Heads up - Jurassic World weird ass aspect ratio

[Leo Enticknap]

Discovered this while fixing a downed screen yesterday afternoon - it's F-200. And the dinosaurf****r of it is that the movie contains captions and text right up against the bottom of the frame, so the only way to avoid cropping it is to play it straight flat, in which case it'll be letterboxed and likely cause "Why are bits of the screen black?" customer complaints, or make separate lens position and screen masking files for F-200, and put them into a separate macro/preset. If you play it straight scope, text will be cropped.

It was their luck that a tech was on site just before the movie opened, so I was able to make a F-200 setup for them, and put an automation cue for it into their server and playlist. But this is going to cause grief for theaters that aren't able to do that.

[William Kucharski]

Noted the AR also but the last remaining theater I rely upon for good first run presentation got it right and they even still move their masking. (Regal Continental large RPX house, Denver.)

[Steve Guttag]

To be clear, Leo...if a theatre has a proper F-200 preset, the text is NOT cropped? We do set up all of our theatres for F-200 (and F-220, for that matter).

[Marcel Birgelen]

I've helped to get the presets right at a pre-premiere about a week ago, due to a KDM screwup, we had exactly 40 minutes of headway, so there was only time to test the very first minutes of the movie... I sat through the whole borefest with the audience, but didn't notice any burned in captions close to the bottom? Maybe the "international version" doesn't include those burned-in captions, as most will run it with subtitles anyway?

[Leo Enticknap]

Yes - with a proper F-200 preset, all is good.

Near the start of a movie, there is a caption that says "Somewhereorother research facility, [new line] Somewhereorother, Nevada." The second line is half cropped off the frame if played in straight 'scope. There is also a mock-up TV news report with a ticker style banner, again cropped.

[Jon Dent]

I don't get why Trevorrow (and Eggers for that matter) uses this stupid ass aspect ratio. He did the same thing with the original Jurassic World.

I tried setting up a 2.0 lens setting for Northman but because I didn't want to change lens presets mid playlist it caused all the Flat advertising content and trailers to overlap the screen edges. So I gave up on that.

Stupid, stupid, stupid decisions by filmmakers who clearly have their head wedged firmly up their hindquarters.

[Leo Enticknap]

And an order of magnitude more stupid not to "shoot to protect" (as many if not all European 1.66 productions do against 1.85) against straight scope, and position on-screen text such that it will be cropped, and therefore the picture will clearly look "wrong" to a customer (with or without any cinema technical knowledge).

If the shots were framed such that F-200 is ideal, but the average customer won't notice anything wrong if it's played in straight scope, that would be one thing. But with this show, any theater that plays it in straight scope is very likely to get complaints.

[Steve Guttag]

The little sheet they include with the movie glosses over the issue and merely states that the little letterbox line is "normal."

We do have the machine do a lens adjustment at the feature. How big a deal that is depends on your projector. Christie is nearly instant, NEC needs a decent amount of time to do its thing and Barco is somewhere between.

My bigger beef, really is with the advertisers. They can't seem to get to make their ads FULL CONTAINER 2048 x 1080 and then protect to 1998 x 858 for all text and critical objects. This way, they will play fine on ALL screens. Instead, most take the lazy way out and just compose for Scope so if it is a Flat movie on a Scope screen, you get this itsy bitsy rectangle in the middle of a massive white screen.

Personally, I think the F-200 format isn't significant enough of a change over normal Flat (1.85) to warrant the hassle. But hey, I don't shoot the movies, I just show them.

[Frank Cox]

"I have a great idea! Lets make the picture smaller, so it will be less immersive and less impressive than it would otherwise be."

"How original and creative! Lets do that!"

[Darin Steffl]

This 2.0 FLAT is STUPID!!! We have a scope screen and we want to fill it but FLAT movies and this even weirder 2.0 FLAT movie makes our presentation look like crap. Give me SCOPE!

[Marco Giustini]

I agree with Steve that 2:1 doesn’t seem such a big improvement over flat or scope to justify the hassle but with modern projectors I don’t see an issue setting up a specific channel.
If moving the lens is not an option, scaling is available (not ideal but won’t be the end of the world, and it could be used for trailers and commercials, not the main feature)

[Carsten Kurz]

What really sucks is the fact that we see more and more movies with non-standard aspect ratios, but without the proper internal aspect ratio indicated in the title or docs. We recently e.g. played KIMI, and it was indicated as flat, while it was closer to 2.0:1. Also 'The Card Counter' contained two different non-flat aspect ratios without being indicated. Same for 'June again'.

- Carsten

[Marcel Birgelen]

What really sucks is the fact that we see more and more movies with non-standard aspect ratios, but without the proper internal aspect ratio indicated in the title or docs. We recently e.g. played KIMI, and it was indicated as flat, while it was closer to 2.0:1. Also 'The Card Counter' contained two different non-flat aspect ratios without being indicated. Same for 'June again'.

Welcome Generation i: If it doesn't fit on the screen, you just pinch it to zoom in on it and if you don't like what you're seeing, you just swipe left...

I'm waiting for the day the director has the cameraman turn the camera by 90 degrees and then starts shouting at the cinematographer that the picture is WAY TOO SMALL.

[Harold Hallikainen]

My wife's parents used to watch TV in "fat mode." To fill the screen, everyone looked fat.

On turning the camera by 90 degrees, that's Vista Vision! I still think Vista Vision was a very clever idea. A whole lot simpler than Cinerama.

Harold

[Steve Guttag]

So, despite getting out ahead on all of this, i got bit anyway. Sure, I have the F-200 (and F-220) formats in the projectors. Sure, I sent out an email informing my clients that Jurassic was F-200 so be sure to use that format and remember, it will not fill the screen left and right (Scope screen theatres). I was, politely informed, that there was no need for the "special" F-200 format has they had this nice letter from Deluxe that stated the small letterbox bars at the top and bottom were "normal" and to run it in the Flat format. (see screen grab of the exact verbage):

Screen Shot 2022-06-12 at 6.49.00 AM.png

Friday...all quiet...Saturday...paged...URGENT image problem on Jurassic. Image does not fill the screen. To make it even more strange...the site was playing it on multiple screens of which most had scope (2.39) screens but they only complained about one. That took numerous emails and a phone call or two to convince them that Flat movies do not fill scope screens (can you guess if they have masking or not?).

They are going to be running an F-166 movie soon and have now asked for a special set up for that format too...boy are they going to be disappointed to find that F-166 has even MORE dead screen.

So, they are okay with not filling a screen vertically (half of their screens are 1.85(ish)) but when a scope screen has pillar boxes, something is wrong.