Letterboxing (filming)

The term refers to the shape of a letter-box, a slot in a wall or door through which mail is delivered, being rectangular and wider than it is high.

The first fully letter-boxed CED release was Amarcord, and several others followed including The Long Goodbye, Monty Python and the Holy Grail and The King of Hearts.

[3] The term "SmileBox" is a registered trademark[4] used to describe a type of letter-boxing for Cinerama films, such as on the Blu-ray release of How the West Was Won.

In addition, recent years have seen an increase of "fake" 2.40:1 letterbox mattes on television to give the impression of a cinema film, often seen in adverts, trailers or tv such as Top Gear.

On a widescreen television set, a 1.78:1 image fills the screen; however, 21:9 aspect ratio films are letter-boxed with narrow mattes.

An alternative to pillar-boxing is "tilt-and-scan" (like pan and scan, but vertical), horizontally matting the original 1.33:1 television images to the 1.78:1 aspect ratio.

This occurs on the DVD editions of the Star Trek films on a 1.33:1 tv when the included widescreen documentaries show footage from the original series.