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Illustration anamorph letterbox by Jailbird via Wikipedia

The anamorphic isn’t using letter boxing or black banding on an image, but instead an optical method is used. An anamorphic lens is a lens with convex glass that horizontally squeezes images down from a 2.35:1 widescreen aspect ratio to a 4:3 ratio. Projectors need have the same style lens in order to properly project the image. If you’ve seen a movie that has “Filmed in Panavision” during the credits, you’ve seen a movie shot in the anamorphic format.

Digital video cameras have a feature called “squeeze mode” which simulates an anamorphic lens. The image quality will suffer slightly because of this, but depending on your output format, the difference might be negligible. We will have a few videos about this later this week.