I'm watching The Thing (1982) and the picture looks like I'm looking through a letterbox, with a large black boarder around the picture. I mean it is in proportion with the rest of the screen so why don't they fill it? I'm tempted to not watch the flick because of it. I'm finding it too distracting.

It's lack of uniformity is what it is.

Alter the aspect ratio.

Thanks, shipmate. That was easy.

If using a widescreen TV, sometimes it's because of the fact that the DVD is non-anamorphic (not made to fit widescreen TVs).

You need a new TV.

Non-anamorphic DVDs. There seemed to be a lot of them made in the '90s to primarily suit old 4:3 TVs.

They suck!

They suck now, but if you were planning on watching the movie on a 4:3 CRT TV in 1998 (which most people would have been), that was the best way to do it.

That's not exactly true I believe. There's been anamorphic DVDs back then just the same, and all you had to do was tell your player the AR of your TV set to have it scale the image correctly.

The real issue presumably was that letterboxing had been the only way to make widescreen work on VHS. And that the production of an anamorphic DVD would have involved doing a new transfer. So that's probably the reason why quite a few DVDs were still letterboxed at that time, because they were merely digitizing their old VHS transfers due to cost considerations.

Yes, anamorphic DVDs existed, but all PAL DVDs had an image size of 720 x 576 pixels, and all NTSC DVDs had an image size of 720 x 480 pixels.

You could anamorphically transfer the 2.35:1 image of THE THING to fill the entire frame, but in order to display it correctly on a 4:3 625-line PAL TV, sooner or later, the image will have to be converted to about 327 scanlines. Better to do it from the outset, before MPEG-2 compression is applied.

THE THING was re-released on an anamorphic DVD in 2004, because 16:9 TV sets were becoming the norm by then.

(A lot of DVD transfers re-sourced laserdisc masters rather VHS masters.)

I'm not sure what that has to do with letterboxing. Of course, to meet different standards of different markets you have to digitize your analog source to conform to each one you want to release your DVD on. Like PAL in Europe. And NTSC in North America.

And no, you don't scan the source to the specifications of a (PAL resp. NTSC) TV standard. You scan it to the specifications of PAL resp. NTSC as defined by MPEG2 (in the case of DVDs). And the player has to accommodate whatever the TV set demands. That's why you're telling it what type yours is. That's been a key ingredient to the whole idea, from the get-go.

I'm not sure I can follow what you're trying to say.

What I'm specifically saying is that for a 4:3 PAL CRT TV set to correctly display a 2.35:1 movie, the movie will always take up about 327 of the TV's scanlines.

An Anamorphic Region 2 DVD of such a movie would place a 720 x about 435 pixels image into a 720 x 576 pixels frame with a 1.42 pixel aspect ratio, but, in order to display this image correctly on a 4:3 PAL TV, those 435 rows of pixels would have to be resized, by the DVD player, to be displayed as 327 scanlines.

It's preferable, in the case of display on a 4:3 PAL CRT TV, for the movie image to be resized to 720 x 327 and placed within a 720 x 576 frame with a pixel aspect ratio of .9375 prior to MPEG-2 lossy encoding.

I used to work at a place that used Sony Vegas during the time that Vegas had a PAL PAR bug, so I know these numbers, because I used to have to identify which pipelines would be affected by the bug.

All of this is a bit technical, and only really of historical interest, but it explains why I said

They suck now, but if you were planning on watching the movie on a 4:3 CRT TV in 1998 (which most people would have been), that was the best way to do it.

Except those last lines were said by you in the context of the prevalent use of letterboxing back then. To which I replied that there's been (full frame) anamorphic DVDs in 1998 (and earlier) already. DVDs which, obviously, merely needed to be scaled down to whatever number of scan lines the specific aspect ratio required, by the player.

Now, that was "the best way to do it" in 1998, when 4:3 TV sets were still widespread, as much as it it now. Not letterboxing. Why? Because that's the type of encoding most robust towards variations in TV dimensions while still retaining the full vertical resolution of the source.

More precisely, letterboxing sucks now. It didn't suck back then with 4:3 CRTs. But it still wasn't the best way to do it. It's never been, in the digital context. Even laserdiscs, if they hadn't been obsoleted, would finally have become anamorphic.

I think we'll just have to agree to disagree.

Don't get me wrong, I do understand what you're getting at. That digitizing the source to the exact "pixel" dimensions of the envisioned 4:3 CRT output would be the optimal encoding, visually and space efficiency wise.

But the visual part could be argued. Because if you scan anamorphically you retain a higher vertical resolution, and then it's all boiling down to the quality of consumer equipment scale-down ("down" should probably be emphasized here) algorithms, which are typically cheap and not really lossy compared to an original scan to the same dimensions.

While the other aspect I was trying to highlight is that anamorphic encoding, while arguably just as good visually on a standard 4:3 output, is the more robust one, regarding TV dimensions (see OP). While packing as much visual information into the full frame as it could possibly hold.

To debate the point further would require discussion of polynomial interpolation, the discrete cosine transform, motion vectors, 4:2:0 chrominance sampling and the like.

It's all academic.

The letterboxed widescreen DVD was the most appropriate way of releasing the movie in 1998; the anamorphic widescreen DVD was the most appropriate way of releasing it in 2004; Blu-ray was the most appropriate medium in 2008.

Still a cool movie, however you watch it.

Feel free to discuss them and make a convincing argument, while precisely stating for what exactly. I'm game. And, again, no.

Widescreen VHS was pretty rare. Most of those old letterboxed DVDs were made from Laserdisc masters.

Letterboxing was how widescreen was emulated on 4:3 VHS. That's what we're talking about. The same applies to laserdiscs, which weren't anamorphic either.

Don't watch The Thing on DVD. Watch it on Blu-ray. You have the TV for it. No reason not to.

I have noticed this as well. The two black bars have more coverage than the film. You should be able to adjust the way the TV is playing the film. Play with the aspects ratios.

The reason for this is letterboxing. The image on your DVD is actually 4:3, and the top/bottom black borders are coded into that image. Now, when you playback a 4:3 image on a widescreen TV it doesn't fill the screen, you get black borders left and right. And that's how these borders come together, the left and right ones are due to the 4:3 format and the top/bottom ones are actually part of the film frame.

As has already been noted, you can fix that to some extent by using scaling capabilities of your player and/or TV set, depending on what functions are available on your equipment.

There may also be a specific button on your remote control (TV) to quickly alter the aspect ratio. The button may pull up a menu like "Stretch/Side Bar/Zoom" or something. This is especially useful for watching academy (1.33) ratio films on a 16:9 widescreen.

For letterboxed DVDs it should ideally be zoom of course, to scale the image linearly (i.e. proportionally). Because fiddling around with AR typically introduces distortion. But zoom can't be assumed to be generally available, that's why I said whatever the equipment provides.

Do not listen to some of these guys. Keep the black bars at the top and bottom. WIdescreen tvs are all very well but they do not represent the full width of the film.

Stick to the black bars.