The DVDLog Film Format Guide is an extensive overview of current and historic film formats.
This list is not complete because not every rare format has been included, but all major systems are represented.
More information about film formats with much original material is available at the American Widescreen Museum.

35mm silent film has its roots in the early Kinetoscope-experiments of Thomas Edison, who already used a film strip around 1890 which was nearly identical to the 35mm-filmstock in use today and despite some competition became a worldwide standard.

The frame of the early silent movies had a height of four sprocket holes and the whole exposed frame was usually projected. The running speed was variable, because early movie cameras had no motors and were powered by a hand crank. This resulted in speeds between 16 and 25 frames per second, so that many movies from this period look strange today, because they are being shown at too high speeds. Today during restorations of silent movies it is often ensured that the correct running speed is used.

With the introduction of optical sound at the end of the 1920s the size of the movie frame had to be modified to include the soundtrack on the film strip. Early talkies put the optical soundtrack simply on the left side of the frame, which resulted in a nearly square picture with an aspect ratio of about 1.19:1. To compensate for this, the height of the frame was reduced and an aspect ratio of 1.37:1 was created.

The wider format also provided more space between the individual frames, so that splices were less visible. The modified format was standardized by the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 1932, but had already been in use since about 1928. The Academy Standard had been used for nearly all movies produced between 1932 and 1952 until the breakthrough of the many widescreen-formats and is still sometimes in use today for artistic reasons.

With the surprising success of Cinerama in 1952 all movie studios were under huge pressure to develop their own movie formats for an image as wide as possible. The easiest and cheapest method was to crop the 1.37:1-frame of the Academy-Standard on the top and bottom and project the resulting wider image on a larger screen. While 20th Century Fox used the anamorphic CinemaScope process, other studios hesitated to make costly investments and chose to use these "flat" formats. Paramount experimented with 1.66:1 as early as 1953, MGM and Disney tried 1.75:1 and other studios followed with 1.85:1, which later became the american standard for flat widescreen formats. In Europe 1.66:1 was mostly used, but has also been succeeded by 1.85:1 since the 1970s.

During production usually the whole 1.37:1-negative is exposed, but the image composition is already arranged for a wider aspect ratio, making sure that the unused parts on the top and bottom of the frame are free of unwanted objects like microphones or cables. The "matte" is inserted during postproduction or sometimes left off altogether, so that the cropping only occurs during projection ("soft matte"). Occasionally the matte is inserted directly in the camera during shooting ("hard matte") and is already present on the negative, but sometimes even finished release prints have an aspect ratio of 1.37:1 with instructions for the projectionist to use a certain matte when showing the movie. The digital intermediate technique makes this a rare occasion today, because a digitally edited movie is usually rendered only in its target aspect ratio and can only be printed back to film as hard-matted.

When Cinerama made the big motion picture corporations go into panic mode in 1952, 20th Century Fox bought the Anamorphoscope process from the French inventor Henri Chrétien, who had already patented his hypergonar lenses in the 1920s. The first movie shot with these new lenses was The Robe, whose production had already begun in the Academy Ratio, but was started over in favour of CinemaScope. With the exception of Paramount, who used VistaVision, nearly all big studios licensed the CinemaScope-process from Fox in the following years.

CinemaScope is based on the principle of anamorphic film, which squeezes the picture horizontally by a factor of 2:1 during the exposure with a special lens and expands it with a similar lens during projection. This results in an aspect ratio of 2.66:1, which was reduced to 2.55:1 in the early CinemaScope-version by adding magnetic soundtracks on the sides of the frame. The early Cinemeascope-prints also had smaller, nearly square sprocket holes called "fox holes" to acommodate the four magnetic soundtracks on the film strip. When an optical soundtrack was added, the aspect ratio was reduced to 2.35:1 and on demand of the other studios cheaper prints only with optical sound and normal sprocket holes were allowed.

Early CinemaScope had some drawbacks. The worst was an imperfection in the lenses made by Bausch & Lomb, which had problems with deep focus and distortion. This mainly showed up on close-ups, which were entirely avoided on early CinemaScope productions to work around the so-called "CinemaScope Mumps". Bad projection quality, high grain and pale colours were some points of criticism, which were mainly caused by imperfect optics and bad film stock. This however only showed up on the release prints and not the negatives, so it was possible to make better prints after a few years, when the problems had been fixed.

In 1955 20th Century Fox tried to compete with the large-negative 65/70mm-formats and developed CinemaScope 55, which used a 55mm wide negative with a huge, eight sprocket holes high frame anamorphically squeezed in the 2:1 ratio. Shot with modified 70mm-cameras, the originally planned 55mm-release prints were never made because there was no way to project them - instead 35mm-CinemaScope-reduction prints with an aspect ratio of 2.55:1 were made from the 55mm-negative. With The King and I and Carousel only two movies were filmed in this process, afterwards it was given up by Fox because of the complicated lens systems in favour of Todd-AO, in which the studio bought a share. In the early 1960s Fox made 70mm prints of The King and I advertising them under the name Grandeur 70, while 35mm-prints were released as CinemaScope 55.

Under different names like Franscope, Tohoscope or Ultrascope and others CinemaScope-compatible anamorphic film processes were used in many countries, because 20th Century Fox owned the patent on their own Bausch & Lomb lenses, but not on the general process. Since 1957 the old CinemaScope camera lenses have slowly been replaced by improved models manufactured by Panavision, who became the market leader in the 1960s. 20th Century Fox continued to use their own CinemaScope-lenses until 1967, when the studio also switched to Panavision equipment. Altough today CinemaScope itsself is not in use anymore, the name has become a synonym for all anamorphic film processes and is sometimes used by 20th Century Fox as a trademark for nostalgic reasons.

Panavision was founded in 1953 by Robert Gottschalk with five partners, when the camera shop owner found out that Bausch & Lomb had problems fulfilling the high demand of their CinemaScope projection lenses. Gottschalk and his Partners William Mann and Walter Wallin improved the lens system and introduced the Super Pantar lens in 1954, which enabled the seamless adjustment between flat and anamorphic projection. Later this lens was replaced by the even more improved Ultra Pantar, and the Micro Pantar could be mounted into a film printer to convert anamorphic prints to flat versions - an enormous advantage for the movie studios, who often shot their early CinemaScope movies with a second camera in Academy-Standard, because not all cinemas had been equipped for widescreen projection yet.

It took a few years, but in 1958 Robert Gottschalk and his partners managed to solve the problem of CinemaScope-mumps, the distortions in close-ups shot with anamorphic lenses. The result was the Auto Pantar camera lens, which got popular very quicky and was soon used by nearly all studios - except 20th Century Fox, who stuck with their own CinemaScope lenses. In the late 1950s CinemaScope became nearly obsolete and almost all movies in anamorphic processes were shot with lenses made by Panavision. Even 20th Century Fox had given up their own CinemaScope lenses in 1967 and used Panavision equipment since then.

In the Mid-1960s Panavision also entered the movie camera business, after they had bought MGMs camera department and improved the standard camera of the movie industry, the Mitchell BNC. At this point the company business model was changed: lenses and cameras were not sold anymore, but were only availabe for hire to guarantee a consistent quality of the equipment. In the late 1960s the first lenses for spherical 1.85:1 photography were available and 1972 Panavision revolutioized the film industry with its lightweight and quiet Panaflex 35mm-camera. Today Panavision is one of the biggest camera- and lens-manufacturer and even managed to make the jump into the age of digital filmmaking.

The Panavision film format has seemingly changed over the years, because the screen ratios of movies shot in this process often vary beetween 2.35:1 and 2.40:1. It was actually only the screen height that had been reduced to mask splices on the top or bottom of the frame. While the whole frame was being exposed, only the recommended size of the projected picture was changed. At the introduction of the process in 1957 the frame had an aspect ratio of 2.346:1, in 1970 the height was reduced to 2.394:1 and in 1992 to 2.391:1. The difference between 2.35:1 and 2.40:1 is however so small that it is no big issue especially on video transfers and usually depends on the individual framing of the movie. Aspect ratios between 2.30:1 and 2.40:1 are absolutely normal on video transfers of CinemaScope and Panavision movies.

In the credits Panavision usually stands for the brand name of the cameras and lenses used . "Filmed in Panavision" means the movie was shot with anamorphic lenses, while "Filmed with Panavision Cameras and Lenses" means that the movie was shot "flat", but with Panavision equipment.

VistaVision was Paramount's answer to CinemaScope, because the studio wanted to have its own widescreen-process and not be dependent on 20th Century Fox. The format was introduced in 1953 with the shooting of White Christmas and was until the end of the 1950s a favourite process for big productions, and was even used by Alfred Hitchcock on some of his movies.

VistaVision used regular 35mm stock, which traveled horizontally through the specially-built cameras. The negative frame was eight perforations wide and had the same size as a normal 24x36 photo frame. The larger frame had a distinct advantage over other formats because of the higher resolution of the camera negative. The prints were made from an extraction area of a variable aspect ratio between 1.66:1 and 1.85:1 from the 1.5:1 negative, which was rotated, resized and copied onto a regular 35mm-strip that could be shown on any standard projector like a regular flat print. Because of the much larger negative even the 35mm-reduction prints had a much better image quality than other 35mm productions.

For special occasions prints were sometimes made in the horizontal VistaVision-process, but the projection was very problematic because the film had to run twice as fast thorugh a modified projector. 70mm prints were theoretically possible, but were never made because Paramount was not interested in the 70mm process and the technical equipment was not yet available. Only in the 1990s during the restoration of Vertigo 70mm was used to make a preservation print of the large-format VistaVision negative.

The heyday of VistaVision came to an end in the late 1950s, because the process was very costly and cumbersome in comparison to CinemaScope and Panavision. Because of its high resolution and larger image area, special-effects producers in the 70s, 80s and 90s revived the VistaVision format to make optical effects of a very high quality, even if the target format was only 35mm. With the emergence of computer-generated effects the need for a high resolution negative in effects work diminished and is only very occasionally used today.

As with other processes using large format negatives, it is still difficult to make good video transfers of VistaVision movies today. Often a 35mm reduction copy is used, but in some rare cases transfers are made directly from the original negative or a horizontal VistaVision-print, which results in a fantastic quality that is nearly impossible to achieve with 35mm.

In the 1950s Technicolor wanted a piece of the widescreen cake too and developed together with Delft, a company from Holland, the Delrama camera lens, which was combined with a VistaVision-type camera. The negative frame on the horizontally running film strip was the size of a 35mm photographic frame and had the aspect ratio of 1.5:1, which was further squeezed with an anamorphic lens by the factor 1.5:1, creating an usable ratio of 2.25:1.

Like VistaVision the frame was rotated and printed to regular 35mm stock, but the 2.25:1 negative was extracted to a 2.35:1 frame by reducing and squeezing it further to a CinemaScope-compatible factor of 2:1. 70mm was also intended as a target format, which involved unsqueezing the negative with the Delrama-lens and printing it to 70mm stock. The quality of the 35mm reduction had a great advantage over CinemaScope, and even 70mm prints had nearly the same good quality as productions with 65mm negatives. When 70mm prints were made, the trademark Super Technirama 70 was used, otherwise the process was just called Technirama.

Although Technirama was very expensive because of the high cost of film material, more than fifty movies between 1957 and 1968 were made in the process, among them Stanley Kubrick's Spartacus, the comedies The Grass is Greener and The Pink Panther and Disney's animated movie Sleeping Beauty. Since the 1970s Technirama has seldom been used as a production format, because the quality of regular 35mm stock had much improved and a large-format negative was only needed on special occasions. Technirama was the only film process in the 1950s and 1960s being used to make 70mm prints from a 35mm negative.

Today only few Technirama movies are preserved in their source formats and usually 35mm reduction prints are used for video transfers - only in some cases, like Spartacus, the 35mm-horizontal negative has been used for a film-based restoration.

SuperScope began as an invention of Joseph and Irving Tushinsky, who experimented in 1954 with methods to convert flat material to a CinemaScope-like format. With their Tushinsky lens, an adaptor for optical printers, all non-anamorphic processes could be copied like that, but most major studios were not interested in the idea.

Ordered by RKO, the Tushinsky brothers developed the SuperScope process as a cheap alternative to CinemaScope. The whole silent frame of the negative was exposed, but only a middle area with an aspect ratio of 2:1 was used. In the Technicolor labs this part was then squeezed with the Tushinsky lens by a factor of 2:1 like the CinemaScope process, but because of the different aspect ratio a SuperScope print had an exactly square frame which sat in the middle of the filmstrip, leaving a part on the right side unused. This was a huge design error, which caused problems on projectors, which were not calibrated for the offset in the frame position. Another problem was the somewhat worse quality in comparison to other processes, because only a small part of the usable room on the negative was utilized and the film grain became more noticeable.

Between 1955 and 1958 SuperScope was used only on very few movies and sometimes a movie shot in 1.37:1 was printed in the 2:1-format. When RKO realized that the 2:1 aspect ratio didn't have a future, the target format was made compatible to CinemaScope by reducing the image height to the 2.35:1 standard, calling the result SuperScope 235. The quality also improved in spite of the even smaller negative, because the printing technique could deliver better results and sometimes even surpassed early CinemaScope productions, which had their own problems with sharpness due to imperfect lenses.

The demise of RKO in 1958 also meant the end of SuperScope, only Warner shot a couple of movies at the end of the 1950s in the renamed WarnerScope process. In the beginning of the 1980s SuperScope 235 was resurrected as the Super35 process.

After SuperScope had not been in use since the end of the 1950s, the SuperScope 235 version was once again used for the shooting of the music documentary Dance Craze and under the name Super Techniscope 1984 for Greystoke, the first time for a major Hollywood production. Since the end of the 1980s most camera manufactures offer this process as Super 35, which was used by many filmmakers for the advantage to shoot in the 2.35:1 aspect ratio with spherical lenses and to make largely lossless 1.33:1 fullscreen versions for video transfers.

Like SuperScope and Techniscope Super35 is only a production format, from which no direct projection prints are made. Compared to SuperScope the widescreen frame is not extracted from the middle of the negative, but from the top two-thirds. The 1.33:1-version looses a bit horizontally, but gains more on the bottom of the frame. During the shooting the framing is ideally done so that none of the two formats lose important parts of the image.

There's however no guarantee that the fullframe version is as good as the widescreen framing, because special-effects are usually done only for the widescreen frame and have to be pan&scanned in the fullscreen version. To save money sometimes the Super35 negative is reduced to a height of only three sprocket holes, which uses about 25% less film and eliminates the possibility of a 1.33:1 fullscreen version, while working fine for TV productions in 16:9 or HDTV, because an image between 1.78:1 and 2.35:1 can easily be extracted. Because of the still high demand of 1.33:1 fullscreen versions this is rarely used on big movie productions, but has become the standard for TV-series, where fullscreen versions are being made by pan&scanning the 1.78:1 picture.

Techniscope is a variant of SuperScope, which was developed in 1960 by the Italian branch of Technicolor and uses a frame dimension of 2.35:1 without using anamorphic lenses during shooting. In contrast to SuperScope, Techniscope doesn't expose the whole negative and modifies the frame height from four to two sprocket holes (2-perf), reducing the film consumption by half. For projection the frame is enlarged to an anamorphic standard format, which is fully compatible to CinemaScope and Panavision and can be shown on all projectors equipped for these processes.

Techniscope has the great advantage of using a 2.35:1-format with spherical lenses, which especially in the 1960s were technically less problematic than scope optics and meant much more flexibility for cinematographers. Disadvantages were the reduced size of the film negative and the additional dupe step, resulting in increased film grain and inferior sharpness, which could be minimized by good laboratory work. One of the greatest advocates of Techniscope was Sergio Leone, who shot nearly all his movies in this format and impressively demonstrated the advantages of the system with his extreme wide-angle shots and close-ups.

Today Techniscope is not in use anymore, because it has been replaced by the similar, but technically more advanced Super35 process. The restoration of Techniscope movies is often problematic, because the conversion of the 2-perf-negatives to the projection print needs special equipment, which has become very rare. During the restoration of the Sergio Leone western movies MGM first copied the negative into a 4-perf-format, while other studios like Paramount with Leones Once upon a time in the West used a direct digital scan of the 2-perf-version, which however produced only a digital master and not a new print.

In the 1930s Fred Waller, an engineer at Paramount, experimented with an armada of eleven cameras to assemble an image as wide and vivid as possible by using several strips of film together. During world war two he built the "Waller Gunnery Trainer", a film- and projection-system with five 16mm cameras.

After the war he began to develop his Vitarama-system, which used three 35mm-cameras and a curved screen. Together with sound technician Hazard E. Reeves he also developed a seven-channel stereo soundsystem with five speakers behind the screen and two in the auditorium. They were joined by Lowell Thomas, who became president of their new company Cinerama Productions, which introduced the first demonstration movie for the Cinerama-system in 1952, starting the widescreen revolution.

Cinerama was shot with a huge camera, actually consisting of three separate 35mm-units which were accommodated in a soundproof case. The image on each of the three film strips was six instead of four sprocket holes high. Problematic were the intersections between the three projected images, which were minimized by a special shutter between the Projection Lenses. The three seperate pictures were projected onto a twenty meter wide concave screen, which had an angle of view of 146°. The soundtrack was partially recorded with five or more microphones live on the set and was stored on a fourth 35mm-strip with magnetic coating, which held the seven soundtracks.

The conversion of a cinema for Cinerama projection cost up to 75000 dollars, and only later when the process began to decline, cinemas would be built especially for Cinerama exhibitons. Between 1952 and 1959 only seven travel documentaries were produced, which were even for today's standards very impressive. In 1962 two last feature films were shot in 3-strip Cinerama: the western epos How the West was Won and The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm.

In spite of the great success of these movies the process proved unprofitable, because the production costs were high and the technical aspects were difficult to handle. Cinerama began to be superseded by other large-format single strip systems, but for some time the name Cinerama was used for 70mm productions in Super or Ultra Panavision 70 when they were projected on the special curved screens of the Cinerama-equipped cinemas - among them movies like Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey and many others.

Cinerama also had competition: Cinemiracle was based on a very similar process, but only one travelogue called Windjammer was shot in it. More successful was the Russian process Kinopanorama, which was developed in 1956 and was nearly identical to Cinerama. It was mainly used on documentaries and only occasionally on feature films. At the beginning of the 1990s Kinopanorama was revived by an Australian company which restored the Russian 3 strip features, but also produced new movies in the process.

Today there are three preserved Cinerama-venues in Seattle, Los Angeles and in Bradford, UK. These cinemas are the only ones in the world, which can show Cinerama in its original 3-projector configuration; in addition many 70mm productions are being shown. Warner Bros., the new owner of How the West was Won even produced new Cinerama prints of the movie, which are regularly shown in these cinemas.

Unfortunately today there are no reasonably good video transfers of the Cinerama productions. How the West was won is the only Cinerama movie available on DVD, but it was sourced from an ancient laserdisc transfer of a 35mm reduction print, which only shows a fraction of the original image. Warner says the studio has been working for years on a solution to make Cinerama possible for the home cinema market, but up to now this has not produced any results mainly because of the high costs and the bad conditions of the source material.