Was 16:9 a Mistake for HD?

MH_Stevens wrote on 9/22/2005, 8:53 AM
When I first started working with widescreen and watching 16:9 widescreen on the telly I thought it great. Soon the old 4:3 format looked odd and the loss of peripharal vision annoying.

Now, having become accustomed to 16:9 I find it too is begining to look "squareish" and I am wishing I was filming in letterbox. Does anyone else feel like this?

Comments

John_Cline wrote on 9/22/2005, 9:01 AM
What do you mean by "letterbox?" Something like 2.35:1 instead of 1.777:1 (16x9)?

16:9 has it's own set of issues, primarily that humans are vertical. Sometimes 9x16 would seem more useful...

John
MH_Stevens wrote on 9/22/2005, 2:57 PM
Yes, having grown accustomed to 16:9 it looks to me like the human natural field of view is wider that 16:9, more like 2.35:1as you sugest.

Chienworks wrote on 9/22/2005, 5:52 PM
I think it's subject to individual interpretation. My personal field of view tends much more towards 1:1 (actually, a circle rather than a square). When i see a letterbox screen part of my brain is occupied wishing i could see what's being hidden above and below the frame. Then again, a larger part of my brain is occupied appreciating the coolness factor of the wide image.

Letterbox makes composition much more difficult since everything important must be compressed to fit in the limited vertical space, yet all the horizontal space must be filled with something usable. I can imagine many directors and cinematographers pulling their hair out and cursing the format as they struggle to fill it well. There are times when i'm jaw-drop-amazed at some scenes that pull this difficult task off exquisitely. (Are you getting the idea that you don't want to sit next to me in the movie theatre? Who cares about plot?* Let's just analyze the cinematography!) This is definately something i want to leave to the pros to handle.

4:3 composition is of course much easier, and as John pointed out, many scenes would be even easier still if the frame was taller than it is wide. 16:9 is a decent compromise between the extremes and will probably remain the norm for video and smaller screen production for a long time. If you want wider, you can always crop. Most people are used to 16:9 with black bars on a 4:3 screen. They'll put up with 2.35:1 with black bars on a 16:9 screen. In fact, i predict that with high resolution displays we'll start seeing more odd shaped frames occurring much more often. I've done a 4:1 video for a conference that went over rather well. The shape was an effective highlight for the topic of discussion, which was reaching out to surrounding areas. I've also done a 1:3 (yes, 3 times taller than wide) production designed to fit on a specific wall space at a convention. True, in both these cases the video was projected on a wall so there wasn't a physical screen border to make you realize that the image wasn't filling the frame. The idea is that the frame is a tool for you to use and how you fill it or not is your artistic decision. You should never limit your creativity to the frame's shape.



*As i typed that, the thought occured that, sadly, not many producers or directors seem to worry about plot these days either.
Serena wrote on 9/22/2005, 6:18 PM
Well human vision covers something like 180 degrees horizontally, which might be the reason some people like to sit in the front row of the cinema. OMNIMAX is a film system that gives coverage similar to human vision, but even on 70mm film the resolution isn't marvellous. There have been many film systems developed over 100 years to give wide FOV, but Cinemascope using 2:1 squeeze was the first enduring system. On a 1.33:1 frame this gives 2.66:1 FOV, but allowing for extra sound tracks reduced the ratio to 2.35:1.
You'll know that the usual non-anamorphic theatrical screen ratio is 1.85:1. The non-anamorphic screen ratio is essentially achieved by masking in the standard 35mm film projector, the DP having composed for the 1.85 action area. Prints might also be masked to the intended theatrical release ratio. Obviously in video you can likewise mask to whatever screen ratio you like.
In video anamorphic means a squeeze of 1.33 and I guess there were technical reasons for choosing that. It might just have been a compromise between the film ratio of 1.85 and the TV ratio of 1.33.
Serena wrote on 9/22/2005, 9:01 PM
Apart from tolerating plotless films, agree wholeheartedly with Chienworks. Composing for widescreen (even 1.78:1) takes care for the usual 4:3 rules don't always work. Paintings, you'll notice, tend more towards square than oblong (and often taller than wide) and in the early days the debate was that the cinema screen should be square (for reasons of good composition). Composing two-shots for widescreen is hard, for there is just too much space available for good composition. A common trick is to cut down the composition area by including dark space on one side of the screen, or other tricks which make it logical to confine the people to a 4:3 area. Of course wide open spaces and action is ideal for the big 2.35:1 ratio.
Spot|DSE wrote on 9/22/2005, 10:06 PM
"shoot for TV, frame for film" still holds true, but as society evolves more and more around entertainment and computers, widerscreen views will become just as accepted as 4:3 became when television came along after folks had been used to widescreen. It's really just a return to the mid 50's Cinerama, isn't it? :-)
Serena wrote on 9/22/2005, 10:24 PM
Spot, you're just too young to remember the cinema "academy frame" format! Prior to Cinemascope (putting aside other things like Abel Gance's 1927 cinerama-like Napoleon) all cinema was 4:3. Widescreen was Hollywood's counter to TV. TV is playing catch up and of course cinema is heading to digital. Incidentally, shouldn't that be "shoot for film, frame for TV"? The TV frame is smaller.

Serena
farss wrote on 9/23/2005, 6:14 AM
Here's a neat trick if you can find the glass. Put an anamorphic 16:9 lens on the front of a Z1 shooting HDV to get 3.16:1 AR, you should be able to convince Vegas to stretch the pixels that far.
I've seen some footage done in SD this way using a DVX100 in electronic 16:9 with the 16:9 glass on the front, with some interesting composition it looked far from silly.
Now of course once Phillips build those OLED screens we can have curved monitors....
Bob.
mark2929 wrote on 9/23/2005, 2:31 PM
My thoughts about the TV Formats!

I like a BIG TV in 4:3 Then have side bits added 16:9 which although out of Focus it gives a feeling of realness and energy..

To apreciate 2:35:1 needs a projector..

16:9 on an average sized TV Is a con and would rather have 4:3 where else can you be given less and pay more..
Serena wrote on 9/23/2005, 6:04 PM
Bob,
I think the anamorphic 16:9 attachment has a squeeze ratio of only 1.33 (16/12=1.333; standard ratio is 12:9). So that would make your Z1 AR=2.37, nicely close to 2.35. The 1.33:1 anamorphic attachments are available from most professional hire people ($80 to $140 a day) to convert 4:3 cameras to shoot 16:9 without losing pixels (probably you have them in your stock ;-) ). Watch the second-hand market and you can pick up a 2:1 film anamorphic attachment for a good price and then you can shoot 32:9 widescreen (AR+=3.56) on your HDV. Attach it in front of your projector lens and you won't have to mask the frame at all! Of course rotate it to give vertical squeeze and you can have 16x18 images. There's no end of fun available once one forgets about distribution.

Serena
farss wrote on 9/23/2005, 6:22 PM
Serena,
thanks. I thought my calcs were missing something (again!). I thought the answer was supposed to be very close to 2.35:1 and thought I'd run it through the calculator and plugged in the wrong values to get an even worse answer.
Now you've really got me thinking, the LCD projectors I've used in the local cinemas do have 16:9 lenses available...and you can also set the projectors AR to 16:9 hmmm....
Bob,
riredale wrote on 9/23/2005, 6:43 PM
Back in 1987 I had a front-row seat to some of these issues when I was promoting an NTSC-compatible HD format called "HD-NTSC." I attended many SMPTE committee meetings in Hollywood and back in Washington D.C. and counted Dr. Kerns Powers of the Sarnoff Labs in Princeton NJ as one of my friends.

There was a great deal of human preference research done by NHK (the public television/video research arm of the Japanese television industry) in the 1970's and early '80's. One of the things they determined was that, given a choice of aspect ratios, the average viewer showed a suprisingly strong perference for the 14:9 and 15:9 shapes (by contrast, NTSC is 12:9, and HD today is 16:9). That is why the first HD systems promoted by NHK and Japanese industry promoted a 5:3 (15:9) aspect ratio. Our own HD-NTSC format promoted a similar 14:9 shape, in part because our group believed new TV sets in the showroom would need to stand out from conventional sets even when turned off, and also because we needed those blank active lines on top and bottom to deliver our digital audio information.

Keep in mind that in those days, the Americans and Europeans were terrified of the Japanese onslaught in TV technology. RCA (Sarnoff) Labs and Philips in particular were afraid that their domestic industries would be utterly destroyed. Then Kerns Powers delivered a proposal to make the shooting aspect ratio 16:9, on the premise that it had some neat geometric properties in relation to the common delivery aspect ratios in use at the time. In a last-ditch effort to derail or at least slow down the oncoming Japanese train, the Americans and Europeans immediately adopted the proposal. All of the Japanese tooling and signal timing had to be re-done.

BTW the committees later adoped the 1920 pixels-per-line spec, and then insisted on having square pixels. This meant there now had to be 1080 active lines, not the 1035 that Japan had already been building. To their credit, NHK patiently smiled and said, "okay" and very quickly brought out new hardware. But the final blow to Japan was the notion by General Instrument in San Diego of an all-digital delivery mechanism, which led directly a few years later to the creation of the MPEG2 codec.