Pan and scan is a method of adjusting widescreen film images so that they can be shown within the proportions of a standard definition 4:3 aspect ratio television screen, often cropping off the sides of the original widescreen image to focus on the composition's most important aspects. Some film directors and film enthusiasts disapprove of pan and scan cropping, because it can remove up to 45% (on 2.35:1 films) of the original image, changing the director or cinematographer's original vision and intentions. The vertical equivalent is known as "tilt and scan" or "reverse pan and scan".
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For the first several decades of television broadcasting, sets displayed images with a 4:3 aspect ratio in which the width is 1.33 times the height—similar to most theatrical films prior to 1960. This was fine for pre-1953 films such as The Wizard of Oz or Casablanca. Meanwhile, in order to compete with television and lure audiences away from their sets, producers of theatrical motion pictures began to use "widescreen" formats such as Cinemascope and Todd-AO in the early-to-mid 1950s, which enable more panoramic vistas and present other compositional opportunities. Although the aspect ratio was the height of a television screen, these formats might be twice as wide as a TV screen when televised. To present a widescreen movie on such a television requires one of two techniques to accommodate this difference: One is "letterboxing", which preserves the original theatrical aspect ratio, but is not as tall as a standard television screen, leaving black bars at the top and bottom of the screen; the other more common technique is to "pan and scan", filling the full height of the screen, but cropping it horizontally. Pan and scan cuts out as much as one-third of the image.
In the 1990s (before Blu-ray Disc or HDTV), when so-called "Sixteen-By-Nine" or "Widescreen" televisions offered a wider 16:9 aspect ratio (1.78 times the height instead of 1.33), they allowed films made at 1.66:1 and 1.85:1 to fill most or all of the screen, with only small letterboxing or cropping required. DVD packaging began to use the expression, "16:9 – Enhanced for Widescreen TVs".
However, films shot at aspect ratios of 2.20:1, 2.35:1, 2.39:1, 2.55:1, and especially 2.76:1 (Ben-Hur for example) might still be problematic when displayed on televisions of any type (though connoisseurs of films might dispute this). But when the DVD is "anamorphically enhanced for widescreen", or the film is telecast on a high-definition channel seen on a widescreen TV, the black spaces are smaller, and the effect is still much like watching a film on a theatrical wide screen.
During the "pan and scan" process, an editor selects the parts of the original filmed composition that seem to be the focus of the shot and makes sure that these are copied (i.e. "scanned"). When the important action shifts to a new position in the frame, the operator moves the scanner to follow it, creating the effect of a "pan" shot. In a scene in which the focus does not gradually shift from one horizontal position to another—such as actors at each extreme engaging in rapid conversation with each other—the editor may choose to "cut" from one to the other rather than rapidly panning back and forth. If the actors are closer together on the screen, the editor may pan slightly, alternately cropping one or the other partially. This method allows the maximum resolution of the image, since it uses all the available vertical video scan lines—which is especially important for NTSC televisions, having a rather low number of lines available. It also gives a full-screen image on a traditional television set; hence pan-and-scan versions of films on videotape or DVD are often known as fullscreen. However, it also has several drawbacks. Some visual information is necessarily cropped out. It can also change a shot in which the camera was originally stationary to one in which it is frequently panning, or change a single continuous shot into one with frequent cuts. In a shot which was originally panned to show something new, or one in which something enters the shot from off-camera, it changes the timing of these appearances to the audience. As an example, in the film Oliver!, made in Panavision, the criminal Bill Sikes commits a murder. The murder takes place mostly offscreen, behind a staircase wall, and Oliver is a witness to it. As Sikes steps back from behind the wall, we see Oliver from the back watching him in terror. In the pan-and-scan version of the film, we see Oliver's reaction as the murder is being committed, but not when Sikes steps backward from the wall having done it.
Another example, as Martin Scorsese has noted on television, is in the 1959 Ben-Hur. During the chariot race, Ben-Hur drives four horses, but in the pan and scan version of the film, the audience sometimes sees only two.
Often in a pan and scan telecast, a character will seem to be speaking offscreen, when what has really happened is that the pan and scan technique has cut his image out of the screen.
As television screenings of feature films became more common and more financially important, cinematographers began to work for compositions that would keep the vital information within the "TV safe area" of the frame. For example, the BBC suggests program makers who are recording in 16:9 frame their shots in a 14:9 aspect ratio which is then broadcast for non-widescreen televisions with small black bars at the top and bottom of the picture, while owners of widescreen TV sets see the full 16:9 picture. Film makers may also reverse this process, creating an original image that includes visual information that extends above and below the widescreen theatrical image; this is called "open matte". This may still be pan-and-scanned, but gives the compositor the freedom to "zoom out" or "uncrop" the image to include not only the full width of the wide-format image, but additional visual content at the top and/or bottom of the screen, not included in the widescreen version. As a general rule (prior to the adoption of DVD), special effects would be done within the theatrical aspect ratio, but not the full-frame thereof; also the expanded image area can include extraneous objects—such as cables, microphone booms, jet vapor trails, or overhead telephone wires—not intended to be included in the frame. Changes in screen angle (panning) may be necessary to prevent closeups between two speakers where only one person is visible in the pan-and-scan version and both participants seem to speak alternately to persons off camera; this comes at the cost of losing the smoothness of scenes. Inversely, the cropping of a film originally shown in the standard ratio to fit widescreen televisions may cut off foreground or background, such as a tap-dance scene in which much attention is directed appropriately at a dancer's feet. This situation will commonly occur whenever a widescreen TV is set to display full images without stretching (often called the zoom setting) on images with an aspect ratio of 1.78:1 or less. The solution is to pillar box the image by adding black bars on either side of the image, which maintains the full picture height. In Europe, where the PAL TV format offers more resolution to begin with, "pan-and-scan" broadcasts and "pan-and-scan" DVDs of movies originally shown in widescreen are relatively rare. However, on some channels in some countries (such as the United Kingdom), films with an aspect ratio of more than 1.85:1 are panned and scanned to fit the broadcast 1.78:1 ratio. One modern alternative to pan and scan is to directly adjust the source material. This is very rare: the only known uses are computer-generated features, such as those produced by Pixar and video games such as Bioshock. They call their approach to full-screen versions reframing: some shots are pan and scan, while others are transferred open matte (a full widescreen image extended with added image above and below). Another method is to keep the camera angle as tight as a pan shot, but move the location of characters, objects, or the camera, so that the subjects fit in the frame. The advent of DVDs and their use of anamorphic presentation, coupled with the increasing popularity of widescreen televisions and computer monitors, have rendered pan and scan less important. Fullscreen versions of films originally produced in widescreen are still available in the United States.
Some directors still balk at the use of "pan and scan" versions of their movies because they feel it compromises the directorial vision with which their movies were created. For instance, Sydney Pollack brought a lawsuit against Danish TV after screening his 1975 film Three Days of the Condor in pan-and-scan in 1991 (The court ruled that the pan scanning conducted by Danish television was a 'mutilation' of the film and a violation of Pollack's 'Droit Moral', his legal right as an artist to maintain his reputation by protecting the integrity of his work. Nonetheless, the court ruled in favor of the defendant on a technicality).[1] Steven Spielberg initially refused to release a pan-and-scan version of Raiders of the Lost Ark but eventually gave in (although he successfully ordered the letterboxed format for the home video releases of The Color Purple and Always); Woody Allen refused altogether to release one of Manhattan, the letterbox version is therefore the only version available on VHS and DVD. Any tampering with the original image of a film, particularly to crop it to fit a television screen, implies a compromise of the original image, and the cropping of a widescreen image to a full screen image for standard televisions requires skill by a film editor to prevent undue loss of elements of the composition.
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