Two weeks ago we
showed off a look at the package art for
Dallas - The Movie Collection, which is coming to DVD from Warner Home Video on
April 12th. When the studio provided the front package art, they also happened to provide a picture for the back of the box as well, so we decided to include that with our post. It seems like that's a good thing, because it came to our attention that some fans are freaking out about something mentioned back there, and we're happy to pass along an explanation which will clear up any confusion!
The specs portion of that image describes a video aspect ratio of "Widescreen" for the 1986 production
Dallas: The Early Year, a movie-of-the-week which was broadcast on television in the then-standard 4x3 ("full screen") aspect ratio. The description of the aspect ratio for that item mentions that the video is "matted" in order to achieve the widescreen format, and a few of our readers have alerted us to the fact that there are fans out there who misunderstood this. The perception, which is understandable based on previous releases (from this studio and from others), was that the mattes were added to the top and bottom. Such a move would end up in creating a "cropped-and-chopped" picture, resulting in a "false widescreen" picture that was missing some of the original image portions from the upper and lower areas.
This is NOT what's happening, however. Warner is instead adding black mattes to the left and right side of the 4x3 image, to extend it out to fit nicely into a "hard-coded" 16x9 widescreen image. Our friend Bill Hunt of The Digital Bits website
described this very well last week, posting this info:
I've asked Warner and they've informed me that the 1.78:1 presentation ISN'T CROPPED in any way. What the studio did was take the original 1.33 presentation and add side mattes to it to create a 16x9/1.78:1 presentation. So the ENTIRE 1.33 image area is visible in the new presentation. You're just going to have bars on the sides to fill up the remaining space. Get it? Good. 'Nuff said.
We had previously gotten the same information from the studio, but since we had only received a small number of e-mails asking about it, we were answering individual e-mails rather than posting a news item such as this one. However, we discussed it today and decided to pass along this information to the masses, having decided that the confusion was more widespread than we originally thought. Our regrets if we didn't come to this decision quickly enough! Hopefully this clears up the matter, and fans can be assured that they won't be missing a thing with "The Early Years" telefilm as found on
Dallas - The Movie Collection.
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