Mondo Knows Facts
Super 35 crops the picture for widescreen
The negative is exposed full height and masked to a wide shape later Super 35 uses the whole silent aperture of the 35mm frame, including the strip normally kept for the soundtrack. The final 2.39:1 picture is extracted by cropping top and bottom, which leaves spare room for reframing and for visual effects. It became common in the 1980s and 1990s. It sits in Mondo's movies & tv collection, one of 200 facts that each trace back to the reference below.
Where this comes from
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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More facts like this
The Academy ratio ruled screens until the 1950sA frame of about 1.37 to 1 was the standard shape of cinema for two decadesLetterboxing kept the wide shape on square setsBlack bars above and below let a widescreen film fit an older television16:9 was a compromise between film shapesEngineers picked a ratio roughly between old television and widescreen cinemaOptical sound is printed beside the pictureA wavering line of light and dark runs down the edge of every frameSeventy millimetre prints carried magnetic soundStrips of iron oxide were glued to the edges to hold six audio tracksFilm stock was slit from 70mm rollsEastman Kodak cut Edison's wide roll in half to make the standard gauge
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Tags: aspect-ratio, film-formats, cameras
Super 35 crops the picture for widescreen: the short answers
- Where does this come from, and can I check it?
- The negative is exposed full height and masked to a wide shape later. The figure is taken from Encyclopaedia Britannica, 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.