Hidden features in QuickTime Player 7.2
As you may know, QuickTime Player 7.2 added full-screen play support, without having to shell out for QuickTime Pro. What you may have missed is this new Preferences screen.
There are also some options in the View menu. Some are present in the “Movie Size” options, some are not. What you may not know is that ⌘4 and ⌘5 will trigger the “Fill Screen” and “Panoramic” view options which are present in the Preferences screen, but not the View menu.
“Fill Screen” zooms the video in so the shortest dimension of the movie (width or height) fills the width of height of your screen. In practical terms, this means that the edges of widescreen videos are cropped so they fill the height of the screen, and the top and bottom of 1.33:1 videos are cropped so they fill the screen’s width. This is handy, because all Apple widescreen displays have an aspect of 1.6:1 (16:10), but most widescreen movies are in 1.77:1 (16:9) or 1.85:1. Cropping these slightly doesn’t lose much information, and it fills the screen in a pleasant manner.
For some 1.33:1 (4:3, standard size) footage, this works nicely, as well. Many television shows (which are the primary venue of 4:3 footage) are now shot in an “open matte” format, where the image is framed for widescreen, but displayed full-screen. Footage which needs to be available in both widescreen and fullscreen use this technique, and this type of video looks quite nice with this option.
For CinemaScope-type video (2.35:1), this is terrible, and should be avoided. It would be very nice if QuickTime could examine the video aspect and automatically enable this feature for any video below a certain threshold, for example anything at 1.9:1 or under.
“Panoramic” disappoints me greatly. When this is enabled, the video is stretched to fill the screen; 1.33:1 video is expanded horizontally, and > 1.6:1 is compressed. This causes the footage to appear squashed, and is a pet peeve of mine. I’m actually disappointed that this option was included, since it alters the appearance of the picture in such a drastically negative way. This is the pan-and-scan of the widescreen TV era, and it is just as bad, if not worse.
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