[Maxwell Everett]

DizzyMan said:

Oddly though, when you look at these caps (originally posted by StewMC), it does look as though there was extra unused footage at the side:

From TNG "Menage a Trois":
http://www.evilpenguins.co.uk/rep1.jpg

From ENT "These are the Voyages":
http://www.evilpenguins.co.uk/rep2.jpg

It is interesting to note that the large area to the left and the small area to the right in the ENT image does conform somewhat to where extra image area would be if the 35mm film from "Ménage à Troi" wasn't hard matted in-camera.

Perhaps director Rob Legato (one of TNG's VFX Supervisors) decided that for his episode he wasn't going to hard-matte the image in-camera.

But if that is the case -- why did they also have to crop the top and bottom of the image for ENT?

Another possibility was that this practice of hard-matting in-camera was inconsistent during TNG's run and simply resulted in a stroke of good luck for this particular shot being used in ENT?