2015-06-03, 16:01
I have a question that's been bothering me for quite a while. I have noticed that most "old" movies (say, released before the 90s) re-released on bluray have a full screen HD resolution, be it 1080p and 720p, without letterboxing (further I will refer to this as "full screen HD". Not very technically accurate I know). This is also the case for most "indie" movies I come across, but almost all moderate to big budget movies are released with letterboxing and it kind of confounds me. The fact that indie movies are released with "full screen HD" tells me it's not done to save costs for most movies of a regular length (or in any case it's not something the Avengers budget couldn't surmount) so why is this the case? I know that the reason of letterboxing is because of the camera that the movie was shot with, so the heart of my question would be why do they keep using these cameras knowing that in the end people will not take full advantage of their HD screens. And before you say "well, home theaters are an after thought, their real target is cinema" then you have to account for Avatar, that was released in "full screen HD" and this movie obviously had cinema in mind. Also, Interstellar mixed letterhead with "full screen HD" and the latter was intended for cinema, specifically IMAX. So I guess you can see now why this confounds me I hope the kind people in kodi could give me a good explanation. My guess right now is that inertia has set in and they don't really care much in solving it but a lot of video engineers work on this movies so it seems a very simplistic explanation.
PS: Although it's not specific to kodi it is vaguely related. I could not post it to offtopic myself for some reason. Any moderator: feel free to move it there!
PS: Although it's not specific to kodi it is vaguely related. I could not post it to offtopic myself for some reason. Any moderator: feel free to move it there!