columbia Records....
. In other instances mattes are animated, such as in the music video for
Never Gonna Stop (The Red Red Kroovy)"Never Gonna Stop " is a promotional single taken from Rob Zombie's second album The Sinister Urge. The song can also be found on Zombie's Past, Present & Future and The Best of Rob Zombie. It was nominated the Grammy for Best Metal Performance for the 2002 Grammy Awards Ceremony.The song is based...
, and even parodied such as the final scene of the Crazy Frog Axel F music video in which
Crazy FrogCrazy Frog, originally known as Adam King, is a computer-animated character created in 2003 by Erik Wernquist. Marketed by the ringtone provider Jamba!, the animation was originally created to accompany a sound effect produced by Daniel Malmedahl in 1997 while attempting to imitate the sound of a...
peeks over the matte on the lower edge of the screen with part of his hands overlapping the matte. Similar to breaking the border of a comic's panel, it is a form of breaking the fourth wall.
The table below shows which TV lines will contain picture information when letterbox pictures are displayed on either 4:3 or 16:9 screens.
| Aspect Ratio on 4:3 screen | 525 Line System | 625 Line System | | Aspect Ratio on 16:9 screen | 525 Line System | 625 Line System | 1080 HD Line System |
| Full Screen (1.33:1) |
21-263 |
284-525 |
23-310 |
336-623 |
|
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
| 14:9 (1.56:1) |
40-245 |
302-508 |
44-289 |
357-602 |
|
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
| 16:9 (1.78:1) |
52-232 |
315-495 |
59-282 |
372-587 |
|
Full Screen (1.78:1) |
21-263 |
284-525 |
23-310 |
336-623 |
21-560 |
584-1123 |
| 1.85:1 |
56-229 |
320-491 |
64-270 |
376-582 |
|
1.85:1 |
26-257 |
289-520 |
29-304 |
342-617 |
31-549 |
594-1112 |
| 2.35:1 |
73-209 |
336-472 |
85-248 |
398-561 |
|
2.35:1 |
50-231 |
313-495 |
58-275 |
371-588 |
86-494 |
649-1057 |
Pillarboxing and windowboxing
PillarboxingThe pillarbox effect occurs in widescreen video displays when black bars are placed on the sides of the image. It becomes necessary when film or video that was not originally designed for widescreen is shown on a widescreen display, or a narrower widescreen image is displayed within a wider...
(reversed letterboxing) is the display of an image within a wider image frame by adding lateral mattes (vertical bars at the sides); for example, a 1.33:1 image has lateral mattes when displayed on a 16:9 aspect ratio television screen.
An alternative to pillarboxing is "tilt-and-scan" (reversed
pan and scanPan and scan is a method of adjusting widescreen film images so that they can be shown within the proportions of a standard definition 4:3 aspect ratio television screen, often cropping off the sides of the original widescreen image to focus on the composition's most important aspects...
), horizontally matting the original 1.33:1 television images to the 1.78:1 aspect ratio, which at any given moment crops part of the top and/or bottom of the frame, hence the need for the "tilt" component. A tilt is a camera move in which the camera tilts up or down.
WindowboxingWindowboxing in the display of film or video occurs when the aspect ratio of the media is such that the letterbox effect and pillarbox effect occur simultaneously...
occurs when an image appears centered in a television screen, with blank space on all four sides of the image, such as when a widescreen image that has been previously letterboxed to fit 1.33:1 is then pillarboxed to fit 16:9. It is also called "matchbox", "gutterbox", and "postage stamp" display. This occurs on the DVD editions of the
Star TrekStar Trek is an American science fiction entertainment franchise created by Gene Roddenberry. The core of Star Trek is its six television series: The Original Series, The Animated Series, The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager, and Enterprise...
films on a 4:3 television when the included widescreen documentaries show footage from the original television series. It is also seen in
The Crocodile Hunter: Collision CourseThe Crocodile Hunter: Collision Course is a 2002 Australian comedy-adventure film based on the nature documentary series The Crocodile Hunter, starring Steve Irwin and his wife Terri Irwin. The Irwins play themselves filming an episode of The Crocodile Hunter while trying to protect a crocodile....
, which displays widescreen pillarboxing with 1.85:1 scenes in a 2.40:1 frame that is subsequently letterboxed. It is common to see windowboxed commercials on HD television networks, because many commercials are shot in 16:9 but distributed to networks in SD, letterboxed to fit 1.33:1.
Many 1980s 8-bit home computers feature gutterboxing display mode, because the TV screens normally used as monitors at that time tended to distort the image near the border of the screen, to such an extent that
textA text, within literary theory, is a coherent set of symbols that transmits some kind of informative message. This set of symbols is considered in terms of the informative message's content, rather than in terms of its physical form or the medium in which it is represented...
displayed in that area became illegible. Moreover, due to the overscanned nature of television video, the precise edges of the visible area of the screen varied from television set to television set, so characters near the expected border of the active screen area might be behind the bezel or off the edge of the screen. The
Commodore 64The Commodore 64 is an 8-bit home computer introduced by Commodore International in January 1982.Volume production started in the spring of 1982, with machines being released on to the market in August at a price of US$595...
, VIC-20, and
Commodore 128The Commodore 128 home/personal computer was the last 8-bit machine commercially released by Commodore Business Machines...
(in 40-column mode) featured coloured gutterboxing of the main text window, while the
Atari 8-bit familyThe Atari 8-bit family is a series of 8-bit home computers manufactured from 1979 to 1992. All are based on the MOS Technology 6502 CPU and were the first home computers designed with custom coprocessor chips...
featured a blue text window with a black border. The original IBM PC
CGAThe Color Graphics Adapter , originally also called the Color/Graphics Adapter or IBM Color/Graphics Monitor Adapter, introduced in 1981, was IBM's first color graphics card, and the first color computer display standard for the IBM PC....
display adapter was the same, and the monochrome MDA, the predecessor of the CGA, as well as the later EGA and VGA, also featured gutterboxing; this is also called
underscanned video. The
Fisher-Price PXL-2000The PXL-2000 is a toy black-and-white camcorder produced in 1987 that uses a compact audio cassette as its recording medium. The original designer at Fisher-Price was Andrew I...
camcorder of the late 1980s recorded a windowboxed image to compensate partially for low resolution.
Occasionally, an image is deliberately windowboxed for stylistic effect; for example, the documentary-style sequence of the film
RentRent is a 2005 American musical drama film directed by Chris Columbus. It is an adaptation of the Broadway musical of the same name, in turn based on Giacomo Puccini's opera La bohème. The film depicts the lives of several Bohemians and their struggles with sexuality, cross-dressing, drugs, life...
suggest an older-format camera representing the 4:3 aspect ratio, and the opening sequence of the
Oliver StoneWilliam Oliver Stone is an American film director, producer and screenwriter. Stone became well known in the late 1980s and the early 1990s for directing a series of films about the Vietnam War, for which he had previously participated as an infantry soldier. His work frequently focuses on...
film
JFKJFK is a 1991 American film directed by Oliver Stone. It examines the events leading to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and alleged subsequent cover-up, through the eyes of former New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison .Garrison filed charges against New Orleans businessman Clay...
features pillar boxing to represent the 1960s era 4:3 television footage. The film
SneakersSneakers is a 1992 caper film directed by Phil Alden Robinson, written by Robinson, Walter F. Parkes, and Lawrence Lasker and starring Robert Redford, Dan Aykroyd, Ben Kingsley, Mary McDonnell, River Phoenix, Sidney Poitier and David Strathairn...
uses a windowboxing effect in a scene for dramatic effect.
See also
- Active Format Description
In television technology, Active Format Description is a standard set of codes that can be sent in the MPEG video stream or in the baseband SDI video signal that carries information about their aspect ratio and active picture characteristics...
- List of film formats
- Motion picture terminology
The film industry is built upon a large number of technologies and techniques, drawing upon photography, stagecraft, music, and many other disciplines...
External links