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Originally posted by: jimbo
Actually there are four processes
anamorphic print - shotting the movie in its theatrical ratio and cutting off the sides for fullscreen. Oviously movies shot in this make widescreen superior. What was done with Star Wars.
Hard matte - Filming in fullscreen. Cutting off top and bottom. then cutting off sides to fullscreen. Widescreen version is better.
Super 35 - shooting the movie in an inbetween ratio so that the widescreen and fullscreen versions are pan scaned equally. Its worth noting that most effects shots will be done in hard matte for these movies.
Open (Soft) matte - shooting movies in 1.33 and simply cutting of tops and bottoms to create widescreen. Again effects shots are done in hard matte.
For the record bad_karma24 only Terminator 2 was shot Super 35. Terminator 3 was shot in soft matte.
Once again, your lack of knowledge of filmic processes shows your overall ignorance. Hard matte is called that because the frame is actually matted during filming. For example, Allen Daviau shot E.T. with a 1.75:1 hard matte. Such a process precludes making an open matte fullscreen transfer because you are restricted to what was actually shot. Thus the sides have to be cropped in order to make the film fit the frame. The end result is that the transfer is grainy as hell because only 25-30% of the film frame is being used at any one time.
Star Wars and many other 2.35:1 films are shot in anamorphic widescreen. What this does is puts a 2:1 squeeze on the film as it is being shot. During projection, a compensating lens is used to unsqueeze the film to its wider dimensions, giving us a 2.35-2.40:1 aspect ratio. To convert this to pan and scan, once again you are restricted by what was originally shot, so you lose ~46% of the frame at any given time. The only major downside to shooting in anamorphic is the tremendous amount of light required for shooting with an anamorphic lens, which tends to make night shooting extremely difficult.
Super 35 is a completely different beast. Rising from the ashes of RKO's Superscope process, Super 35 shoots using the entire width of the film between the sprocket holes (no sound on film), so the shooting AR is ~1.6:1, depending on if the camera shoots 3 perf or 4 perf (if 3 perf, AR is 2:1). In post-production, special effects are composed in the 2:1 ratio to make effects shots less grainy in video transfers and to allow more flexibility in panning and scanning. When the film is shown in theatres, the camera negative is matted to (usually) 2.35:1 and optically compressed by an anamorphic lens to make the film compatible with projectors across the planet. Conversion to a 1.33:1 ratio is one consideration that filmmakers like about shooting in Super 35; the other is flexibility. Because Super 35 is shot with flat lenses, lower light levels are possible and smaller cameras can be used.
BTW, T3 was shot Super 35, just like T2. Other recent films shot in Super 35 include the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Kill Bill vols I &II, Gladiator, Hannibal, and Titus.
Here endeth the lesson.