Where does this come from, and can I check it?

Black bars above and below let a widescreen film fit an older television. The figure is taken from BFI, which is linked in full on this page. Every fact on Mondo Knows names its source rather than repeating an unsourced claim.

Is this really a movies & tv fact?

Yes. It sits on the Movies & TV shelf, one of 2,600 sourced facts grouped into space, animals, the human body, history, science and more. Category pages collect every fact in the same field.

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The links under the fact point to a quiz, game, puzzle or calculator on the same subject, and the shelf below shows related facts. The wording here is original, and quoted phrases are marked as quotations.

Mondo Knows Facts

Letterboxing kept the wide shape on square sets

Black bars above and below let a widescreen film fit an older television When widescreen films reached video, the choice was to crop the sides or shrink the picture and fill the spare height with black. Early tapes and broadcasts usually cropped, which cut actors out of group shots. Letterboxed releases became common on DVD and are now the normal way to show a film at home. It sits in Mondo's movies & tv collection, one of 200 facts that each trace back to the reference below.

Where this comes from

BFI

Facts that can change over time are reviewed and updated. If something here looks wrong, Mondo would rather know than be confidently incorrect.

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Movies & Television trivia Technology trivia

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16:9 was a compromise between film shapesEngineers picked a ratio roughly between old television and widescreen cinema Telecine machines copied film onto tapeA flying spot scanner read each frame and turned it into a video signal Music television began with one videoMTV opened in 1981 and made the promotional film a career maker VHS beat Betamax by recording for longerVHS could hold a whole evening on one cassette where Betamax could not Super 35 crops the picture for widescreenThe negative is exposed full height and masked to a wide shape later The Academy ratio ruled screens until the 1950sA frame of about 1.37 to 1 was the standard shape of cinema for two decades

Tags: aspect-ratio, video, television

Letterboxing kept the wide shape on square sets: the short answers

Where does this come from, and can I check it?: Black bars above and below let a widescreen film fit an older television. The figure is taken from BFI, which is linked in full on this page. Every fact on Mondo Knows names its source rather than repeating an unsourced claim.
Is this really a movies & tv fact?: Yes. It sits on the Movies & TV shelf, one of 2,600 sourced facts grouped into space, animals, the human body, history, science and more. Category pages collect every fact in the same field.
What else can I read about it?: The links under the fact point to a quiz, game, puzzle or calculator on the same subject, and the shelf below shows related facts. The wording here is original, and quoted phrases are marked as quotations.