What are some of the terms I need to know when studying aspect ratios?
Excerpted from Wide Screen Film Processes, compiled by David Uy. Glossary of Standard Terms used in this section: • Academy Aperture – The standard ratio of 1.33:1 which represents the image area of a normally photographed image on a 35mm print using spherical lenses. • Anamorphic – As used in this document, the anamorphic process is a distortion free compression process which squeezes the horizontal image information by some specified factor while leaving the vertical image information alone. A special set of lenses must be used to reverse the process. • Aspect Ratio – The normalized ratio of physical image width to physical image height after decompression (if required). • Cropping – Selective deleting of part of the image on the edges. • Hard Matte – The image is filmed with the aspect ratio mask used in the camera itself. There is no safe area in this process. • Matting – As used in this document, this is the process designed by filmmakers to simulate the anamorphic process by taki
