In 1971, the industry standard size of the aperture gate was changed from 2.35:1 to 2.39:1, slightly reducing the height. The reason for this was to hide those ugly laboratory splices:
which are very distracting when almost every single shot change gives you a white flash of glue at the top and bottom.
So, while on the film, the image is printed at 2.35:1 (after being unsqueezed), it would have been projected at 2.39:1.
However, with 4KXX we made every effort to clean these up, and the same is probably true of the official Blurays (Either that or they just cropped them out).
Sometimes they’re just too big for that aperture plate to hide:
But at 24 fps you barely notice these big blobs of glue.
I’m sorry I didn’t see your post until now, was busy with Covid.
Thank you for these screen shots! Very neat to get a behind-the-scenes look at your work!