4x3? 16x9? Aspect Ratio: A History

Just bookmarked that for later! Thanks for sharing besty.

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Very informative and fascinating. Thank you so much. You have become my go to person.

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I always ask myself, "How would Janis Paige explain it?"

http://youtu.be/X0kHKijb8jI

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PJ, I LOVE that number ... and I love Janis Paige, too.

As for Anamorphic, it really just means "squeezed" horizontally. People try to assign it a specific ratio, but that's not true. It's a technique of both filming and projecting at a wider ratio than the actual film stock. The reason it revolutionized the movies is that it was really pretty simple:

1) Film the movie using an "anamorphic" lens that records the image on regular 35mm film stock. No special stock is needed. Just a special lens, that squeezes the image horizontally. So everything looks really tall and skinny to the naked eye.

2) Project that same film on a wider screen using a projector lens that stretches that same "squeezed" image and widens it, making it the correct ratio again in the theatres.

It allowed the industry to use the same cameras, the same projectors they already had, and the same film stock---all 35mm---so all they had to buy to make it work were new lenses for the cameras and new lenses for the projectors.

The exact same principal is applied for DVDs, which was very "forward thinking" of the industry when they first released the DVD format on the market. 16x9 TVs hadn't even caught on yet, but they knew they were coming on a huge scale.

DVD (standard def) video is all recorded on 4x3 video (720x480 D1 NTSC pixels, here in the USA). It's the same, no matter what. That's how the video is recorded.

If it's a 4x3 movie (1.33:1 or 1.37:1, like "old" movies, pre-1950s, the 720x480 movie plays back on your DVD player at a standard ratio (no stretching of the image horizontally).

If the movie is any of the various widescreen film ratios, the DVD video can be recorded two different ways. One is good, the other is crap.

1) The crap way is to record the widescreen video as "standard" (no anamorphic stretching) and add black bars to "letterbox" the movie into whatever ratio it should be. That is called "4x3 letterboxed, and on any widescreen TV, it looks like total crap, because the image sits in the middle of the screen with both the letterbox bars on the top and bottom AND the pillarbox bars on the sides, because it's a 4x3 image. It looks like a small rectangle playing on your TV with black bars on all four sides. I usually "zoom" the image, which of course lessens the quality and clarity significantly, but at least I'm not watching a 30" widescreen movie on my 60" TV.

2) The good way is to record the widescreen video as "anamorphic" (also known as "enhanced for 16x9 TVs"). This means the image was "squeezed" when it was recorded on the same 720x480 (D1 NTSC) video. And your DVD player actually stretches the image horizontally for playback, just like the anamorphic projector lenses do in a movie theatre. It fills the TV screen horizontally, and you may or may not get any black bars (depending on the various widescreen film ratios).

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Updated On: 6/27/13 at 06:01 PM

Everything, absolutely everything, you could ever want to know about the history of aspect ratios, color film, film sound, and much, much more, in easily readable language -- and lots of pictures!

http://www.widescreenmuseum.com

Updated On: 6/27/13 at 08:12 PM

It's a technique of both filming and projecting at a wider ratio than the actual film stock.

Bless you besty. Now I get it. :)

To my knowledge it was never used, either, but that's an interesting idea!

The closest would be 1.66:1, which is also referred to today as "Academy flat" widescreen ratio.

They would take the 4x3 Academy ratio (1.37:1), and instead of using an anamorphic lens, they would just crop off a bit from the top and bottom of the image that was shot to create the 1.66:1.

It started in the '50s, but was used a lot in the '60s and early '70s. Films that were shot that way include Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, Some Like It Hot, Night of the Hunter, and several Disney films of that era, including The Jungle Book, The Aristocats, The Fox and the Hound, Robin Hood, etc.

Since the image wasn't stretched, but rather "blown up" or "zoomed in" when projected, it created a lot of added/magnified film grain, so most movies shot that way don't look that good.

The interesting thing which has caused controversy today is that several of these movies have been released in the standard 4x3 ratio, or "open matte" which removes the top and bottom crops and actually shows viewers MORE info vertically on the screen. This was not the way these films were intended to be viewed (or projected). In some instances it adds camera flaws like mic booms hanging down in the shot, or a startling one from Willy Wonka: you can see the air tubes on the floor going into Violet Beuregarde's blueberry costume as she's being filled with air! Those were supposed to be cropped off by the matte, but in an "open matte" 4x3 DVD, you can see this "extra" area at the top and bottom, exposing the air tubes.

When "Academy flat" movies are displayed properly on 16x9 (1.77:1) TV sets, you will get very small pillarbox bars on the sides to get to the 1.66:1 ratio.

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