Derann Widescreen prints

[Phil Moors]

I was curious why Derann Films took all widescreen releases and cropped them to Cinemascope 2.66 to 1. Many of the releases were filmed in Panavision 2.35 to 1, this cropping resulting in heads near to the top of the frame, and titles being cropped sometimes at the bottom of the screen. Wouldn’t it have been better to have printed the film directly on to the Super 8 frame as it was on the original negative or print? I know that Cinevision had proportionally reduced prints, why didn’t Derann do the same. Strangely my print of the Big Parade from ‘Hello Dolly’ released by Derann has black bars at each side and the frame ratio is correct and the print looks so much better.

is one of the reasons that widescreen lenses are not available for the Panavision format for collectors, 2.66 lenses being the only ones?

[Martin Davey]

The compression factor (x2) is the same. The cineavision process would have been an extra step. It would have been cheaper and easier, as Derann did, just to take what is there on 35mm and stick it in to a super 8 frame. Super 8 has a 1.33:1 frame while 35mm has a 1.18:1 frame, so gets cropped top and bottom in the reduction. Super 8 scope looks 'clumsy' to my eyes with the compromised composition of the image, and not what the DOP would want.

[Osi Osgood]

I noticed this the most on the Tom and Jerry scope cartoons, released by Derann, where the logo and lettering is literally only half there.

[Brian Fretwell]

I have a feeling that most of the full length ones were from negatives produced for 16mm prints which were already cropped like that.

Some Iver digests were even worse. I remember one review of Gold saying that the lab over-scanned (not digitally in those days) when making the negative so much that in some shots people lost most of their heads.

[Adrian Winchester]

I don't think it was specifically a Derann decision; I believe it applied to all or nearly all Super 8 releases from any company other than Animex (who were responsible for the Cineavision prints). I doubt whether anyone likes the cropping at the top/bottom so Derann would have pleased customers if this didn't apply. Hopefully someone can explain fully but I've always heard that the process involved in the Cineavision process was considerably more involved than might be imagined, with a downside being the prints were one generation further away from the master used, hence not particularly sharp. They were also more expensive to produce. Animex head Dr. van Tettering was an enthusiast and it was more a labour of love on his part rather than a profit-making business.

[Mitchell Dvoskin]

After 35mm mag/optical (as opposed to the original mag only) sound was introduced in the mid/late 1950's (I forget what year), CinemaScope was standardized at 2.35:1 until the 1990's when the standard was changed to 2.39:1. Nothing changed on the film, the aperture plate height was reduced to better hide splices. Panavision matched CinemaScope's standard because while most anamorphic films were shot with Panavision lenses, 99% of theatres played them using CinemaScope lenses. For a theatre, CinemaScope and Panavision were interchangeable.

16mm 1.66:1 is a severely height cropped format. As mentioned above, the aspect ratio of a 35mm scope film has more height. The 35mm frame still uses the entire picture area for width, but the height a frame exceeds what would fit in a 1.33 or 1.37 frame. 35mm film and projectors can handle this extra height, 16mm film and projectors cannot, so the top and bottom of the scope image is cropped off of 16mm prints. Occasionally you will come across a 16mm scope print with the image reduced and black bars on the side to compensate for the 16mm frame height limitation, along with a briefly used 16mm format called WarnerScope (prints and lenses) that expanded the image 1.5X instead of 2.0X to reduced the obvious 16mm scope cropping.

[Larry Arpin]

On a few of the scope trailers I released a few years back I reduced the top and bottom to fit the 16mm frame bringing in black on the sides. The trick, since I was using prints to dupe from, is to avoid the soundtrack from bleeding into the picture. I'm sure Animex negatives came from interpositives so they didn't have to worry about that. You can see the curve of the movement in picture instead of it being squared off.