Spaced Ranger said:
The above How The West Was Won smilebox was a wrong simulation of Cinerama for a few reasons. First, they cropped the picture -- enough said on that. Second, the screen top/bottom curvature is a circle without it's proper flattened perspective. Third, there is no (or almost none) perspective-compressed picture on the far sides due to the screen curvature. Fourth, they didn't offer me the job to do it right. :)
This is strange to visualize correctly, so I worked up a graphic to demonstrate the principle:
The picture is the original size source and the full area for the target curved-screen projection. The yellow 146° circle is the true width of the curved screen (ticked off in 10° increments, with the last 6° at the top). The green marker lines are the re-proportioned 3D screen to the 2D projection.
As clearly shown, the equidistant increments of the true screen translate into ever-greater-compressed horizontal picture on the target projection, toward the sides. The picture would first be proportionally resized larger to cover the width of the curvature (one can count the number of pixels per 10° across the top of the curve). Then it is horizontally resized into smaller widths of the target strips. (This demonstration shows only broad adjustment strips. The actual processing would be for resizing narrower strips for pixel-wide target strips.) That's for the horizontal.
The vertical is similarly approached with the resized height of each pixel-wide target strip to follow how much the circular screen is perspectively flattened (top and bottom need not be the same -- in fact, the bottom should be less and the top, more, to correspond to the best stadium-seat position).
Just thought I'd mention this bit of information from the wikipedia article for How the West was Won:
"Even though the aspect ratio of Cinerama was 2:59:1, Warner's new BD and DVD releases of the film offer an aspect ratio of 2.89:1, incorporating image information on both sides that was never meant to be seen when projected. The BD-exclusive SmileBox alternative has the intentional cropping intact."
Also, a mention of this from hidefdigest.com about the blu-ray:
"The Letterbox version has a slight bit more picture information on the left and right sides of the frame than the Smilebox does. According to David Strohmaier (director of the "Cinerama Adventure" documentary), this was done intentionally. During the video transfer, Warner scanned each camera negative from edge to edge, including parts of the frame that would never be seen during Cinerama projection. The studio opted to include all of that image in the Letterbox presentation as a sort of "bonus material," while the Smilebox version retains the small amount of cropping as it would have been seen in a Cinerama theater."
So their Smilebox version sounds like the image was correctly framed as it was meant to be projected - the non-smilebox version contains additional information that wasn't meant to be seen during projection. So they didn't crop it incorrectly from the sounds of this.
Also, there's some interesting info on this smilebox presentation over on this site:
http://www.hometheater.com/content/aspect-ratio-oddities-page-2
"According to David Strohmaier, director of the Cinerama Adventure documentary contained on the Blu-ray Disc, SmileBox was created with input from the American Society of Cinematographers (ASC) and some top visual-effects talent in Los Angeles. The process was designed to re-create the viewpoint of a seat in the 12th to 14th rows of the Seattle Cinerama theater."
Perhaps they faced some technical issues that made their decisions the best choice? It sure sounds like they spent an awful lot of effort handling this smilebox transfer - it wasn't just done on a whim.