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The Pan and Scan technique

Podcaster Craig Syverson produced the following tutorial for his Gruntmedia.com. Here is a full transcript:

We all know the old adage that you can’t fit a square peg into a round hole, and as it relates to our current discussion, if the aspect ratio of the source material is not exactly the same as the aspect ratio of the screen you’re viewing it on, something’s gotta give. In today’s program we’ll discuss something we’ve probably all experienced, but maybe didn’t know exactly what was going on behind the scenes, and that is watching old movies on television.

From our last program you’ll remember we talked about how the wider film aspect ratios don’t quite relate to the taller 4:3 aspect ratio of our traditional televisions. To illustrate, let’s take a look at some examples from the 1966 MGM film, The Good the Bad and the Ugly. This film was shot in the 2.35 aspect ratio by the master widescreen cinematographer Tonino Delli Colli, and directed, of course, by Sergio Leone.

The second way is to evenly scale the image until the vertical dimensions are the same, thus filling the entire 4:3 screen with a picture, solving the distortion problem, but cropping parts off the image. This technique was the standard practice to present a movie on television, and is referred to as Pan and Scan.

To show you how it works, we’ll use an example from the next scene, shown here in its original width. It’s a standoff, four guys facing Clint, one draws, cut to Clint drawing faster, letting off three shots, three guys go down, cut to close-up of anti-hero, cut to close-up of gun barrel.

To make a Pan and Scan version, a technician would take the film footage and scan the area of the film to fit the 4:3 aspect ratio. For each shot, he would re-frame the scan to make the most compositional sense. In this opening shot, for instance, the scan would be of this section of film. He would then roll the footage until the next shot, reframe the scan area, roll again until it needed reframing, and so on. Now you’ll note that some of the image of the original film is cut out using this process, but like we said before, when the proportions are different, something’s gotta give.

So here’s how this scene would look modified for television: there’s the standoff - one, two, three shots fired, two guys go down, close-up, was this guy grazed by the bullet? Hard to say. Here is is again, we see and hear three shots, but only two guys fall.

Up until now we’ve been talking about the Scan part of Pan and Scan. This scene is a good example of where the Pan might be used. When the three shots go off, the technician could electronically pan the film as the action occurs, giving us a better sense of what’s going on. When we play this version back in the modified television dimensions, it looks like this. With this in mind, let’s take one more look at the full scene and compare the artificial pan to the original static wide shot.

As you might imagine, a lot of film directors and cinematographers are not all that happy about how their films look when they’re converted to a Pan and Scan, but one thing I learned recently is that up until the 1980’s, the Federal Communications Commission here in the US, mandated that all television signals had to fill the entire 4:3 screen with picture information, so up until that time time there was simply no other alternative.

Now with movies being released to DVD, this Pan and Scan process is used to make what is now called the Full Screen version, and the outside packaging for the disc might also make reference to an aspect ratio of 1.33, which we all know from program 2, is the same thing as 4:3. These altered versions will also flash this notorious statement at the beginning of the program that we’ve all come to know and love.

This article originally appeared at Craig Syverson's site, Gruntmedia.com.

In this series:

• All about aspect ratio
• All about the widescreen format
• The Pan and Scan technique
• All about letterboxing