First I wanna say that nothing of what follows really matters,it's just me being my dethicrazy self, since the DVD is not cropping anything (the 6 pixels it is cropping from the 720 x 486 master are inconsequential, a 1% crop) so everybody can have his cake and eat it too! (or is it hats?
). Well, probably MickeyMouseBoy (and I) still want it to be 16:9 coded, but if you really desire that extra 16:9 resolution, get the PAL, MickeyMouseBoy, that way you'll have the equivalent to the 2 disc edition you asked for with one disc open matte and another with the resolution of a 16:9 Widescreen one, as Disneyunlimited tells me it's just GBP$5.99 and he even has a PowerDVD setting to make it look as good and clear (if not even better) as the NTSC disc.
So first, the numerical part
Part 1- splitting hairs
First.
The new captures are 300 x 225, no? (i measured just one of them but asume all three are the same)
300/225 = 1.333333
But
720x480 mpeg2 video is not 1.333333
because
NTSC Digital Video is 720 x 486.
And in NTSC Digital Video, 710.85 x 486 = 1.33333.
Therefore, 720 x 486 = 1.3504958
Therefore, NTSC DV video and NTSC mpeg2 DVD 720 x 480 video is 1.3673769
NTSC Digital Video Equipment including Sony $45,000 Professional Broadcast Monitors used in mastering houses follow the NTSC standard.
Therefore the 300 x 171 crop on the captures is not 1.75, it is 1.7991801 (1.80)
For it to be 1.75 the capture would have to be 300 x 176
Second.
225 vertical pixels in resized capture:
27 pixels of black bar
171 pixels of image
27 pixels of black bar
or
480 vertical pixels in original capture
57.6 pixels of black bar
364.8 pixels of image
57.6 pixels of black bar
Therefore, those captures are cropping simetrically a Full Frame image that ALREADY has 4 to 6 pixels cropped from the top (4 top, 2 bottom is the usual, but sometimes it's 6/0) (but NEVER 3/3, because that would change the interlace field order) when it was transfered from 720 x 486 Digital Video to 720 x 480 mpeg2 video.
So you have to re-center mattes on 480 images up by 4 pixels (in some cases 6) for them to fall in the center of the original Full Frame 486 image.
let's go with the usual 4/2 crop.
On the 300 x 225 size capture that translates that the center of the matte is 2 pixels too low.
So taking all the numbers into account, on the 300 x 225 image, the top matte is 4 pixels too low and the bottom matte is about 0.5 pixels too high
So the top matte line on the 300 x 171 image is actually at the 1.89 aspect ratio cropping mark, while the bottom matte line is at the 1.77 mark
But as I said that's splitting hairs, cus
Part 2- One word: psychovisuals
Even if my numbers were totally wrong, or if they're right, if you take the cropped images and blow them up so they fill the height of the screen, those images will look fine when seen in a large screen.
Disneykid on anthother open matte discusion wrote:I'm pretty sure the head chopping thing is intentional because one of the tips they give you in film school is that it's better to frame a shot so that the top of someone's head is sliced off because the brain mentally fills in the rest of that image.
And then an annoying mouse called deathie wrote:Now we go to the second phenomenon: Psychovisuals. When you look at something on a smaller TV at home, be it letterboxed or widescreened, the effect is very different than in the cinema, a 20 foot tall head that you have to look up and down or scan with your eyes becomes a 10" to 20" head you watch from a distance of 10 feet almost fixed on your vision, You are more aware of its borders or "limits" cus you can quickly flick your eyes around it and you're seeing it all at once, intead of being overpowered by it, and therefore observing it more analitycally than just being inmersed on the storyline and it's emotions (thats why mmm the video experience is sometimes so different than in the theater, thank God surround sound can be better and wider at home to compensate
)
A shot that doesn't seem tight in a huge theater screen might look to be too tightly framed in the more compact TV (or Plasma) screen. (I think this phenomenon is what Disneykid was reffering too also)
Another part of this phychovisual impressions could happen when we watch an Open matte version first, or for a long time, then we see the letterboxed version> We know there's more image, we've SEEN this image, and now it's gone. So we might have gotten used to it and we might feel the widescreen is cutting something. (Well. it is! ) But apart from the transfer really being wrong, we might feel unconfortable for a while till we get reused to it being in the proper composition.
I'll tell you what I see when i see those shots on widescreen : A extreme close up of an old man looming gigantically in front of me, so big he's almost out of my field of view. A shot in which a little people king is dwarfed by the same old man so tall he's almost gonna get out of the top of the screen. And a threatening tall guy in a bar adressing a short guy.
I haven't seen the movie. Is this what's happening?
Cus if it is, that's the way to frame things to give those impressions.
but maybe I'm wrong since I have't seen the movie yet.
But again, I repeat! it doesnt matter cus we can watch it both ways! >In fact i'll say, that i have the 4:3 open matte version of Underworld in addition to the Special Extended S-35 Scope edition
) I have it in PAL 4:3 disc in 1.66 (the OAR) and in NTSC 4:3 open matte 1.375 and NTSC 16:9 1.85 USA slighly cropped widescreeen. This also makes me have it in various languages and subtitles too. (It was the last film I projected in public. So it's special to me *sniff 
)(Last one i projected, (for myself) was the Technicolor José Ferrer Moulin Rouge in full Academy 
