Cinemascope Cropping Explained
The resolution of the Orion Cinemascope and the optix Cinemascope is 2560x1080. An Aspect ratio of 2.37:1 The new cinemascope TV’s
manufactured today are called 21:9 TV’s but the actual format is 64:27 which is 2.37:1. By having a projector in this format we are
following the 21:9 standard.
Most movies in the theaters that are released today are in 2.39:1(2.40:1). A more common used term is 2.35:1 but that aspect ratio hasn’t
been used in movies since 1970. The standard changes in 1970 and the new standard was 2.39:1. The common term for all these formats
are cinemascope.
Blurays today are released in 1920x1080, an aspect ratio of 16:9(1.77:1), when they release a cinemascope movie they end up using
1920x800 pixels of that resolution for the actual picture ( the full image is still 1920x1080, but part of the image is shown as black bars).
Aspect of 2.40:1 that means if you show a cinemascope movie on a 1920x1080 display in native resolution the result is black bars on the
top and the bottom of the image as shown below.
If you increase the resolution of the display to 2560x1080 and show the same native content you will see the content as shown below, you
will have the same black bars at the top and the bottom, but also black bars on the sides. Even if you have a cinemascope image the native
resolution is 1920x800.
Using the optix cinemascope the image is scaled diagonally, which is a uniform process and maintains perfect geometry while utilizing
almost 700.000 more pixels. The result is a perfect image filling the complete 2560x1080. This process is referred to as cropping and you
will find different features under the cropping function in the menu. The actual procedure is that we crop of the black bars over and under
the image and then we change the aspect ratio to cinemascope. That means we actually scale an image that fills the complete height of the
1920x1080 and then scaled sideways to fill the complete cinemascope chip to maintaining the aspect ratio. The result is shown on the next
page.
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www.barco.com/residential
Barco n.v.
President Kennedypark35
B-8500 Kortrijk, Belgium
Cinemascope Cropping Explained
As you can see above, the result is a perfect cinemascope image in correct aspect ratio.
In the optix Cinemascope we also have an auto cropping feature. It will look for cinemascope content and automatically scale the image to
fit the 2560x1080 resolution and of course change back to 16:9 (1920x1080) if you have content in that format.
At the moment the Orion Cinemascope don’t have this cropping or auto cropping built in. The result is that we are not able to fill the
complete resolution of 2560x1080 using a bluray movie as a source without using a video processor.
In the menu you will still find an aspect ratio option called cinemascope or actually 2.35:1 (like I started to explain, the 2.35:1 is more
commonly known as the aspect ratio used for Cinemascope, that’s the reason why it’s used in the menu). When you click on this aspect
ratio the result is that you will stretch the content to fill the full width of the image.
The result is shown below.
As you can see, you end up with a sideways scaling of the content and the black bars are still very much visible. The reason is, like I have
explained above; even if the black bars are not in the real movie content it is still part of the actual image frame. To be able to solve this we
need the cropping function to crop off the black bars before we scale the image sideways.
This can be utilized with an advanced video processor until we have this built into the projector the same way as the optix CInemascope.
The result will be the same; it’s just that you have to have a video processor controlling it. We are working on customizing a video
processor with a direct cropping button on the remote and in the menu to simplify and make a perfect bundle with the projector. Until we
have either or both of the two options (built in cropping/video processor) you can solve this by adding a video processor on your own to
bundle with the Orion cinemascope. The result is an image that fills the complete cinemascope picture frame. I can’t set a date on either of
the two options at this point in time, but soon.
2|P a g e
www.barco.com/residential
Barco n.v.
President Kennedypark35
B-8500 Kortrijk, Belgium