A widescreen movie could be fit on 35 mm film by simply using less of the frame vertically and projecting it to fill a screen with the desired aspect ratio. The advantage was that the standard 35 mm projector owned by many theaters could be used. However, this meant that a lower resolution image was being blown up to a larger size on the screen, so the image was less sharp than movies using the entire 35 mm frame.

VistaVision provided a way to get a sharper widescreen image on standard 35 mm film by shooting a much larger image in the camera, then reducing it to fit the 35 mm frame. The camera used a 35 mm negative oriented horizontally, allowing an image height up to the width of a full 35 mm frame with an aspect ratio of 1.5:1 or higher (if the full height wasn't used). The width occupied 8 perforations rather than the standard 4 and the film was pulled horizontally through the camera. Reducing the image during printing resulted in a sharper image than would be obtained by shooting directly to a standard 35 mm negative. The typical aspect ratio for projection was 1.85:1.

The first film made in VistaVision was White Christmas, released in 1954. The process was used in the U.S. until 1961, when it was supplanted by Panavision. Limited foreign use continued into the 1980s.