Open matte

This article relies largely or entirely on a single source. Relevant discussion may be found on the talk page. Please help improve this article by introducing citations to additional sources. Find sources: "Open matte" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (May 2023)

Open matte is a filming technique that involves matting out the top and bottom of the film frame in the movie projector (known as a soft matte) for the widescreen theatrical release and then scanning the film without a matte (at Academy ratio) for a full screen home video release, thus not only providing a much better full frame presentation than cropping, but considerably more convenient than pan and scan. It is roughly equivalent to an uncropped version of the film.

Open matte can be used with non-anamorphic films presented in 2.20:1 or 2.39:1, but it is not used as often, mainly because it adds too much additional headroom, depending upon how well the framing was protected or for aesthetic purposes. Instead, those films will employ either pan and scan or reframing using either the well-protected areas or the areas of interest. Films shot anamorphically use the entire 35 mm frame (except for the soundtrack area), so they must use pan and scan as a result.