Pan & Scan?

[J. Baker]

I've had three dvd players and the "Pan & Scan" option has never worked. It still displays the wide-screen bars on my tv. Does anyone have any information on this?

[manono]

Yes, that feature has never been implemented on any DVDs. At best, there are some menus that take advantage of it:

For automatic pan & scan mode, the anamorphic video is unsqueezed to 16:9 and the sides are cropped off so that a portion of the image is shown at full height on a 4:3 screen by following a center of interest offset encoded in the video stream according to the preferences of those who transferred the film to video. The pan & scan "window" is 75% of the full width, which reduces the horizontal pixels from 720 to 540. The pan & scan window can only travel laterally. This does not duplicate a true pan & scan process in which the window can also travel up and down and zoom in and out. Auto pan & scan has three strikes against it: 1) it doesn't provide the same artistic control as studio pan & scan, 2) there is a loss of detail when the picture is scaled up, and 3) equipment for recording picture shift information is not widely available. Therefore, no anamorphic movies have been released with auto pan & scan enabled, although some discs use the pan & scan feature in menus so that the same menu video can be used in both widescreen and 4:3 mode. In order to present a quality full-screen picture to the vast majority of TV viewers, yet still provide the best experience for widescreen owners, some DVD producers choose to put two versions on a single disc: 4:3 studio pan & scan and 16:9 anamorphic.

http://www.dvddemystified.com/dvdfaq.html#3.5

Stupid idea anyway.

[J. Baker]

Thanks for the info. I do prefer 16:9 myself but was just wondering why this feature never worked.

[skidog]

works on my LG 730, perhaps you have to restart the file or reload the dvd for it to take effect if you were trying to enable it from a menu while the file was playing.

Pan scan is for old people like my parents who want the whole screen filled regardless of what they're missing on the sides. I preffer letterbox and i use he zoom option on the fly if i feel the need.

[j1d10t]

Edited:

Posted to the wrong topic

Sorry

[ntscuser]

Yes, that feature has never been implemented on any DVDs. At best, there are some menus that take advantage of it:

For automatic pan & scan mode, the anamorphic video is unsqueezed to 16:9 and the sides are cropped off so that a portion of the image is shown at full height on a 4:3 screen by following a center of interest offset encoded in the video stream according to the preferences of those who transferred the film to video. The pan & scan "window" is 75% of the full width, which reduces the horizontal pixels from 720 to 540. The pan & scan window can only travel laterally. This does not duplicate a true pan & scan process in which the window can also travel up and down and zoom in and out. Auto pan & scan has three strikes against it: 1) it doesn't provide the same artistic control as studio pan & scan, 2) there is a loss of detail when the picture is scaled up, and 3) equipment for recording picture shift information is not widely available. Therefore, no anamorphic movies have been released with auto pan & scan enabled, although some discs use the pan & scan feature in menus so that the same menu video can be used in both widescreen and 4:3 mode. In order to present a quality full-screen picture to the vast majority of TV viewers, yet still provide the best experience for widescreen owners, some DVD producers choose to put two versions on a single disc: 4:3 studio pan & scan and 16:9 anamorphic.

http://www.dvddemystified.com/dvdfaq.html#3.5

Stupid idea anyway.

Manono, you are confusing "automatic pan & scan" with the regular variety. The latter is a Prohibited User Option on most titles. I have a Pioneer with hacked firmware which enables me to view widescreen movies in pan & scan mode whether it is a PUO or not. Since I have a 16:9 TV it is very little use to me.

[manono]

Manono, you are confusing "automatic pan & scan" with the regular variety.

No I'm not.

I have a Pioneer with hacked firmware which enables me to view widescreen movies in pan & scan mode

Sure, maybe you can view them, but all it's doing is cropping. That's not Pan&Scan. There is no movie on DVD which has both widescreen and true Pan&Scan. Maybe both WS and P&S encoded twice on the same DVD. Maybe one side WS and the other P&S. Maybe one disc WS and another P&S. But not a WS that can also be viewed as P&S, with lateral movement of the "camera". I didn't make it up. You don't believe the DVDDemystified guy?

J. Baker, the OP, was asking about P&S, not cropping.

[ntscuser]

Manono, you are confusing "automatic pan & scan" with the regular variety.

No I'm not.

I have a Pioneer with hacked firmware which enables me to view widescreen movies in pan & scan mode

No you don't. Sure, maybe you can view them, but all it's doing is cropping.

Yes I know that, but as far as the average viewer is concerned it is the same thing.

I can do the same thing with the Zoom on my TV or remote control. That's not Pan&Scan. There is no movie on DVD which has both widescreen and true Pan&Scan. Maybe both WS and P&S encoded twice on the same DVD. Maybe one side WS and the other P&S, but not a WS that can also be viewed as P&S, with lateral movement of the "camera". I didn't make it up. You don't believe the DVDDemystified guy?

Of course I do, I'm not arguing semantics.

J. Baker, the OP, was asking about P&S, not cropping.

Was he? Whereabouts in his post does he state that?

[manono]

Hehe, you quoted me before I edited out some of the rudeness (the "No you don't").

Was he? Whereabouts in his post does he state that?

Well, I can in turn ask you about this:

Yes I know that, but as far as the average viewer is concerned it is the same thing.

Where is it shown that J. Baker is unaware of the difference between a Pan&Scan and a crop? All I have to go on is what he wrote. He is specifically asking how to get a P&S out of his widescreen movie. Don't most people know that in a P&S, the "camera" moves all around inside the original WS frame? Anyway, I don't think that hacked feature of your DVD player is all that common, and every retail DVD I've ever seen has 16:9 Automatic Letterbox set, and not 16:9 Automatic Pan&Scan. As you know, he can also put the DVD on his hard drive and change it to 16:9 Automatic Pan&Scan using IFOEdit or PGCEdit, and then he can do the same as you. At least I think so. I've never tested to see how that'll look on a widescreen TV set.

It's all academic anyway. True P&S is bad enough. Cropping is exponentially worse.

[J. Baker]

Yes, I know the difference of P&S and cropping. I also later did think of editing it with IFOEdit but never got around to it. I'm sure it would work though.

[AlanHK]

It's all academic anyway. True P&S is bad enough. Cropping is exponentially worse.

I've got a 4:3 29" TV. Sometimes when watching a widescreen movie, perhaps 2.35:1, I get annoyed at losing 2/3 of my screen to letterboxing. I may zoom to 150%, which still leaves some letterbox bars, but at least I can see the actors' faces. (Most recently "The Departed".)

Most scenes are framed so nothing is lost in this mode; occasionally I'll switch back to 100% if there is truly "wide screen action". My daughter likes to zoom to 200% to get full screen, but that often partially crops speaking actors.

One of the extras on "The Interpreter" DVD had the director Sydney Pollack explaining how much he hated pan and scan versions; I think he deliberately framed scenes so they couldn't be cropped.

Once somehow the pan-and-scan option on my DVD player got set accidentally. It took me a couple of days before I noticed all the new movies were full screen and badly cropped...

[manono]

Sit closer.

What should annoy you even more is losing 43-45% of the picture when a TV station shows a widescreen movie as panned and scanned.

Gee, I didn't think The Departed was out on DVD for another 2 weeks. That's true in R1 anyway. You HK guys seem to get everything before we do. I wonder why that is?

[AlanHK]

What should annoy you even more is losing 43-45% of the picture when a TV station shows a widescreen movie as panned and scanned.

Yes. But if I can choose to zoom back out to 100% when necessary, it's okay.
When a scene is two people talking in a room, seeing the faces trumps what's on a sidetable.
But I don't make a habit of it.

Gee, I didn't think The Departed was out on DVD for another 2 weeks. That's true in R1 anyway. You HK guys seem to get everything before we do. I wonder why that is?

Well, the menu was in Russian...