Definition: pan & scan

To reformat a movie for the screens of earlier TVs. Hollywood movies are wide screen, but standard TV screens up until the late 1990s were more square (4:3 ratio). In the past, pan & scan was performed on many films for home viewing in order to avoid displaying a void (black bars) at top and bottom when the movie was viewed on TV in its original wide format (see letterbox). See SDTV and HDTV.

A Manual Process
As the original movie was played, a technician decided which part of the scene was critical and moved a standard definition (SD) viewing window horizontally across the wide image to capture it.

Since nearly half the original scene was missing with pan & scan, artistic elements were often degraded. For example, landscapes were always clipped, and when two important objects were at opposite ends of the frame, one was lost.

It Became Somewhat Automatic
In order to avoid the cost of pan & scan, many wide screen movies were shot with a standard TV outline in the middle of the camera's viewfinder so that the director could keep critical objects in the center of the frame at all times. In that way, the movie could be automatically converted to the 4:3 aspect ratios by truncating both sides automatically. See anamorphic DVD.

Panning the Scenes

Although occasionally the director of the movie was involved with the pan & scan, it was usually left up to a technician to move the standard TV window across the original scene and decide what should be retained.