An interesting point, but I don’t know if it’s a totally apt analogy. Roads are primarily flat, with generally gradual gradients–most movies aren’t filmed from the perspectives of cars. I would also imagine the height of a window was reduced as much as possible for practical reasons to prevent a vehicle from being taller than it needed to be. But I can’t be the only one who’s had to duck down and look up to spot something outside the window’s field-of-vision occasionally, right?
They made do with less horizontal, essentially. These compilations do a good job of illustrating the contrasting effects the two aspect ratios have compositionally. In one case, you’ll see a panoramic shot is handled in 4:3 by having the camera situated very high (on a clifftop) and moving along with the action. Whereas in 16:9, you can have the action move across the frame without moving the camera at all. Also, you’ll also find movement from one side of the screen to the other often occurs in a diagonal in 4:3, from upper-right to lower-left, while 16:9 can accomodate a shot of equal length with a more straightforward left-to-right motion within the frame.
Similarly, when you have 3 bad guys waiting for the good guy, or four guys moving in a group down a frontier street, they’re clustered together, shoulder to shoulder or staggered two by two in 4:3. In 16:9, you can space the 3 or four guys out more liberally, giving you greater variety of options in arranging the actors and composing the frame.
To be sure, thousands of truly great films were made in 4:3–visually stunning and composed in dramatic, intricate fashion. But you’ll also find that they were more dependant on close-ups and medium close-ups, camera movement, and depth of field to create a visual sense of variety.
I also flatly don’t believe the claim that we see in a 4:3 aspect ratio. Human vision varies by focus so that we can concentrate on a small specific area or on a vast area of nature. I don’t think it’s accurate to say we see in an aspect ratio at all. Why don’t you just discard that thought entirely and see what happens?
The 4:3 format is a historic accident brought upon by using 35 mm film-stock. It was not an aesthetic decision in any way. Once it caught on the same legacy problem existed that keeps so many technologies tied to the past. However, filmmakers kept trying from a very early day to get around what they all saw as the limitations of that aspect ratio, all failing because of the enormous expense needed for the changeover. Tellingly, I don’t know of any attempts for a squarer commercial format. Life happens on a vast flat plain in real life. How often do you ever have to raise your eyes in normal life? Compare that to how often you have to look to both sides.
I always like to refer people in these discussions to the really cool website The Widescreen Museum. Poke around inside there for a while and then try to convince yourself that 4:3 is somehow better.
I brought up that claim because it’s often cited (such as in the article I linked earlier) as being a reason why widescreen is superior. Whether it was a valid argument at all (regardless of factual accuracy) was sort of beside the point.
So how does this much differ from widescreen being primarily introduced primarily as a gimmick to get patrons back into theaters?
It seems like you were convinced from the start that widescreen was bullshit and just wanted to fish for the answer that you wanted (that it has no basis other than tradition) which was the only response you expressed thanks for.
Try this; use your thumb and forefinger to estimate the range of your visual field vertically. Maintain the same distance from your eyes and rotate your hand (obviously maintaining the measured vertical visual range) and see how narrow that seems compared to your horizontal visual field. It’s not just because of tradition.
Not necessarily. If the film was intended to be shown in an aspect ratio of 1.85:1, most likely* it was actually shot 1.33:1 or 1.37:1, leaving it up to the theater projectionist to use a 1.85:1 aperture mask to create the desired ratio. The full 1.33 is then used for television and home video release. (Sometimes in the home video release you see actors’ naughty bits in that bottom area during nude scenes that weren’t intended to be seen.)
I have a dual-sided DVD of Godspell; one side has a 1.85:1 letterboxed image, the other as a 1.33:1 image, which has more image, not less, than the letterboxed.
- Some 1.85:1 movies are shot “hard matted”, meaning the camera’s aperture plate is that shape.
Because suddenly it was thought to be worth the enormous costs involved to give moviegoers what was supposed to be a better moviegoing experience. Color wasn’t enough, stereo wasn’t enough, but widescreen was supposed to be the difference that would make the expense worth it.
In fact, many widescreen films were produced then that everybody raved about and made lots of money for the studios. Of course, most filmmakers are mediocre and so a lot of widescreen films were also mediocre. Overall, however, the notion that people would stop watching television and return en masse to movie theaters was nothing but a dream. No format would accomplish that. Once the studios, helped by the screams of the theater-owners who had to spend their own money to replace the screens, the projectors, the sound systems, and the seating arrangements to accommodate the new formats, realized that, they stopped spending the money on format.
Even though the ultra-wide-screen formats died, the standard ratio for films today is 1.85:1, much closer to the 1.78 of 16:9 than the 1.33 of 4:3.
I don’t see that claim in the pages you link to. Could you point it out?
The director who shot in short aspect ratios was Stanley Kubrick. Most of his films were framed in-camera for 4:3 or 1.66:1 (The Shining and Full Metal Jacket being exceptions). I think the reason for this is that Kubrick expected his films to be shown on video a lot, and wanted to make sure they were framed for that medium. I don’t know if he had anything in particular against the various widescreen formats.
Anyway, getting back to aspect ratio… It turns out that this is a far more complex question than one would think. You can’t just look at the aspect ratio of the eye, because the brain is involved and the brain can do all sorts of post-processing on what the eye is really seeing. So there’s no physical measurement we can make of the eye and say, “This is the best aspect ratio for humans.”
However, it’s a fact that for video material, most people prefer an image that is substantially wider than it is tall. My personal opinion is that this has to do with activating our peripheral vision. The center of the eye is where we have the highest resolution and best color sensitivity, because that’s where the concentration of cones are. But to the periphery of the eye we have the rods, which are more sensitive to light, and more involved in our peripheral vision. And most activity in our peripheral vision happens in the horizontal plane, and our brains have been more developed to respond to peripheral cues in the horizontal plane because that’s where our predators happened to live, and were all the action happens today. Most of us don’t much care what happens in the vertical dimension well above us, and the ground clips the vertical dimension below us, so our brains and eyes are really scanning and absorbing data in the horizontal plane.
However, it gets more complicated…
Various certifying bodies like THX and SMPTE have done work on the optimum field of view for watching moving pictures, and the consensus seems to be that a range between 24 degrees and 30 degrees is about right. My feeling is that when the movie is framed such that it’s filling that much of your view, the action will remain in a space small enough that your high resolution cones are picking it all up, and yet the picture is wide enough that your rods in your peripheral viision are being activated, which is what gives you that ‘immersive’ feeling. But if you go much wider than that, then your eyes are going to have to track back and forth just to follow the primary action, which becomes tiring. Smaller than that, and your peripheral vision doesn’t come into play, which makes you feel more like you’re watching an image in a box rather than being in the scene.
So… Widescreen may not be superior if the TV you are watching it on is small enough that the entire image is still within the center of your field of view, but if you have a big enough screen or sit close enough, a widescreen image will make you feel immersed where a square image might feel constricted or like you’re looking through a box.
IMAX is an interesting difference - it’s shot in 1.33:1, and not widescreen. But the theater screen is so large that the image is still triggering your peripheral vision. That’s probably why you get those ‘gulp’ feelings in Imax when a helicopter goes over a cliff - now you’re picking up peripheral vision clues in the vertical plane, which gives you an immersive feeling of height.
But there’s a practical reason why you can’t do this in a regular theater or at home - If you build a square screen large enough to fill your vision, your audience has to be either very close, or you need a really tall building. My home theater screen is 8’ wide, and that puts it right in the sweet spot for my peripheral vision. If I wanted that width in a 4:3 screen, it would have to be 6 feet tall. Even in a room with a 9’ ceiling, that means the screen would only be a foot and half off the floor and ceiling. That means no one in the back row could see the bottom of the screen.
If you notice in an IMAX theater, the seats are usually stacked very steeply. That’s necessary so that the person in front of you don’t cut off half the screen image. But that’s an expensive way to build a theater, and can only really be managed for a small number of seats - a 60 foot by 80 foot screen IMAX theater only seats 440 people. So, there are serious limitations in being able to build a screen big enough for immersion in a 4:3 aspect ratio.
Not exactly–I wouldn’t describe it as “bullshit,” but I was skeptical. I won’t deny I had a slight slant coming in, but one I was looking to test the validity of. I’m honestly not “fishing” to confirm what I believe might be true (although I did frame my arguments as such, by virtue of me leaning in that direction). Instead, I was looking for more of a discussion (which I’ve received) about the merits of such a stance, and a lot of interesting points have been brought up that I hadn’t considered.
I quoted it in post 8.
Where? There is not a word about the 4:3 ratio in the CNET article?
To clarify, the claim I’m addressing is that widescreen is a more natural fit for our eyes. Here’s the quote I mentioned, from the Cnet article:
Damn Sam Stone, that was one hell of a post.
Okay, so it sounds like perhaps (in your view—which seems to make sense) widescreen makes more sense on a moderate scale, perhaps? Whereas, as you alluded to, IMAX seems to often be heralded as the most immersive form of movie watching that exists, with people often paying a premium to watch movies on such screens (even if they do sometimes have to be cropped to conform to the screen’s dimensions).
This is all so confusing! 
And I’m addressing your claim that:
If that second sentence was actually referring to:
then I agree. It’s the 4:3 claim as closer that I find impossible to believe.
You cannot say that the eyes have an aspect ratio, but obviously widescreen is closer to vision and more natural. Who really disputes that?
You seem to find that hard to believe, though, which is what is confusing to the rest of us here.
People like me who haven’t been presented with proof that 16:9 is “more natural” than 4:3 (also a format that’s wider than it is tall, I might remind you). Your sentence also seems to contradict itself; surely they must have an “aspect ratio” of some sort, lest your second point wouldn’t make sense…
Your field of view, roughly speaking, is about 180 deg horizontally and 120 deg vertically.
FWIW, the Handbook of Human Factors and Ergonomics recommends that head-mounted displays provide a minimum FOV of 120 deg horiz x 60 deg vert to convey a feeling of immersion. For displays that use stationary screens, you start to get a feeling of immersion once you hit a FOV of about 90 deg, though more is better.
Your refutation here only applies to cyclops. It’s having two eyes side by side that makes the wider field of view more natural. That’s also what makes the actual aspect ratio of eyes irrelevant. If we only had one eye, then the internal aspect ratio (which doesn’t even make sense as a concept, IMO) would matter. With two eyes, the internal aspect ratio is rendered moot because the relative position of them becomes all important. Since they are side by side and both forward-looking, widescreen is the bee’s knees.
I should point out that widescreen does make working on three windows at once a lot easier. I tend to have a web page in the main part, and two sections of code to the right, when I’m testing how a ‘normal viewer’ might see a page. Or when I’m shredding data in spreadsheets, I really appreciate widescreen.
Listen, I’m not disputing the fact that our side-by-side eyes afford us a wider field of vision…obviously it does. But by how much was the question. Clearly there has to be some crossover in order for us perceive depth, which seems to be the primary use for having two eyes, and not that of seeing in “widescreen.” The 4:3 ratio is also wider than it is tall, and at least according to one article I read long ago (again, I don’t know whether it’s accurate or not, just as I don’t the similar claims regarding widescreen), 4:3 was closer to our natural field-of-vision than 16:9 is.
As a journalist who covers the IMAX industry, I want to compliment Sam Stone for getting the details about IMAX exactly right, something mainstream journalists rarely seem to to manage.
FYI, according to a 1983 article in the SMPTE Journal, the inventors of the IMAX format designed the theaters so that the minimum and maximum field of view (for furthest and closest viewers, respectively) would be 60 and 120 degrees horizontally, and 40 and 80 degrees vertically. Compare that to the 24-30 degrees (horizontal) that Sam said SMPTE has set for regular movies.
I should point out that the new IMAX digital theaters that are sprouting up these days mostly do not conform to the original IMAX theater specs. They are retrofitted 35mm auditoriums, so their screens are much smaller – averaging 32x55 feet instead of 60x80 feet – with an aspect ratio of about 1.8, not 1.33 like the IMAX film theaters. The auditoriums are also deeper in relation to the screen width, so the audience field of views are not as wide – i.e., immersive – as the classic IMAX film theaters. And the digital projectors have nothing like the resolution of the IMAX film frame.
So if you want to see a film in the real IMAX format, be sure to go to one of the older film theaters, not a new one in a multiplex.
It’s closer to monocular FOV, not biocular; widescreen is closer to your biocular FOV.