Panaflex User's Manual, 2nd Edition

Anamorphic or Spherical?

For theatrical release, to shoot ‘anamorphic’ or ‘spherical’ is a technical decision the Producer must make. Put simply, ‘going anamorphic’ involves photography with anamorphic lenses which squeeze a wide scene area onto a narrow film format. The film is subsequently projected in the theatre using a complementary anamorphic lens which unsqueezes the image to give a picture on the screen which is almost 2.4 times as wide as it is high. Television, and other forms of electronic presentation, be it for the normal 4:3 format, for the later 16:9 format or for any other video screen shape that may be dreamed up in the future, is achieved by extracting an appropriate width image from the anamorphic original at the time the film ...