slackergirl wrote:On my widescreen TV, anamorphic movies still have some black bars on the top and bottom, but TV shows filmed for widescreen (such as Heroes, Arjuna or Last Exile) do not.
Alright, then yes, the ratio of those particular movies is greater than 16:9, which is what widescreen TVs are designed to show much like a traditional TV is designed to show a 4:3 image. Where 16:9 would equal 848x480 (or in this case, 640x352), a 2.35:1 image would equal 1136x480 (or in this case, 640x256). The way such ratios are usually done is by letterboxing the image to make it 16:9 and then using the standard anamorphic flag. On a 4:3 TV, those movies would be the ones that have more drastic letterboxing, since the DVD player adds in the typical letterbox that 16:9 anamorphic movies are displayed with on playback on said TVs, plus the letterboxing that's part of the video stream in order to make it 16:9 in the first place - on a widescreen television, the DVD player doesn't have to letterbox on the fly, so what is seen on those is simply the letterboxing used to make a 2.35:1 image fit in a 16:9 frame.
I actually have to do this quite often when authoring DVDs with many of the HD trailers from the Quicktime site since they often use 2.35:1 instead of 16:9. Basically, you resize a trailer that's 1920x816 down to 720x352 (it would really be 848x352 to look right, but this is anamorphic we're talking about), do AddBorders(0,64,0,64), encode as a regular 4:3 image, and then manually reset the ratio flag to 16:9 instead of 4:3 - true, most encoding programs will let you select the flag prior to encoding, but I don't put much trust in them.