lmg@houxb.UUCP (L.M.Geary) (03/08/84)
# I think my original article was pooly phrased. So called 35mm film produces a 36mm X 24mm picture in an SLR. The ratio of height to width is 1.5:1. I wanted to know the corresponding ratio for a "70mm" wide screen movie. The point of all this was to determine whether or not a wide screen movie such as Star Wars or 2001 could be shown uncropped under the proposed "High Definition TV" system. HDTV would have a wider aspect ratio (1.8:1 I believe) and better resolution than the current system. Unfortunately, as one correspondant mentioned, it isn't that simple. The image is stretched by the projection optics to fill the wider screen, and even if a similar process was applied during the transfer from film to video tape, there might be other distortions due to the curvature (or lack thereof) of the screen. This is probably the wrong newsgroup for the topic, but I hoped someone might know something about the film dimensions. Off to the library ... Larry Geary AT&T Information Systems Holmdel, NJ ...houxb!lmg