Supermartyoh said:

Very interesting.... I knew all about Psycho's odd matting choices.

I remember reading somewhere that 2 Fast 2 Furious, while shot in Super 35 like its predecessor to make 4:3 full screen versions and crop appropriately to 2.35:1, had the SFX scenes done within the full 1.66:1 (I think) aperture, but everything else was hard matted to scope. What do you think of that?

Looks like i'll be checking the 4:3 DVDs along with the SE widescreens then.

I'm a bit confused by what you're saying... Hard matte to 2.35? If they did shoot super35, and crop non sfx shots to 2.35, the resulting prints sent to movie theaters would be in anamorphic. Not hard matte.

Sfx shots in 1.66 is a compromise between 4:3 and 2.35 and... Money/time! It's unheard of to make open matte sfx shots. Cropping a square format to 2.35 results in a lot of wasted pixels and any computer generated effect would have to increase their resolution by a large factor to account for this crop to insure that a cropped and blown up sfx will not look like crap. With 1.66, you either crop a little from the top and bottom (scope) or a little from the sides ("fulllscreen") and still maintain optimum quality.

EDIT: after some light searching, it appears that 2Fast2Furious shot their FX shots with VistaVision. In a nutshell, it's shooting 35mm like a still camera (film is advanced horizontally and each frame is 8 sprockets wide), so you have twice the negative space as Super35. Although the real negative size has a 1.5:1 aspect ratio, this is usually cropped to 1.66 or 1.85. That would explain the discrepancy.