Pan and scan

Copying widescreen film images to video while keeping the ordinary image shape of video. This involves selecting parts of the widescreen composition that seem to be significant and cropping the rest. When the action is covered in one long take, the editor may have to shift his equipment to a new area of the film frame, creating the effect of a pan shot. Pan and scan is a format usually scorned by directors, as it does not include the entire image they originally intended to present; and it does indeed create a different effect, especially in movies intended to be suspenseful--for instance, in Jaws, the shark can be seen approaching for several seconds more in the widescreen version than in the pan and scan.

See also widescreen, letterbox