Vertical & Horizontal Bars

What's with those black bars on the top and bottom of my screen?

The standard television screen proportions are 4:3 or 1.33:1, however theatrical movies are filmed in a variety of wide screen formats such as 1.85:1, 2.15:1 or 2.35:1. When wide screen movies are show on a standard television, there are two options for displaying the picture. The first option is "pan-and-scan". This is a method of cropping the full frame of the movie, so that it fills a 4:3 screen. The drawback to this is that quite a bit of the picture gets chopped off and the original scope of the scenes is ruined. On a movie filmed in 2.35:1, almost half of the picture is lost in the pan-and-scan process. The second option is to display the movie in its original aspect ratio. This results in the black bars on the top and bottom of the screen, however you are now seeing the movie as it was meant to be seen, without losing any of the picture.

F.A.Q.