"Hey, we have all these extra pixels to make our picture look better... let's throw away 20% of them with letterboxing!"

I don't think anything beyond 16:9 is practical in a home environment, so basically we have a bunch of folks pretending they are shooting for 2.4:1 theater screens (some do, but the majority are faking the funk) who will likely never view their content on a display capable of displaying native at that aspect. Then you have the group who fakes it even more by shooting 16:9 and cropping it for no reason other than to look cool.

In both cases, wasted pixels that could be showing us more of the scene.

Were they black bars or part to the branding, IBM Blue?

Almost all cinema is shot wider than 16:9.

Does that mean we should demand 2.40 aspect screens and let the 16:9 and 16:10 stuff go pillarbox on the display?

Methinks it would be a bad experiment, but it's easy enough to simulate and make your own conclusions.

As j_d pointed out, the extra space top and bottom is often used for background effects, logos, and aesthetics.

But trends often become the norm eventually.

We went from 4:3 to 16:9 so maybe in a few years 2.40:1 will be standard for TVs. By then even the smallest screen will take up a whole wall!

Yeah, I don't think it is practical for the average home.

Interestingly I've just watched (twice) the "Mauritania Railway..." that Kinvermark posted earlier. It's 2.35:1. I don't think it would have the same impact if presented as 16:9.

I have no problems with movies being shot in different aspects, it sometimes adds to the artistic effects. But I have been in production for many years and would hate to guess how many fake 16x9 black bars I added just because we could.

I suffer from serious "cognitive dissonance" on this issue 😀

The techy part of me agrees with David et al, but then the arty movie loving part of me says..."but it looks sooo cool like that." It's a bit like that with 24p vs 60p too: crappy juddery pans and blurry motion just seems to look more "movie like" (whatever that means), so 24p it is!

Kinvermark, that has been a thought of many producers, but in my mind I want more frames per second, not less. Just like shooting in 4k and downrezzing, you can always throw frames out for effect. I had a friend produce a nice documentary in 24p and the juddery pans on the stills drove me nuts. But I was raised with 29.97 interlaced TV as well as theater movies. I want more frames. 🙃

Black bars are appropriate and necessary in some cases, but to shoot for that results doesn't produce professional results in my opinion. What do you say?

Well, since you asked . . . . Surely, professional cinema has been framing its images to something other than what was imposed by the limits of current technology, and they have been doing it for about a century. Just because TV monitors or computer screens have limits in their dimensions does not mean that creative people must stick with those.

Ever since the VHS days people with 4:3 TV sets got accustomed to seeing black bars on the top and bottom of their screens despite the woefully low resolution of those screens (relative to what we have now). And now we watch old academy ratio movies with bars on the left and right sides of our monitors.

Plus we now even have some computer monitors with the 64:27 ratio (even if for some strange reason the manufacturers refer to them as 21:9 or something, corresponding roughly to 2.37:1 films). By the way, 64:27 is to 16:9 what 16:9 is to 4:3. That is because 4:3 times 4:3 = 16:9 and 16:9 times 4:3 = 64:27.

By the way, if anyone wants to experiment with different bars, you can download various masks I made in SVG format from openclipart. I used SVG because it can be scaled to a desirable resolution, 1080, 4k, etc, by various software programs, including the free Inkscape, that will export it to a PNG bitmap of desired size. And the PNG can be placed on the top track in Vegas (and others).

I have no problems with movies being shot in different aspects, it sometimes adds to the artistic effects. But I have been in production for many years and would hate to guess how many fake 16x9 black bars I added just because we could.

I know this is primarily about letterbox. But when I did my demo reel, my 4:3 dvcam looked so yesteryear I could hardly stand it. One of my mistakes led me to fakey widescreen, which I used again last week.

For ntsc, I just change the aspect from .9091 to 1.00. Not too fat to pass muster alongside real widescreen, and not too skinny for the bars to make it look like 70s tv.

Aspect Ratios may be used for some purpose other than what size/shape screen the footage is most likely to be shown on. I make short movies, and have used different aspect ratios for specific purpose. Examples:

I used 1.66:1 for a short story that "felt" to me like an old-time romantic movie.

For a movie featuring a clone of a main character, I used 2.00:1 aspect ratio.

For a fantasy story that featured three different stories at different times (years), plus a story-within-one-of-those-stories, plus flashbacks, plus a "bookend" preface and epilogue, I used different aspect ratios for different elements, all of which were interwoven. (1.78:1 for the bookends -- although most of the screen was black during those; 1.78:1 for the substories about a musician and about a writer, since those had enough of a different look to be obviously different times; 1.66:1 for the substory about a painter; 2.39:1 for the writer's story-within-the-story; 1.33:1 for the simulated 8mm home movies played via Bell & Howell projector for flashbacks within the story-within-the-story) [This movie is only 7 minutes long, believe it or not.]

So, the point is: Black bars to preserve OAR are not wasted space.

The short movies are here . Each was made in only 2 days.