Chasing Aspect Ratios

Audiences have unknowingly been chasing aspect ratios their whole lives.

This story begins in 1892, when silent film was standardized by William Dickson and Thomas Edison. They adopted the 4:3 or 1.33:1 ratio. It was made from 35mm wide film, 4 perforations high (24.89mm x 18.67mm). It was made out of arbitration. This was just the beginning. In 1932, the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences developed a new standard to adopt optical tracks onto film, creating the 1.375:1 (22mm x 16mm) Academy Ratio. Years later, televisions are in every home, and people were going to the cinema less and less. It was designed with a 4:3 ratio, common to most films at this time. The film industry is about to do something that they will do until the end of time.

“How can we bring people back to the movie theater?”, they asked.

“More”, is all they heard back from the void.

Film

Up to around this point, a film’s aspect ratio was merely practical: it was the size and dimension of film. Cinematographers knew how to balance that frame, and how to fill it, but there wasn’t necessarily creative intent behind the ratio. In a medium of visual art, you can imagine how the shape of the canvas is also in play, but that is another topic altogether. So, when director George Stevens wanted his Western epic, Shane, to be more immersive, showing its violence, three things were done: one, the film would be shown at 1.66:1 (wider than 4:3, narrower than 16:9), it would be projected on a larger than normal projection screen, and it would have a three-channel stereophonic soundtrack in the theater. It was bigger, wider, and louder. It wasn’t actually shot for widescreen; it was shot with the Academy ratio of 1.375:1. What the filmmakers noticed was how the film used many wide angle and landscape shots so that cropping the top and bottom didn’t deteriorate the balance of the frame. This wasn’t the birth of widescreen, but it was one of the early adopters of it in popular media.

At the same time, everyone was trying to figure out the best widescreen format. Some include the ludicrous multicamera-setups like Cinerama, whereby taking three cameras, angle offset by one another, create a very wide 2.59:1 frame (cropped to 2.65:1 to hide anomalies). Cinerama beat Shane in sound too, having a seven-channel mix. But this was expensive. So, similar to Shane, films would be shot at a higher quality film like 70mm, at a smaller perf count, to preserve more grain than when cropping a 35mm frame and a smaller perf count. And just as an explanation, when I say perforations, these are the holes on the sides of film which work with a camera and projector to move the film through the gate. Less or more perf refers to how many perforations or holes a frame has, which was another way to change your frame size and aspect ratio. Also running the film horizontally vs vertically (remember this for later). But in all of this, one method came out on top and still runs many films today.

Anamorphic

Anamorphic lenses squeeze light in one direction with the intent of capturing a wider field of view onto a narrow frame, then by un-squeezing it you create a widescreen format with the benefit of fitting on the same standard film frame­–I highly recommend the Anamorphic Cookbook by Tito Ferradans on YouTube to learn more about anamorphics. This technology was developed a few decades earlier but was first used in Hollywood by Twentieth Century-Fox for The Robe (1953) with CinemaScope! And now we’ve opened up a whole new can of worms. The frame would be much wider than a spherical lens, but at the deficit of a slightly distorted image.

Anamorphic lenses have different squeeze factors depending on the lens. Common squeezes are 1.33x, 1.8x, and 2x. What these factors mean is how much the lens will squeeze the frame size. For example, a 4:3 (1.33:1) frame size, with a 2x squeeze factor would produce a new aspect ratio of 8:3 (2.67:1) when de-squeezed. Similarly, 1.8x makes 7.2:3 (2.40:1) and 1.33x makes 5.32:1 (1.77:1). But remember, this is only concerning a 4:3 frame size and these aspect ratios change with every new recording format. For example, Ultra Panavision 70 has a frame aspect ratio of ~2.20:1 [citation needed], combined with a signature 1.25x anamorphic lenses makes for a very wide 2.76:1 ratio, used most famously for Ben-Hur, and resurrected for Hateful Eight.

I’m slamming my head on my desk even trying to source how any of these aspect ratios were formed. Not only are the negative frame size, the perforations, and lenses a factor, but also the projection size. And this is where things get confusing. For theaters to project a film or video they need equipment that will fit it. For film, it meant a projector that ran the proper perforation type, gauge size, correct lens. For digital projectors they need to be of high enough resolution and quality to project the full size of the film, and again the lens. So, even if your shot in Ultra Panavision 70, 2.76:1 could be cropped to 4:3, for creative reasons, or for different theaters that could only show a smaller format. So, organizations like the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) tried to standardize cinema formats.

Standards

For the sake of brevity, I’ll be jumping to the age of digital filmmaking. When we were developing a whole new way of filmmaking, all of these problems of aspect ratio and scale came back again. Every manufacturer tried to make their own ratios and resolutions to claim their stake as the standard in digital. The Digital Cinema Initiative was when a bunch of people tried to grasp what film had popularized and use that as an aspect ratio for digital projection. It would also make the transition from filmmaker to a video maker a familiar process; this can be seen all over the industry in other departments. They came up with 3 ratios for digital cinema, “Flat” 1.85:1, “Scope” 2.39:1, and “Full” 1.90:1. So, out of all these ratios, how did we get here?

1.85:1 came from Paramount’s VistaVision. A horizontal film technique that utilized the same 35mm film strip. This allowed for the frame to be both wider and obtain quality with size. There were various ways to cut VistaVision, but 35mm 8 perf stuck out, and is where we get 1.85. The horizontal filmmaking technique would be redeveloped with 70mm for the original IMAX film format. It is still one of the most expensive and beautiful film formats used today, although very rare.

2.39:1 requires some additional backstory and can cause arguments between filmmakers. SMPTE not only standardized digital cinema but standardized film as well. It changed over time, but their standard for anamorphic projection gauges after June 1971 was for an unsqueezed ratio of 2.39:1. I can’t find why this was, but I suspect it was to create accessibility with projection screens. Imagine if you built a massive screen for Ultra Panavision at 2.76:1, use it once, and now your theater feels smaller when you screen another at 1.77:1. This is not to say cinematographers and filmmakers can’t use big squeeze factors for shooting, they just need to be aware of a “container”. 2.35:1 was an older format, but would tend to have filmic artifacts on the top and bottom that was often cut off by projectionists. The 2.40:1 ratio has often been a rounding error by some, but also has roots with using a 1.8x anamorphic lens on a 35mm 4:3 frame like I wrote earlier. Regardless, the standard is 2.39:1.

1.90:1? This was built out of digital necessity. Digital Cinema Projectors were designed to show both Scope and Flat films. When you consider the resolution requirements of both, you will notice that Flat is taller than Scope, and Scope is wider than Flat. This means that when overlayed and centered, a new area is drawn that fits both frames, and that is Full. 1.90:1 is also the digital IMAX standard.

And just to wrap it up in the present, TV’s have upgraded to the modern 16:9 ratio. It revolutionized modern TV shows and broadcasting and is a healthy balance between the old 4:3 formats and newer widescreen formats like 2.39:1...wait.

The Chase

Ironic isn’t it, how the format that was meant to move people away from the TV is now normal for watching on the TV? And how much smaller in size it is than any screen it was meant to be projected on? And to that point, isn’t it ironic that something like IMAX, which again was meant to bring people back to the movies was to go BIGGER, but it’s actually closer to the aspect ratio of TV’s? Even today, Disney+ delivers the IMAX ratio to your screens. You can watch Endgame, in IMAX, on your telephone.

“QUICK! We’re losing theaters, what should we do?”, they asked the void again.

“More…”

And then there was ScreenX.

ScreenX, similar to the older Cinerama format, uses multiple cameras and projectors to surround the audience. I have yet to see a film in this format, but on paper I already dislike it. Unlike Cinerama, ScreenX screens are not curved, and they are angled perpendicular to the main screen (there may be some theaters that are angled, but again that’s a waste of a theater that wide. These are likely made from existing boxed theaters), so if you sit anywhere other than dead center, the illusion will break. And like any other theater format, it only serves to immerse the audience, not tell a story with it. No studio is going to make a movie for ScreenX anytime soon, they’d lose money. Films shown in ScreenX will be nothing more than the original film with excessive frames to the left and right. Directors, regardless of what format their film ends up in, want to tell the same story across all platforms, that way nobody feels cheated. Studios and distributors also want to make as much money as possible. Same goes for IMAX by the way. Some filmmakers like Christopher Nolan do shoot films entirely IMAX because they like that aspect ratio and format, but it will also be cut to Scope so other theaters can play it (and have a big enough difference that people believe they’re experiencing something different). Then there are films that aren’t really shot for IMAX, and like ScreenX, will give people scraps on the top and bottom. And what a butcher that is on the Director and D.P. that they have to pick multiple frames now because they have to appeal to all aspect ratios. Commercials have to do this for smartphones now! Think about that: having to frame for TV at 16:9, but you also have to make it work for 9:16. It’s the world we work in.

With all these different formats, it’s easy to lose yourself. But know this, the aspect ratio is just an artistic expression. Massive landscapes do well for widescreen, and character studies do well for tall screens. It’s perhaps why the most popular aspect ratio is the one on your TV. Tall enough to watch someone talk, but wide enough to see the surroundings. All of these different formats could be unique to the film and the filmmaker, but we needed a way for theaters to easily project them.

We went from 4:3 film, to 4:3 TVs, to bigger Anamorphic formats and VistaVision, to 16:9 TVs, then to the bigger IMAX, then to the even wider ScreenX, desktop monitors are 21:9 now, we will then have moved to an even bigger square screen that wraps around a hemisphere, then we’ll wrap it around the audience, then we will put the movies in VR, put you on a treadmill, shake the floor, taking all narrative from the director into the audience, welcome to video games, and death to film.