Heads up - Jurassic World weird ass aspect ratio

[Marcel Birgelen]

DCP-o-matic aspect ratio handling has changed completely with the current 2.15/2.16 release.

I guess to be able to accomodate hipster-cinema, we should stop thinking about Aspect Ratio as something that's defined on a feature level, but more like a "safe bounding box" and an aspect ratio that can change every frame.

[Leo Enticknap]

[Carl Hetherington]

DCP-O-MATIC™ is going to have to add a few additional aspect ratios to its' library.
(said with with some amount of sarcasm- - but would have come in handy for two recent events)

Can you describe what you needed?

Is this F200 2:1 within a flat frame (1998x999)?

[Carsten Kurz]

The current version of DCP-o-matic let's you choose ANY arbitrary aspect ratio. Even inverse ARs for vertical video. But it is usually not necessary to force source footage into a specific aspect ratio, as the best way is to assume it comes with a properly flagged aspect ratio. For those few cases where this is not true, any numerical value can be set, and any interior aspect ratio can be achieved by applying cropping in both dimensions, both symmetrically and non-symmetrically. And all completely independent of the chosen container. All scaling settings are content based, so, if necessary, you could fit an unlimited number of different interior aspect ratios into a single DCP. The DCNC name, of course, could only indicate one of them, or, the most prominent, or simply indicate the container ar.

[Leo Enticknap]

Yes. F-XXX means a ratio other than 1.85 but within the 1.85 container (so if it's wider than 1.85, with a width of 1,998 (in 2K) but a height other than 1,080; if narrower than 1.85, with a height of 1,080 but a width other than 1,998). S-XXX means a ratio other than 2.39 but within the scope container, and C-XXX would be a ratio other than 1.90 but within the full container.

[Mike Babb]

At Tribeca FF in our venue we have had one 2.00 aspect ratio so far, marked as Flat. We also had what we think was a 1.90 but within a Flat wrapper and slightly justified to the top of the window. At Mountainfilm last month we had a 2.00 as well.

[Carsten Kurz]

There have been loads of mainstream movies in 2.0:1 in recent years. Oscar winners among them:

Green Book
Another Round
A rainy day in New York (all recent Woody Allen movies are 2.0:1)
Jurassic World (both the first and the current one).
A simple favor
Men in Black: International
Last Christmas
June Again
Kimi
The Northman
The Outfit

And that's just those that we played in recent years.

[Marcel Birgelen]

2.0:1: FLAT and SCOPE had a baby, they called if FLOPE. Since FLAT was the mother, it mostly ended up in her container...

[Jim Cassedy]

"NOPE = F-220"
We can add the upcoming release of NOPE to the ever increasing list of "2.20 - Play As Flat"
releases. Of course it only matters mostly to us folks here. Most theaters these days don't
have moveable maskings, or if they do-- they never move them anyway.

[Steve Guttag]

Actually, it is my maskingless theatres that struggle with F-200 and F-220 the most. In particular, those with "scope" screens because now the image doesn't touch any end of the screen.

Screen Shot 2022-07-20 at 8.09.43 AM.png

For Jurassic world...I got a significant number of emails and even paged, multiple times, that something is wrong with the projector and that the manager has verified it (customer complaints). Oddly enough, the theatres that paged did have dedicated projector presets for these formats (in particular, the F-200 for Jurassic World).

For Nope, it may be best to run the movie with the Scope preset, if one doesn't have a dedicated F-220 preset. It all depends on how tightly they framed it and if there is any vital content/text near the top/bottom.

Screen Shot 2022-07-20 at 8.10.15 AM.png

DCI specs, originally, only called for Flat and Scope and during the bulk of the digital conversion, that is what we set up for. After all, they only had the two lenses in the film days. The exception would be the art houses where they also tended to have lenses and the ability to present many ratios (though 2.20 wasn't one of them as that is, traditionally, a 70mm format). Once, the first F-200 and F-220 titles started hitting commercial releases, we set up new theatres, with either Scope or Masked screens with F-200 and F-220 (and masked screens got the full boat if they have multi-stop masking.

Now, if you have a "Flat Screen" with a nominal aspect ratio of 1.85:1, then these formats are of no consequence as they are just another letterboxed format.

Screen Shot 2022-07-20 at 8.20.16 AM.png

Likely due to TV/Home Video, letterboxed is MUCH more acceptable to pillarboxed.

[Carsten Kurz]

I find it more annoying that good practices regarding naming/indicating non-standard aspect ratios have gone belly up. Now often we get trailers with F-239 indicators, and main features without any indication, not in the name, not in the accompanying letter (if there is any at all).

Obviously those jerks mastering these DCPs give a shit about proper presentation in a cinema. I have probably shown already half a dozen non standard aspect ratio DCPs this year alone, and except for Jurassic World 3, not one of them was labeled properly. We recently showed 'The Electrical Life Of Louis Wain', and while it was 1.33:1, it only came labeled 'F'.

Looks as if I need to make a note and from now on check EVERY flat DCP in the future beforehand...until they start fucking up the scope container as well.

[Marcel Birgelen]

To be honest, I consider the whole DCP naming convention thing to be a failure, since it's considered "optional" and a "guideline" rather than a strict standard. It also has the potential for a lot of ambiguity.

Isn't it just bonkers that nobody ever came up with the idea of properly encoding the container's aspect ratio in one of the many metadata sections a DCP offers? The same thing for the name of the actual feature... By all means and purposes, I'd consider MKV as a far superior and better engineered mediacontainer format than DCP...

[Carsten Kurz]

The aspect ratio (and many other things) are contained in metadata for SMPTE DCPs - just that so much equipment in the field now is legacy equipment, and the manufacturers don't care about updating their software to make use of it. A major flaw of the late SMPTE transition.