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unplugged/Scope screens

Scope screens and projectors

No black bars. No cropped picture.

Fill a 2.39:1 scope screen without throwing away the edges. Unplugged shares the stretch across both axes, so the correction is spread out and faces near the edge keep their shape.

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Every option has a trade-off

Stretching evenly breaks shapes. Warping only the horizontal axis bends faces near the edges. Cropping throws picture away. Non-linear stretch trades a measured amount of the first two for the bars, and lets you decide how much.

16:9 PANEL BARS 2.39:1 PICTURE SHARED CORRECTION 12% VERTICAL + 12% HORIZONTAL
Illustrative: sharing a 24% correction across both axes instead of spending it on one.
The short version: choose how much of the black bars to remove, choose whether the stretch goes sideways, up-and-down or both, and protect the centre of the picture. The Warp/Crop readout tells you what the correction is costing.
New in 2.1.0: NLS is set-and-forget. Auto handles clean 16:9 and scope content as well as letterboxed sources; Post NLS X/Y crop trims each axis after the stretch; scope-to-IMAX transitions are tracked per frame.

Why both axes?

A 2.39:1 film shown on a 16:9 panel needs roughly 24% more picture height to lose the bars. Horizontal-only NLS spends all of that in the width, which is why faces near the edges bend. Unplugged can split the same correction between the axes.

At a 50/50 split, that 24% becomes about 12% up-and-down and 12% sideways. The bars are gone and each axis carries half the distortion. The exact ratio is yours to set.

The controls, in plain terms

Bars removed0–100% · how much of the letterbox the picture grows into. It controls every fill mode; 0 is the film at its own aspect, 100 fills the screen. Half the bars costs half the distortion.
AxisHorizontal (default) · Vertical · Split. Split uses the percentage below to share the correction. Vertical and split can elongate vertical detail.
SplitThe share each axis takes. 50% is an even split.
Max distortion100–150% · caps the warp per axis in both directions. Whatever the warp refuses is covered by cropping the axis that has slack.
Fill modeAuto · Stretch · Crop · Off. Auto fills up to the fill limit; Stretch never crops; Crop spends the bars; Off returns the film to its own aspect.
Fill limitThe largest correction Auto will fill with.
Lock bandKeeps one shape for titles that switch aspect mid-film, such as IMAX sequences.
Centre protectionUp to 90% · keeps a uniform, undistorted band around the middle and pushes the correction into the rim.
Post NLS X / Y cropPer-axis crop after stretching. It covers the whole frame, including bars, and applies in real time.

Try it live

Every control applies as you move it, including on a paused frame, so you can judge the correction on a face rather than on motion. N toggles the stretch on and off for an A/B.

The Info panel's Warp / Crop row reports what the current settings are actually costing, so “why does it look like that?” has a number next to it.

One honest limit

Both axes are being resampled, so with strong stretch fine text can look slightly soft. Lower the strength or raise centre protection if it bothers you. This is the honest cost of filling the screen without cropping, not a defect that a later setting hides.

During a scope-to-IMAX transition, at least one IMAX frame can still use aspect-ratio NLS. The per-frame band tracking removes the stale-crop drop-outs; this single-frame case is the remaining limit.

Measure the correction, then make it.

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