But since most of the transfers made for these releases are remastered and restored in HD there is room for improvement.
As far as Ben-Hur goes: it truly has an aspect ratio of 2.76:1, making it one of the widest widescreen movies ever. So even on anamorphically enhanced widescreen DVD's that leaves you with almost huge hardencoded black banners.
Remember that DVD is a native 4:3 format, hence the necessity of the anamorphic encoding flag so the horizontal lines can be stretched on widescreen TV's but use the maximum possible vertical resolution.
Allow me to explain with a few images: (I'm basing it on PAL DVD's, but the principle remains the same)
1st. Normal 1.33:1 image for movies like Casablanca, they use the full horizontal and vertical resolution available on the DVd and are displayed without any kind of manipulation to the image.
2nd. Ben-Hur letterboxed ... 4:3 Tv-owners won't notice the difference with anamorphic, but we, the widescreen tv-owners, know that the quality isn't very good because we have to zoom in to get rid of the hardcoded banners, they're huge too for Ben-Hur by the way because of the 2.76:1 aspect ratio
3rd. Ben-Hur anamorphic ... better for widescreen owners, but still far from ideal quality wise. The hardcoded black banners are still huge, leaving lots of vertical resolution unused. On top of that the image is stretched horizontally to fill your TV screen (remember DVD's are 1.33:1 natively). In cases like Ben-Hur this automatically reduces the amount of deatil you can possibly store in the useable part of the MPEG-2, simply because of the fact you need those black bars.
Now there's gonna be HD-DVD / Blu-Ray. Native format is 1.78:1. This would make Ben-Hur look like this:
Now, as you can see the black bars are still there. But:
1. the image isn't stretched horizontally anymore, after all the native format is widescreen as is.
2. the available vertical resolution is a lot higher, going from only 370 out of 576 pixels to 697 out of 1080, but the horizontal resolution difference is a lot bigger because of the native 16:9 format: from 720 to 1920 pixels ! That's 2,66 times more ... an amount of detail that could not be encoded on normal DVD's because of the native 4:3 format on one side and the anamorphic transfers on the other one.
One can only hope they'll be able to encode Academy Format movies in something like 1350 x 1080 instead of resorting to hardcoding black bars to the left and right of the image ... I hope this clarifies a few things.
Most of Warner's restoratians of old movies these last few years have been done in HD (most even at 2000 or 4000 vertical pixels) so DVD's won't be a problem ... Widescreen movies will be the ones who benefit the most from HD as DVD wasn't really well equiped to handle them. Ideally DVD would have needed a 1024x576 mode ... but we got stuck with anamorphic, something that was supposed to make the best out of the worst
Who knows, maybe HD-DVD / Blu-Ray will be a lot more flexible when it comes down to aspect ratios and just have flags indicating the aspect ratio, leaving displaying it correctly to the player, in that case Ben-Hut for example would measure 1920 x 697 pixels ... but I don't think those kinds of details have been made available to date.
Linear Mode
