Comments

Chienworks wrote on 9/15/2011, 10:02 PM
I must be odd (well, yes, anyone who knows me will echo that sentiment), but my field of vision seems to be nearly circular. I see about as much up and down as i do side-by-side. So to me all this widescreen stuff seems very foolish.
Kevin R wrote on 9/15/2011, 10:16 PM
In the computer world, the best thing about 16:10 is turning the monitor 90 degrees to see much more of the document you are editing!

For video, I'm always stuck trying to please both worlds with every project. Until DVD players disappear this will be reality for a long while.

I shoot 30p now to avoid interlace issues when down-converting to SD.
Geoff_Wood wrote on 9/15/2011, 10:16 PM
Do you have only one eye ? ;-)

geoff
Chienworks wrote on 9/15/2011, 11:22 PM
I have two. However, they're only 5cm apart and generally face the same direction. This means that by the time i'm looking at something normal viewing distance away the additional horizontal field due to the horizontal placement of the eyes is 5cm out of 200cm, or 200m, or 200Km. Even at close distances, 205cm x 200cm is pretty darn close to 1:1. Any further away and the effect is negligible.
hazydave wrote on 9/16/2011, 1:10 AM
I shot something in 4:3 a few years back, because that was the right creative choice, and I could get away with it. But nothing since.

I have two 4:3 televisions left, but none I use regularly. I am happy I bought 16:10 monitors, before "convergence" made the PC industry keep their promise. That was kind of funny... the 16:9 ratio, part of the "grand compromise" or "grand alliance" on HDTV, was half-way between Hollywood's requested 2:1 and the PC industry's 16:10. So HDTV came out 16:9... and the PC industry just want along with 16:10 anyway. Brilliant!

But then TV panels started being cranked out by the millions, and monitor makers couldn't compete selling made-for-computer screens rather than just using TV panels. So all the cheap new ones are 16:9... and I just saw a television at 21:9 from Philips. No! Stop it! I won't crop! I won't buy new gear!... well, not before 4K is affordable...
ushere wrote on 9/16/2011, 1:21 AM
i've got three, but the one in the centre of my forehead puts halo's round everything and makes me think i should install media manager again. therefore i know it's looking into another universe.

mike, the 8 track will probably do it, though i've still got an old 2" ampex tape reel with a studio mix of 'ultimate spinach' on it. maybe that'd do, if i could find a player ;-)

maybe i should just go and have a joint and listen to firesign theatre?
PeterDuke wrote on 9/16/2011, 2:49 AM
""I would like to see wider adoption of 2.35:1, it's a better match to how our vision works."

Actually 16:9 is closer to the ratio of human vision. Except it needs to be kind of oval shaped to match precisely."

If I sit one foot from a 50" 16:9 TV screen I can still see the edges in my peripheral vision. I would think that most people would sit further back than that. It is therefore crazy to try to include peripheral content.

If I use say a 25 mm wide angle lens (35 mm film equivalent) for a group photo at a restaurant where getting further back is not practicable, I find people on the edges are a bit fatter than normal or otherwise distorted. A small bit of barrel distortion can help in this situation.

It is unnatural to project a huge flat grid so that all the horizontals and verticals are straight and parallel. Things straight ahead of us do look like this, but when we look to the sides, we see true parallel lines appear to run together and meet at a vanishing point in the distance. We have all seen, I am sure, 360 degree panoramas at such a distance from our eyes that we can see all 360 degrees at once. It looks very peculiar indeed. This is an extreme example of trying to put too wide a coverage into our field of view.
John_Cline wrote on 9/16/2011, 3:05 AM
Do I miss 4x3? Uh.... NO.
Serena wrote on 9/16/2011, 3:21 AM
If you're really going into the technicalities of vision, instantaneously you have a very small FoV of sharp vision. We think we see more because we scan, and those scans are not continuous. Our perception of "seeing" is an artefact presented to us by our brain, not the raw data delivered by our eyes to the brain. We perceive a very wide FoV, as you demonstrated by sitting with your nose on your TV screen, but the majority of this is for detecting motion and not detail.
A wide angle photo is not an analogy of human vision and widescreen allows us to scan as we do normally. We compose shots to lead the eye to points of interest, and we must scan even small images. Yes, 2.35 is indeed closer to our normal viewing experience.
PeterDuke wrote on 9/16/2011, 4:00 AM
"We perceive a very wide FoV, as you demonstrated by sitting with your nose on your TV screen, but the majority of this is for detecting motion and not detail."

True. But the sides still have to be sharp in case we look to the sides.

Everyone seems to be chasing shallow depth of field these days with only the main point of interest in focus, but that doesn't appeal to me at all. After migrating from a 35 mm film still camera to digital about 8 years ago, I have got used to good depth of field, but having recently gone to DSLR with a larger sensor I now have to fight (or at least, manage) DOF once more. If you take a snap of someone at a scenic spot you want both subject and background to be in focus. I concede that dramas may benefit from blurred irrelevant material, but I am not into that.
Jay Gladwell wrote on 9/16/2011, 5:01 AM

I wonder, did the great artists, painters of art's most memorable master pieces, debate and discuss the ratio of their canvases?

PeterDuke wrote on 9/16/2011, 5:51 AM
"I wonder, did the great artists, painters of art's most memorable master pieces, debate and discuss the ratio of their canvases?"

From Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_ratio

"At least since the Renaissance, many artists and architects have proportioned their works to approximate the golden ratio—especially in the form of the golden rectangle, in which the ratio of the longer side to the shorter is the golden ratio—believing this proportion to be aesthetically pleasing"

"In mathematics and the arts, two quantities are in the golden ratio if the ratio of the sum of the quantities to the larger quantity is equal to the ratio of the larger quantity to the smaller one. The golden ratio is an irrational mathematical constant, approximately 1.61803398874989."
Former user wrote on 9/16/2011, 6:59 AM
Maybe my eyes actually SEE 16 x 9 or 2.35,but my comfortable vision is closer to 4x3. To comfortably see a 16x 9 or wider, I have to move my head or eyes. I don't like moving my head when I watch TV.

This may be because I wear glasses so my mind has shut out anything outside of the glass lens left and right. That restricts my comfortable vision somewhat.

Dave T2
Jay Gladwell wrote on 9/16/2011, 7:12 AM

Peter, that's what led me to ask the question.

That would roughly be 16:10 (1.1.60), which would translate to 1720x1080.


Chienworks wrote on 9/16/2011, 7:43 AM
Standard 35mm film frame is 1.66666667, which is pretty close to the golden ratio.

One *ENORMOUS* difference between canvas and TV is that the painter can and does build a new frame and canvas it for each individual painting, one at a time, choosing what works best each time.

When's the last time you got out your hacksaw and trimmed off part of your $2500 plasma TV screen to make the format match the idea ratio for each project? Hmmmmm? Yeah, i thought so. Hey, there's always BillyBoy's suggestion of a dark curtain hanging in front of the screen that can automatically close in or open out to cover up the blank parts of the screen.
Chienworks wrote on 9/16/2011, 7:47 AM
"It is unnatural to project a huge flat grid so that all the horizontals and verticals are straight and parallel. Things straight ahead of us do look like this, but when we look to the sides, we see true parallel lines appear to run together and meet at a vanishing point in the distance. We have all seen, I am sure, 360 degree panoramas at such a distance from our eyes that we can see all 360 degrees at once. It looks very peculiar indeed."

Rather striking example here:
http://www.kellychien.com/panoramas/?fitchs_bridge_1

I get into surprisingly vehement discussions from people who claim the photo is distorted and then i try to explain that actually, no, it's a completely natural and undistorted view. It's what your eye actually sees. The only difference is that you're not used to seeing it all at once.
Serena wrote on 9/16/2011, 8:04 AM
>>>True. But the sides still have to be sharp in case we look to the sides.<<<

Interesting..... often I think people respond to posts without bothering to read them.
rs170a wrote on 9/16/2011, 8:36 AM
Interesting..... often I think people respond to posts without bothering to read them.

Serena, that goes along with reading the manual or doing a search before asking a (quite often common) question :(

Mike
farss wrote on 9/16/2011, 8:47 AM
"I wonder, did the great artists, painters of art's most memorable master pieces, debate and discuss the ratio of their canvases?"

Not being a good student of the arts I cannot answer that from knowledge but I'd guess not. I do know some of the most famous works were painted on very large canvasses but I've also seem some impressive works the size of a postage stamp.

To this creative black hole of an engineer it seems to me given the constraints of the medium we work in a bigger canvas should be a thing to be welcomed by the artist. Just as he doesn't have to use all the channels of surround sound he doesn't have to use all the canvas / screen. He doesn't have to put something in the peripheral vision of the audience but perhaps there is a way it could be used creatively as well.
Maybe I'm still missing something about this creative thing but did anyone bemoan the technical marvel of adding valves to brass instruments centuries ago.

In some respects Grazie's question is a bit odd to me.
The widespread adoption of 16:9 cameras and displays doesn't mean 4:3 is dead or useless, one can elect to only use the 4:3 part of the frame with no downside. The converse doesn't hold true, 16:9 in the 4:3 frame means loss of resolution, the artist is restricted, his work fuzzy.

Bob.
Chienworks wrote on 9/16/2011, 12:10 PM
Actually that's not entirely true. A 4:3 section of a small 16:9 screen would be a loss of resolution. A 16:9 section of a huge 4:3 screen wouldn't be. It's not the shape that matters, it's the overall resolution of the screen. Just because most common TVs tend to be SD for 4:3 and HD for 16:9 doesn't mean that 16:9 is inherently higher resolution. Heck, i see lots of cheap 16:9 TVs that are around 800x450 visible resolution being billed as "HD" merely because they are widescreen, and the public buys them up because they can now own an "HD" TV dirt cheap.

However, i do very much agree with your comment about using as much of the "canvas" of the screen as is appropriate for the work. It's sad that so many viewers get in a tizzy and wildly upset over the black bars. Too bad they don't see it as displaying the best shape possible for the material on a screen big enough to facilitate artistic choice.

I've been thinking a lot lately about my freshman photography course where we had to use full-frame negative carriers when we printed so that we'd get a black edge around our photograph. If we didn't show that black edge then we must have cropped and that was A Bad Thing! We were being taught to compose in the camera rather than "cheat" afterwards. I knew there was something wrong about that policy back then, but it wasn't until now that it finally struck me: why should i be restricted in my art by the physical layout of the medium? What if i see a scene i want to capture that is 2:2.5 or 2:3.2 or 2:7 while my camera is fixed at 2:3? Why shouldn't i capture that scene the way i want it, knowing that the physical medium forces me to also capture unwanted material that i can throw away later? It was a bad and restrictive policy back then and sets too much unreasonable expectation that limits art now.

The screen is a canvas that the artist should use as he/she sees fit. It's not a glass prison that should force them into conformity.
deusx wrote on 9/16/2011, 12:49 PM
No, but I could really use one of these http://labs.tribalddb.nl/Cinema219/?ls=gb_en as 16:9 just doesn't seem enough.
Kevin R wrote on 9/16/2011, 2:39 PM
Love widescreen for cinema.

HATE WIDESCREEN FOR COMPUTER/INFORMATION DISPLAY!!!
PixelStuff wrote on 9/16/2011, 6:07 PM
Depends on the information. This looks pretty cool.
http://www.crvd.com/

A multi-touch version of this with Windows 8 could be really fun.
John_Cline wrote on 9/16/2011, 6:37 PM
Looks like the CRVD display may use OLED technology but they don't say that specifically. For $6,500, I'm probably not going to find out first hand. I would like to have one, though...