Quote:
Originally Posted by
Shaktijess 
Thanks so much for your help, Bob. IR is my primary concern. But I do also like to fill the whole scrren, and I hate stretch modes. Will the Anthem or some other processor enable me to customize the zoom so that it fills the screen without distorted stretches. The 1140 does a good job, distortion wise, on HD TV and on 4:3 materail but HD DVDs
in 2:33 mode have a vertical distortion. Apparantly it zooms equally on 4:3 but not on 2:33.
Like I said above, there is no free lunch here. If you "stretch" the image in only one direction (so as not to lose stuff off the edges in the other direction) you will end up with circles that look like ovals in that direction.
If you "zoom" into the image to increase it's size without distortion then you have to lose something off one pair of edges or the other. There's no place to put those portions of the image without distorting the image.
Stretching 4:3 content left and right to fill a 16:9 screen is less noticeable since the screen is already wider that way, the percentage stretch is not that big, and the eye gets fooled if there aren't prominant circles in the image.
Stretching "wider than wide screen" cinematic content to fill the 16:9 screen top to bottom produces more noticeable distortion. And your only way out of that is to allow some of the image to be lost off either side.
But to answer your question, the Anthem allows you to enter Custom settings to crop the image prior to scaling as you choose. That determines how much of the input image is lost off the top/bottom or the left/right. By default nothing is lost. Then the Anthem will scale that to the pixel count you specify in your video output resolution. In the process, the Anthem will either stretch the cropped input uniformly to fill the screen (Scale Out = Anamorphic), non-uniformly (Scale Out = Panoramic), or retaining the shape of your crop and adding either letter boxes or pillar boxes to pad out the short direction to fill the output resolution.
To use this with "wider than wide screen" cinematic content you will need to experiment with how much you prefer to lose left and right compared to how much distortion you introduce due to the stretching up and down.
If you watch a lot of 2.35:1 cinema from some input, you can put your prefered set of Custom settings for that in the Video Source Adjust / Crop Input / Custom entry for that input. Then you can use the remote to pretty easily switch between 16:9 crop, 4:3 crop, or your Custom crop. For HDMI sources, there is also an HDMI Auto setting that will switch automatically between 16:9 and 4:3 cropping (but not Custom). HDMI Auto is the factory default.
Of course not all "wider than wide screen" cinematic content is 2.35:1. You will need to enter new Custom numbers manually each time you switch image shapes you want to handle this way.
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EDITED TO ADD: If you do a Custom setting for Crop Input that is less than the full input resolution in either directiion, then you can ALSO adjust the centering of the crop in the short direction (both of them if both are short).
There's not much point in doing this horizontally unless your source is sending screwy video to the Anthem.
But adjusting the vertical positioning on an input that you have cropped top and bottom can be very useful if your source puts subtitles below the image. At the expense of losing some of the real image on the top, you can shift the crop down to keep the subtitles visible without adding additional distortion to the image. Increasing the size of the vertical crop to keep the subtitles visible would do the same thing, but then you'd ALSO have at least a letter box bar on top equal to the size of the space on bottom you've opened up to see the subtitles (even if you are "stretching" the result, since this letter box bar is being retained from the input image, so it is also shown in the "stretched" result).
And of course you can balance this by opening up the crop a little AND shifting it down a little.
The point is, you've got pretty much TOTAL flexibility, at the cost of having to figure out how you best prefer to do it for any given movie, and then writing down those settings someplace for the next time you watch that movie. The settings you need to note are the four integers making up your preferred Crop Input / Custom setting and also the preferred Scale Out setting to use with them (Anamorphic, Letter/Pillar Box, or Panoramic).
All of these settings can be seen and changed "live" while you are watching the movie (via the Video Source Adjust menu under the "7" key on the remote), so it is easy to see the result "on the fly" and refine things as you prefer.
You will likely discover that there is just one set of settings you prefer for each wideness of "wider than wide screen" cinemetic content -- plus perhaps one variant if the movie displays subtitles below the image. I.e., your preferred settings for ALL 2.35:1, non subtitled movies will likely be the same.
IMPORTANT NOTE: The additional Scale Out setting -- "ZOOM" -- should *NOT* be used for actual viewing. It is intended to be used temporarily when setting things up or when checking a particular portion of an image. Using it for normal viewing will result in dramatically worsened imaging as the math that implements it is done AFTER the scaler does its job.
--Bob
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