TServo2049 said:

Mavimao said:

Space Kaijuu said:

Ah, Jurassic Park and its weird combo of open-matte and hard-matted scenes.

It was actually common practice for films to have their special effects shots hard-matted. Less area to work with = less work to do.

That's not why. It's because VFX were usually done in VistaVision, with a wider AR. For the final negative, they were reduced to hard-matted 4-perf.

Oh right, silly me. My mind was too stuck in Jurassic Park where the special effects were done electronically and not photochemically.