Classic television aspect ratio 4:3, and two wider ratios
Widescreen images are displayed within a set of aspect ratios (relationship of image width to height) used in film, television and computer screens. In film, a widescreen film is any film image with a width-to-height aspect ratio greater than 4:3 (1.33:1).
For TV, the original screen ratio for broadcasts was in 4:3 (1.33:1). Largely between the 1990s and early 2000s, at varying paces in different countries, 16:9 (e.g. 1920×1080p 60p) widescreen displays came into increasingly common use by high definitions.
With computer displays, aspect ratios other than 4:3 (e.g. 1920×1440) are also referred to as "widescreen". Widescreen computer displays were previously made in a 16:10 aspect ratio (e.g. 1920×1200), but nowadays they are 16:9 (e.g. 1920×1080, 2560×1440, 3840×2160).
Film
History
Widescreen was first used for The Corbett-Fitzsimmons Fight (1897). This was not only the longest film that had been released to date at 100 minutes, but also the first widescreen film being shot on 63mm Eastman stock with five perforations per frame.
Conrad Luperti, J. Marvin Spoor, and William S. Adams with the Natural Vision camera
The experimental Natural Vision widescreen process developed by George K. Spoor and P. John Berggren used 63.5mm film and had a 2:1 aspect ratio. In 1926, a Natural Vision film of Niagara Falls was released.[1][2] In 1927, the Natural Vision process was used in the production of The Americana.k.a.The Flag Maker. It was directed by J. Stuart Blackton and starred Bessie Love and Charles Ray, but was never released theatrically.
In 1930, after experimenting with the system called Fantom Screen for The Trail of '98 (1928), MGM came out with a system called Realife. MGM filmed The Great Meadow (1930) in Realife. However, it is unclear whether it was released in that widescreen process due to declining interest of the movie-going public.
By 1932, the Great Depression had forced studios to cut back on needless expense and it was not until 1953 that wider aspect ratios were again used in an attempt to stop the fall in attendance due, partially, to the emergence of television in the U.S. However, a few producers and directors, among them Alfred Hitchcock, were reluctant to use the anamorphic widescreen size featured in such formats as Cinemascope. Hitchcock used VistaVision, a non-anamorphic widescreen process developed by Paramount Pictures and Technicolor which could be adjusted to present various flat aspect ratios.[4]
Types
Masked (or flat) widescreen was introduced in April 1953. The negative is shot exposing the Academy ratio using spherical lenses, but the top and bottom of the picture are hidden or masked off by a metal aperture plate, cut to specifications of the theater's screen, in the projector. Alternatively, a hard matte in the printing or shooting stages may be used to mask off those areas while filming for composition purposes, but an aperture plate is still used to block off the appropriate areas in the theater. A detriment is that the film grain size is thus increased because only part of the image is being expanded to full height. Films are designed to be shown in cinemas in masked widescreen format but the full unmasked frame is sometimes used for television, known as an open matte. In such an instance, a photographer will compose for widescreen, but "protect" the full image from things such as microphones and other filming equipment. Standardized "flat wide screen" ratios are 1.66:1, 1.75:1, 1.85:1, and 2:1. The 1.85:1 aspect ratio has become the predominant aspect ratio for the format.
35mm anamorphic – This type of widescreen is used for CinemaScope, Panavision, and several other equivalent processes. The film is essentially shot "squeezed", so that the actors appear vertically elongated on the actual film. A special lens inside the projector unsqueezes the image so that it will appear normal. Films shot in CinemaScope or Panavision are usually projected at a 2.39:1 aspect ratio, though the historical aspect ratio can be 2.66:1 (original separate magnetic sound aspect ratio), 2.55:1 (original four-track magnetic sound aspect ratio) or 2.35:1 (original mono optical sound aspect ratio, and much later "stereo variable-area" aspect ratio, also called Dolby Stereo). The negative is usually 2.66:1 or, in rare cases, 2.55:1 or 2.35:1. The sole purpose of the change to 2.39:1 and, later, to 2.40:1, was to better hide so-called "negative assembly" splices (splices employed in the composited camera negative. This was not a production change, rather it was a recommended projection change.)
Super gauges – The full negative frame, including the area traditionally reserved for the sound track, is filmed using "full" aperture, which was standard for silent, but also common for most anamorphic negatives. The print is then shrunk and/or cropped in order to fit it back onto release prints, which include a sound track. The aspect ratio for Super 35, for example, can be set to virtually any projection standard.
Large gauge – A 70 mm film frame is not only twice as wide as a standard frame but also has greater height (five perfs versus four perfs). Shooting and projecting a film in 70mm therefore gives more than four times the image area of non-anamorphic 35mm film providing a major improvement in image quality. Few major dramatic narrative films have been filmed entirely on this format since the 1970s; the three most recent are Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet, Paul Thomas Anderson's The Master and Quentin Tarantino's The Hateful Eight. For many years, large budget pictures shot anamorphically used reserve stocks of 70mm film for SFX shots involving CGI or blue-screen compositing as the anamorphic format creates problems with said effects. It has also been used to sometimes strike 70mm blow-up prints for "roadshow" tours in select cities from the 35mm camera negative in order to capitalize on the extra sound channels provided. The introduction of digital sound systems and diminishing number of installed 70mm projectors has made a 70mm release largely obsolete. However, blowups from 35mm formats to IMAX have been used for a limited number of blockbuster films.
Paramount'sVistaVision was a larger gauge precursor to 70mm film. Introduced in 1954, it ran standard 35mm film through the camera horizontally to achieve a widescreen effect using greater negative area, in order to create a finer-grained four-perforation 35mm prints in an era where standard monopack stock could not produce finer results. Negative frames were eight perforations wide. Eight-perf photography is sometimes used for shooting special effects in order to produce a finer-grained matte that can be used in optical printing without image degradation, and is notable for its use in Lucasfilm's original three Star Wars films, among others. Another similar system with horizontal orientation was MGM's Arnoldscope.[7]
Multiple lens camera/multiple projectors – The Cinerama system originally involved shooting with three lens camera, and projecting the three resulting films on a curved screen with three synchronized projectors, resulting in an ultrawide aspect ratio of 2.89. Later Cinerama movies were shot in 70mm anamorphic (see below), and the resultant widescreen image was divided into three by optical printers to produce the final threefold prints.
The technical drawbacks of Cinerama are discussed in its own article. Only two narrative feature films, The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm and How the West Was Won, were filmed in three-camera Cinerama, and several sequences from the latter were actually filmed in Ultra-Panavision. With the exception of a few films created sporadically for use in specialty Cinerama theaters, the format is effectively obsolete.
A non-Cinerama, three-projector process was pioneered for the final reel of Abel Gance's epic film Napoléon (1927) The process, called Polyvision by Gance, consisted of three 1.33 images side by side, so that the total aspect ratio of the image is 4:1. The technical difficulties in mounting a full screening of the film, however, make most theaters unwilling or unable to show it in this format.
Between 1956 and 1957, the Soviets developed Kinopanorama, which is identical in most respects to the original three-camera Cinerama.
Anamorphic 70mm – 70mm with anamorphic lenses, popularly known as "Ultra Panavision" or "MGM Camera 65", creates an even wider high-quality picture. This camera process was used for the remake of Ben-Hur (1959), resulting in an aspect ratio of 2.76:1, one of the widest projected images ever used for a feature film. The 70mm anamorphic format was not commonly used, due to the very high production costs, although it was favored for epic films such as Ben-Hur in order to capture wide panoramic landscapes and high-budget scenes with thousands of extras and enormous sets. This system is obsolete.
Television
The original screen ratio for TV broadcasts was 4:3 (1.33:1). This was the same aspect ratio as most cinema screens and films at the time TV was first sold commercially. 1930s and 1940s films in 4:3, such as Gone with the Wind, have always been displayed on television in 4:3, filling the entire frame.
When preparing a film that was originally intended to be displayed in widescreen for TV broadcast the material was often edited with the sides truncated, using techniques such as center cut or pan and scan. Sometimes, in the case of Super 35, the full film negative was shown unmasked on TV (that is, with the hard matte removed). However, this causes the 4:3 image not to be what the director intended the audience to see, and sometimes boom mics, edited out of the shot when the picture is matted, can be visible. Current TVs feature a 16:9 aspect ratio, allowing them to display a 16:9 picture without letterboxing.
An early (1994) Sony Widescreen Television
Japan saw its first commercially available widescreen TV models in 1992[8] and TV networks began broadcasting in EDTV widescreen in 1995, starting with NTV.[9]
The first widescreen TV sold in the United States was the Thomson Consumer Electronics RCA CinemaScreen, released in 1993.[10] In Europe, the PAL and the French SECAMStandard Definition systems employed higher resolutions than the US NTSC Standard Definition system, which meant the quality issues of letterboxed or matted movies on TV were not as severe.[11] There is also an extension to PAL, called PALplus, which allows specially equipped receivers to display a PAL picture as true 16:9 with a full 576 lines of vertical resolution, provided that the station employs the same system. Standard PAL receivers will receive such a broadcast as a 16:9 image letterboxed to 4:3, with a small amount of color noise in the black bars; this "noise" is actually the additional lines which are hidden inside the color signal. Clear-Vision supports an equivalent widescreen system for NTSC analogue broadcasting.
Despite the existence of PALplus and support for widescreen in the DVB-based digital satellite, terrestrial and cable broadcasts in use across Europe, only Belgium, Ireland, the Netherlands, Austria, Germany, the Nordic countries and the UK have adopted widescreen on a large scale, with over half of all widescreen channels available by satellite in Europe targeting those areas. The UK, in particular, began moving to widescreen with the advent of digital terrestrial television in the late 1990s, and commercials were required to be delivered to broadcasters in widescreen as of 1 July 2000, on their widescreen "C-Day".
Widescreen televisions are typically used in conjunction with Digital, High-Definition Television (HDTV) receivers, or Standard-Definition (SD) DVD players and other digital television sources. Digital material is provided to widescreen TVs either in high-definition format, which is natively 16:9 (1.78:1), or as an anamorphically-compressed standard-definition picture. Typically, devices decoding Digital Standard-Definition pictures can be programmed to provide anamorphic widescreen formatting, for 16:9 sets, and formatting for 4:3 sets. Pan-and-scan mode can be used on 4:3 if the producers of the material have included the necessary panning data; if this data is absent, letterboxing or centre cut-out is used.
HD DVD and Blu-ray players were introduced in 2006. Toshiba ceased production of HD DVD players in early 2008. Consumer camcorders are also available in the HD-video format at fairly low prices. These developments will result in more options for viewing widescreen images on television monitors.
Letter-boxing is the practice of transferring film shot in a widescreen aspect ratio to standard-width video formats while preserving the film's original aspect ratio. The resulting video-graphic image has mattes of empty space above and below it; these mattes are part of each frame of the video signal.
Pan and scan is a method of adjusting widescreen film images so that they can be shown in fullscreen proportions of a standard-definition 4:3 aspect ratio television screen, often cropping off the sides of the original widescreen image to focus on the composition's most important aspects.
35 mm film is a film gauge used in filmmaking, and the film standard. In motion pictures that record on film, 35 mm is the most commonly used gauge. The name of the gauge is not a direct measurement, and refers to the nominal width of the 35 mm format photographic film, which consists of strips 1.377 ± 0.001 inches (34.976 ± 0.025 mm) wide. The standard image exposure length on 35 mm for movies is four perforations per frame along both edges, which results in 16 frames per foot of film.
VistaVision is a higher resolution, widescreen variant of the 35 mm motion picture film format that was created by engineers at Paramount Pictures in 1954.
70 mm film is a wide high-resolution film gauge for motion picture photography, with a negative area nearly 3.5 times as large as the standard 35 mm motion picture film format. As used in cameras, the film is 65 mm (2.6 in) wide. For projection, the original 65 mm film is printed on 70 mm (2.8 in) film. The additional 5 mm contains the four magnetic stripes, holding six tracks of stereophonic sound. Although later 70 mm prints use digital sound encoding, the vast majority of existing and surviving 70 mm prints pre-date this technology.
CinemaScope is an anamorphic lens series used, from 1953 to 1967, and less often later, for shooting widescreen films that, crucially, could be screened in theatres using existing equipment, albeit with a lens adapter.
Cinerama is a widescreen process that originally projected images simultaneously from three synchronized 35mm projectors onto a huge, deeply curved screen, subtending 146-degrees of arc. The trademarked process was marketed by the Cinerama corporation. It was the first of several novel processes introduced during the 1950s when the movie industry was reacting to competition from television. Cinerama was presented to the public as a theatrical event, with reserved seating and printed programs, and audience members often dressed in their best attire for the evening.
Anamorphic widescreen is a process by which a comparatively wide widescreen image is horizontally compressed to fit into a storage medium with a narrower aspect ratio, reducing the horizontal resolution of the image while keeping its full original vertical resolution. Compatible play-back equipment can then expand the horizontal dimension to show the original widescreen image. This is typically used to allow one to store widescreen images on a medium that was originally intended for a narrower ratio, while using as much of the frame – and therefore recording as much detail – as possible.
Negative pulldown is the manner in which an image is exposed on a film stock, described by the number of film perforations spanned by an individual frame. It can also describe whether the image captured on the negative is oriented horizontally or vertically. Changing the number of exposed perforations allows a cinematographer to change both the aspect ratio of the image and the size of the area on the film stock that the image occupies.
Todd-AO is an American post-production company founded in 1953 by Mike Todd and Robert Naify, providing sound-related services to the motion picture and television industries. The company retains one facility, in the Los Angeles area.
Open matte is a filming technique that involves matting out the top and bottom of the film frame in the movie projector for the widescreen theatrical release and then scanning the film without a matte for a full screen home video release. It is roughly equivalent to an uncropped version of the film.
Techniscope or 2-perf is a 35 mm motion picture camera film format introduced by Technicolor Italia in 1960. The Techniscope format uses a two film-perforation negative pulldown per frame, instead of the standard four-perforation frame usually exposed in 35 mm film photography. Techniscope's 2.33:1 aspect ratio is easily enlarged to the 2.39:1 widescreen ratio, because it uses half the amount of 35 mm film stock and standard spherical lenses. Thus, Techniscope release prints are made by anamorphosing, enlarging each frame vertically by a factor of two.
Technirama is a screen process that has been used by some film production houses as an alternative to CinemaScope. It was first used in 1957 but fell into disuse in the mid-1960s. The process was invented by Technicolor and is an anamorphic process with a screen ratio the same as revised CinemaScope (2.35:1), but it is actually 2.25:1 on the negative.
The Academy ratio of 1.375:1 is an aspect ratio of a frame of 35 mm film when used with 4-perf pulldown. It was standardized by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences as the standard film aspect ratio in 1932, although similar-sized ratios were used as early as 1928.
Super Panavision 70 is the marketing brand name used to identify movies photographed with Panavision 70 mm spherical optics between 1959 and 1983. It has since been replaced by Panavision System 65.
Polyvision was the name given by the French film critic Émile Vuillermoz to a specialized widescreen film format devised exclusively for the filming and projection of Abel Gance's 1927 film Napoleon, its three-projector format predating Cinerama by 25 years.
Ultra Panavision 70 and MGM Camera 65 were, from 1957 to 1966, the marketing brands that identified motion pictures photographed with Panavision's anamorphic movie camera lenses on 65 mm film. Ultra Panavision 70 and MGM Camera 65 were shot at 24 frames per second (fps) using anamorphic camera lenses. Ultra Panavision 70 and MGM Camera 65's anamorphic lenses compressed the image 1.25 times, yielding an extremely wide aspect ratio of 2.76:1.
Anamorphic format is the cinematography technique of shooting a widescreen picture on standard 35 mm film or other visual recording media with a non-widescreen native aspect ratio. It also refers to the projection format in which a distorted image is "stretched" by an anamorphic projection lens to recreate the original aspect ratio on the viewing screen. The word anamorphic and its derivatives stem from the Greek anamorphoo, compound of morphé with the prefix aná.
The aspect ratio of an image is the ratio of its width to its height. It is expressed as two numbers separated by a colon, width:height. Common aspect ratios are 1.85:1 and 2.40:1 in cinematography, 4:3 and 16:9 in television, and 3:2 in still photography.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
