I really love watching Asian movies and becuase I can't stand the way they are translated to English, I usually rent or buy the original Chinese version and read the subtitles. I've noticed lately that more and more mnovies are coming out with a type of subtitling that is very presentable and readable (blocky yellow text with a black border) as opposed to the old style which was just white text that was pretty hard, if not impossible to read if the background where a white or bright color.

Now, my question is, do you know of a way to distinquish what type of subtitle a movie displays by reading the discription, or is it random or what. Is that what "Letterbox" means? Not sure... please let me know if you know of an answer. Thanks...

-- Steve (sdtran@hotmail.com), November 03, 2000

Answers

The term "Letterbox" means that the movie is in a widescreen format. Widescreen is when the original aspect ratio is preserved when transferring from film to the other source of media. The letterboxes are the two black bars at the top and bottom of the screen. Letterbox, widescreen, and cinemascope are all the same thing. As for subtitling, I don't think there is a way to tell what kind of subtitles are in a movie, most of the subtitled movies I have are plain yellow without black outline.

-- Mr.Ian Roswell (cyberlien51@juno.com), November 03, 2000.