By Stuart Bayens, Circulation/Audio - Visual, Stanley A. Milner Library

"This film has been modified from its original version.It has been formatted to fit your TV."We ’ve all seen this message at the start of a videocassette,but what does it really mean?And what do Woody Allen and Warren Beatty have to do with it being there?

When a movie is transferred from film to video, a number of technical decisions have to be made. The first major hurdle is to accommodate the difference between movie theatre and television screen shapes. When a movie is presented in a theatre, the image is usually much wider than it is tall. Television images are almost square. The shape and size of the image is known as its "aspect ratio".

The aspect ratio for film images can vary between 1:1.6 (the image is 1.6 times wider than it is high) all the way up to 1:2.85 (this would be an ultra-widescreen presentation). The aspect ratio for most TV screens is 1:1.33 (sometimes referred to as 4 by 3).

Traditionally, widescreen movies have been transferred to video using a method called "pan & scan." Usually a technician not involved in the artistic process is responsible for choosing the most important part of a widescreen film image and centering that for the video transfer. When action takes place on the sides of the movie image, the technician is forced to move the video image around to follow it.

It is this "panning and scanning" that has upset film directors and movie fans alike. The language of cinema relies heavily on elements such as editing, lighting, camera angle and camera movement. By introducing artificial camera movement in the pan & scan process, the artistic integrity of the film is affected. In the early days of home video, numerous directors refused to have their widescreen films released on videocassette unless the entire image could be presented without intervention. In addition to unintended camera movement, releasing a widescreen film in the square video format meant chopping off the sides of the picture. This would be like re-framing a print of "The Last Supper" with a few disciples missing from each end of the table.

So, at the insistence of Woody Allen and others, most widescreen films are now released on video in the "letterbox" format, with black horizontal bars framing the video image to recreate the presentation in movie theatres. (Newer model TV sets, especially those designed for home theatre applications, are being manufactured to encompass the widescreen dimensions).

Warren Beatty figures in this story because of the running time of his 194-minute 1981 film "Reds." The video distributors asked Mr. Beatty to trim a few minutes off his film so it would more easily fit onto a videocassette. Warren refused, citing artistic integrity.