dcp trailers not being cropped (unlike film)

[Frank Cox]

It occurs to me that in the days of film the trailer images usually filled the screen - the trailer maker people did whatever cropping was needed and there was rarely any letterboxing of the image.

Now it's pretty much guaranteed that the trailer images are just jammed into the screen ratio that's in use and nobody bothers to do any cropping any more. Scope movie, flat dcp? Here's a long skinny image for you. Flat movie, scope screen? We didn't need the screen sides anyway....

I just don't remember seeing so much of that on film.

[Carsten Kurz]

What?
.

[Frank Cox]

I'll try to do a better job of explaining it.

Call of the Wild is a scope movie.

CalloftheWild_TLR‐1_S_EN‐EN‐CCAP_CA_51‐HI_2K_TCF_2 0191030_EKN_IOP_OV looks as expected, fills the screen to the scope size.

CalloftheWild_TLR‐1_F_EN‐EN‐CCAP_CA_51‐HI_2K_TCF_2 0191030_EKN_IOP_OV is letterboxed. You get the scope picture crammed into the flat screen size with black borders around it.

I don't remember seeing that so much with trailers on film. If they had made a trailer for Call of the Wild back then they would likely have done whatever they do (trimming the edges I suppose) to make the flat trailer image fill the flat screen instead of just cramming the whole scope picture into the flat screen with the black bars on the top and bottom.

It appears that these days they just make one version of the trailer (either flat or scope) and put it into two dcp's marking one scope and the other one flat with no effort to make it actually fit the "other" screen size.

[Marcel Birgelen]

I remember many trailers on film just being flat and scope features just being letter-boxed into those trailers. In some cases, you could order a proper scope trailer, but usually that privilege was reserved for the "feature trailer", the trailer you're supposed to play in front of the feature (if there was any).

There might be the occasional flat trailer of a scope feature that had their edges cropped off, but do you think that's a proper way to treat a trailer?

Switching between flat and scope wasn't much faster than it is nowadays, if you had it automated (depends a little on the different projectors obviously), so not something you did between every trailer.

[Frank Cox]

Perhaps I've just forgotten (but it doesn't seem like that long ago) but I thought letterboxing (both horizontal and vertical) wasn't really something that was done much until relatively recently, like maybe the last ten years or so. And before that they did some kind of custom edit like they used to do with the old videotapes to make the picture fit a standard television set.

Somehow I just don't remember seeing those black bars much when I was running film. Or have I really forgotten about it somehow?

I don't think it makes a really great presentation when you have a bunch of trailers that keep switching the image size on the screen. Now we have a skinny image in the middle, now we have a tall image with blank sides, now we have a picture that actually fills the screen, back to that skinny image and, blimey, now we finally have the feature and it's the only thing that actually looks like it was properly sized for that screen.

But that's how the movie companies make 'em now so there's not much we can do about it.

[Mike Blakesley]

I don't remember seeing that so much with trailers on film. If they had made a trailer for Call of the Wild back then they would likely have done whatever they do (trimming the edges I suppose) to make the flat trailer image fill the flat screen instead of just cramming the whole scope picture into the flat screen with the black bars on the top and bottom.

Heck, back in the film days it was often a fight for a small theater to get scope and flat versions of trailers. Often you'd get one or the other and either have to not run some trailers, or do a lens change on the fly. That's if you could get the trailers at all. So I have always been pretty much in the not-giving-a-crap category about what format the trailer is onscreen.

I went through a phase of playing all the "scope" trailers, but in the "flat" setting, so the scope picture would float in the screen, and then the feature film would come on at the correct setting and fill the screen up, but I've since reverted to playing the trailers at the proper format.

[Frank Angel]

Frank, it's just a matter of how far back you want to reminisce -- go back to dual projector systems and the attraction reel would always be shown flat. The cartoon and trailers would all be shown flat and then switch to the feature in scope or even if it was also flat, it was easy to do and never any problem. Except that is if the feature was scope and had an attached trailer. Then I would have to scramble to have them send a flat version of that trailer because the cartoon/trailer pack was an entity in and of itself -- the curtain closed after the attraction reel. I couldn't then open the curtain and play another trailer in front of the scope feature; the curtain opened for the feature. It would make no sense aesthetically if the curtain opened on another trailer. The curtain opening and masking widening for scope had to happen for the feature, not for a trailer after the cartoon and trailer already finished.

I remember Warner started putting an absurd amount of black between their attached front-end trailers. I was able to work with that, doing the change-over from the trailer pack in flat directly to to the 1st reel of the feature which opened with a scope trailer, opening the masking for the trailer, closing the curtain as the black ran thru, pausing and then opening it for the feature. But never really liked doing it that way because the idea was always to open the curtain and masking for the feature. Opening it for a trailer kinda defeated the whole dramatic impact of that mask move.

Then of course platers came and made that kind of meticulous presentation values even more difficult, although with motorized turrets you could still pull it off, even it you needed to add black more footage between the attached trailer. But unfortunately with the platters came curtainless, naked screens and in many cases screens wiithout masking as well as the curse of common width, so it became all moot anyway.

Now no one cares where the black bars show -- sides, top,bottom....hells, you are lucky if the feature isn't letterboxed or pillard or even cropped in the wrong aspect ratio frame. No point kvetching over it anymore. The picture is going to wind up where it winds up on the screen; "standards" are suggestions nowadays. I just saw MALEFICENT MISTRESS OF EVIL in which there was a black bar on the bottom of the screen, not on the top, just on the bottom. Halfway thru the movie I just gave up trying to figure out what could that be about. The youth in our party weren't bothered by it at all...didn't even notice it, in fact. For a public who watch movies on tablets and cellphones and watch cellphone videos taken by idiots holding the phones vertically, then play them back as skinny, claustrophobic strips of tall images in the middle of a 16:9 screen, a few black bars on a movie theatre screen seems hardly anything to fret about...except by people old enough to remember how we used to do it.

[Carsten Kurz]

In my (limited) 35mm career in germany, I have never seen a scope trailer that wasn't attached to a scope feature. Maybe we could have gotten scope trailers if we'd asked for them specifically, but all I ever assembled were flat/letterboxed scope in flat trailers. We always play(ed) our trailers in chronological 'upcoming' order, so, mixing flat and scope on our full manual setup would have been a nightmare anyway.

Now, for scope DCPs, we always have a choice between flat or scope DCP trailers when we download them.



Bildschirmfoto 2020-02-02 um 14.00.44.png

For most high-profile titles, we also get pillarboxed flat-in-scope trailers - e.g. recently for 'Knives out'.

I usually play letterboxed scope trailers in flat even immediately preceding a scope feature. As our full screen width is reserved for features. Very occasionally I change my mind on that rule.

- Carsten

[Marcel Birgelen]

In my (limited) 35mm career in germany, I have never seen a scope trailer that wasn't attached to a scope feature. Maybe we could have gotten scope trailers if we'd asked for them specifically, but all I ever assembled were flat/letterboxed scope in flat trailers. We always play(ed) our trailers in chronological 'upcoming' order, so, mixing flat and scope on our full manual setup would have been a nightmare anyway.

Like I said in my post, that's how I remember it too. Maybe in the U.S., it was more common to release scope trailers and ship them by default. In some rare cases, if you called and asked for a scope trailer for some big upcoming movie, they had one available for you. But the limited number of scope trailers, not attached to a scope feature, there were, probably primarily went to the big boys first.

[Frank Cox]

I used to get a more-or-less random assortment of trailers every week that was shipped in another box along with the feature. As I recall, everything from Warner came with both a flat and a scope trailer and stuff from the other companies was apparently just whatever happened to be laying around at the film warehouse. Sometimes I would end up with three copies of a scope version of a movie and no flat version, and vice versa. I could phone the warehouse and ask them for a trailer that I wanted and if they had it they would send it with the next movie but sometimes they didn't have one either.

But I really don't remember too many of them being letterboxed. If I played a flat trailer of Movie X from Warner the image filled the screen, and if I played a scope version of Movie X from Warner the image still filled the screen. A lot of the time I wasn't sure if a movie would be flat or scope when I got it since the trailers both looked "normal".

Doing that properly takes more skill and artistry than just whacking the sides or the top and bottom off of an image to make a trailer in the other format and it seems that nobody bothers to do that any more.

But it is nice to have all of the trailers immediately available and not have to go on a hunt for them any more. So digital has an advantage there.

[Marcel Birgelen]

Even before we went digital, the amount of open matte releases was pretty limited, so it was either a pan&scan affair or simply cropping off the edges. If a movie is actually filmed in open matte, I don't have a problem with creating a scope and flat trailer out of it, but otherwise, I'd say that a cinematic trailer should at least present the end product.

It's interesting to see that most moviegoers have no clue about a thing like aspect ratio at all, yet I'm pretty sure that subcontinental, it's a big part of how you experience a movie.

[Mike Blakesley]

In the tradition of that old saying "Follow the money," I'm sure it is more expensive to have some editor re-frame a scope movie to go into a flat container... so they just put the bars on it and let it go. Plus, I can see directors getting all bent out of shape if the trailer for their movie ruins their artistic framing vision. (Never mind that half the audience views their vision on a 6" phone screen, a couple of minutes at a time.)

As for attached trailers..... I never saw an attached trailer whose format was different from the feature film. I'd guess if that DID happen, it was an error at the shipping depot -- because in some cases, those trailers were attached to the feature by the depot, not printed as part of the print.(as became the later practice once every feature had an attached trailer).

[Frank Cox]

The biggest screw-up that I ever saw for screen ratio was One Hour Photo.

The paper reel bands said Scope.
The headers all had Scope printed on them. (Lab print, not just written on there.)

The movie was flat. *boggle*

I had set the whole thing up as a scope movie, with scope trailers and everything. Then had to do a really quick lens change when the feature started the first night.

After that I got paranoid and always tried to figure out the ratio for every movie after that. Never saw another one that was marked incorrectly though.

[Marcel Birgelen]

I've seen the wrong headers on a feature before, but I don't know what feature it was. I'm pretty sure it wasn't One Hour Photo though. In this particular case it was a pre-release print though.

I also remember more than once that reel numbering went wrong. We ended up messing up the pre-release screening of Hidalgo this way, where we could just build the print in time. What went out to the audience was an incomprehensible mess, because reel 2 and 3 were swapped...

I still remember the reaction of the audience... Some had something like an epiphany and apparently there was a whole bunch of folks that didn't notice it at all. Apparently, there is a whole bunch of people out there that doesn't need a comprehensible story-line to watch a movie.

[Frank Cox]

Shortly after I got the digital cinema stuff installed I had a movie that played in the wrong order, just as though I had mixed up the reels on film. I phoned Technicolor and they emailed me a tiny little file to ingest that solved the problem. I'm not sure what that file was and the whole digital cinema thing was still new enough to me that I didn't really understand the fix but it worked so I was happy enough with the result.