Info Wanted: 'The Dark Knight' - and others with shifting IMAX ratio...

I can’t seem to find a search function so my apoligies if there is a thread already.

I recently bought a 2.35 screen for my CIH set up and it’s awesome with scope movies. I have both Dark knight movies on BD and it’s a bitch watching them this way with the changing aspect ratio. The picture spills on the walls when the IMAX scenes appear

I use the zoom on the projector since I don’t have a video processor/scaler or an anamorphic lens.

Has anybody done a 2.35 crop of these movies?

Why not just get the widescreen DVD (which is 2.35:1 all the way through) and crop the Blu-Ray video based on it? That would look much better than a hybrid BR-HDTV version, I'd imagine.

Mass5160 said:

itv did air TDK the other day in 2.35:1 throughout, which I recorded in HD. I'm in the process of merging this recording with the BR. I've actually noticed 1 use of an alternate take (possibly shot from a different angle) in place of an imax shot, Alfred burning the letter towards the end of the film. Not sure of any other cases of this as the frame counts don't differ, which makes them hard to find.

 Interesting.

How did the presentation look overall. did it match the blu in colour ect.

Mass5160 said:

A simple 2.35 "crop" wouldn't look right, as for some shots, important areas would be clipped, and other shots would just look odd. It's quite uncommon for the important picture information to be directly in the middle on the IMAX scenes.

Neither "Dark Knight" film suffers visually when projected "cropped" on a scope screen. During production, the films were purposefully framed in such a way as to protect for either aspect ratio.

Mass5160 said:

I said "a simple crop" -- as in, hacking the top and bottom of the BR scenes without shifting them would look odd, hence why I mentioned the action not always being in the middle. I guess I'll have to be more specific next time.

 That's what I understood you to mean. The Blu-ray releases of the "Dark Knight" films play just fine on a scope screen when performing the "simple crop" which you describe. My own home theater is set up for constant image height, for which I utilize my projector's vertical stretch option in combination with an anamorphic lens. The framing of these two films does not suffer by being cropped in this way.

Mass5160 said:

I read my earlier post back and hope I didn't come across as snobbish, I apologise if I did the voice in my head sounded very different at the time.

Anyway, the beginning when the Joker puts that...gas spraying thing in the bank manager's mouth looks odd to me when cropping the BR to 2.35, as do close up shots of Bruce Wayne driving his fancy car (the top of his head is cut off). The alternate shot at the end as well, while very subtle, is still there. There could be more, but I don't really have the patience to check, I only found this one by accident.

No worries -- it's hard to convey tone through text in forum posts between perfect strangers.

I'll have to go back and check out those scenes. From past viewings I really don't remember anything seeming unbalanced, and from what I've read they took great care to preserve the framing.

Mass5160 said:

@CSchmidlapp - It was the same transfer as seen on the BR with the edge enhancement present, the IMAX scenes also have the edge enhancement, and compared to the BR are mostly noticeably duller, colour-wise.

 Cheers.

Maybe it is from the same master that was used for the DVD?

@Starthoughts

Always bugged me also.

With the Blu Releases they could have given us a choice via seamless branching or something to that effect. The IMAX sequences are cropped anyway to fit the screen, so it does not fully represent the IMAX photography.

What do we got more?

Transformers?

Star Trek?

I saw Guardians of the galaxy on BD and the 3D have shifting ratio, I would guess that maybe 60% was in 1.78. The regular version is 2.35

Asaki said:

budwhite said:

I recently bought a 2.35 screen for my CIH set up and it's awesome with scope movies. I have both Dark knight movies on BD and it's a bitch watching them this way with the changing aspect ratio. The picture spills on the walls when the IMAX scenes appear

 I didn't know they made wide screens for projectors. My friend had an old-school portable screen, and once we got the DVD player's aspect ratio set up correctly, switching between widesreen movies and fullscreen ones (or TV shows) was always effortless.

We even tried projecting a few VHSes, it wasn't as bad as you'd expect.

 Sure do. And with just a few  seconds on the remote and the projector is switching to 1.78 or vice versa. No manual zoom here :D

Vudu has constant aspect ratios, if you're interested.

digitalfreaknyc said:

Vudu has constant aspect ratios, if you're interested.

 Is this also the case with The Dark Knight Rises?

CSchmidlapp said:

digitalfreaknyc said:

Vudu has constant aspect ratios, if you're interested.

 Is this also the case with The Dark Knight Rises?

I noticed Amazon Instant Video does too, but there's no way of downloading it unfortunately.