Posted by Vincent at bg-tc-ppp863.monmouth.com on July 12, 2001 at 13:26:57:
Somebody asked on the last board if the DVD is full-frame. The answer is no, it is very mildly letterboxed to an aspect ratio of 1.5:1. Basically, when we were doing the transfer, I had them "zoom out" the image all the way so you saw the EXTREMEM left-and-right of the film frame- these are areas that would normally even be cropped off in projection. When zoomed out this far, you could see the actual top and bottom of the film frame, and the actual frame-lines are kinda rough looking. They're not perfectly straight, they're a little blurry, and you'll also get smutz like dirt and hair way up near the film edge. I had a 1.5:1 matte applied basically to cover this up, and it gave me a little room to reposition the frame slightly up-or-down from shot to shot as it was neccessary.
The mattes are so minor that they won't even show up on all television sets due to overscan (which is probably the case with Todd Doogan's review), and if you can see them they really are just slivers of black that were added to give the frame a hard-edge rather than the blurry actual edge of the film frame. One shot in the film was matted to 1.66:1 because we had to cover up something at the bottom of the frame. You can hear all about that in the audio commentary.
Vincent