Hot take: 4:3 > 16:9
It's been a while since I've watched an old TV show. We've had widescreen TVs in our houses for decades now. When HD and digital video came into the scene, it basically came hand in hand with the 16:9 aspect ratio. It was more cinematic. It was basically a mark of quality in and of itself.
On a whim, I decided to watch Wolf's Rain, an original Bones anime that was produced in 4:3. I thought it would be difficult to adapt to the more narrow screen. I was thinking what I'd be missing out on by the missing part of the screen.
In hindsight, those thoughts were pretty rediculous. The people who made the show knew they were going to target that aspect ratio, so they built the entire show around it. It's animation: every frame is literally a painting. The aspect ratio was never a limitation to the artist because it was effectively the same limitation any given piece of paper or canvas they would apply their art to.
By no longer producing video in 4:3, we have lost something important to framing: verticality and angularity. 16:9 means there's a lot more room to the left and right than there is up and down, and because you have so much more horizontal view dutch angles tend to be extra disorienting. While Wolf's Rain doesn't use dutch angles very often, vertical framing is extremely common. One early episode has a particularly striking scene where a white wolf is running vertically up a cliff towards the moon. Other times it's used to show off the scale of large structures, which can better express a sense of dread or oppression. The show also often has circular framing; where characters and objects are arranged in a circle, which doesn't seem to work quite as well aesthetically on widescreen formats.
Now that I've started thinking about this, I started to think about what a shame it is that we are actually losing some of our treasured 4:3 shows from the past. TV shows aren't terribly well archived in general outside of ultra-popular shows, and even then many old shows that were made for 4:3 have been bowdlerized into 16:9. Many shows have been stretched out or had their tops and bottoms deleted in order to fit into 16:9. Some shows were shot on film and had new scans done in order to use the parts that were originally designed to be cropped out. But because they are ruining the intent of the cinematographers, the addition is not necessarily a good one.
But what do you think? I know this is probably not a popular opinion, but I'm sure that I'm not the only one who thinks this.
4:3 / 1.33:1 is awesome. A lot of people think they're missing something with it being 4:3, but here's a good example of The Shining in open matte -- https://imgur.com/a/hA82pDp (c/o noamkroll on instagram.)
My favorite aspect ratio for film is 1.66:1 -- which is close to 5:3 or the original euro widescreen. I hate when they fuck with the frame to make it widescreen for the peasants. Its disgusting that the studios ever allow that.
When they did the new transfer of Star Trek: TNG, they were smart to leave it at 4:3. The picture looks great.
ot: bowdlerized is a great word
TNG was shot open matte and cropped to 4:3 in post production. Keeping the original aspect ratio it was composed for was the right call, however CBS also didn't have much choice in the matter. While the photography was open matte, no attempts were made to keep film crew and equipment out of parts of the frame that were going to be cropped out later.
Later seasons of DS9 were actually shot with 16:9 widescreen in mind so we might see that if it ever gets a proper remaster.
oh my god -- I would looooove to see DS9 and VOY redone. Even if they just left the CGI looking like scaled up hot garbage, that's fine. It'd be double-great for better quality intakes
These are hilarious, I can't believe I've never seen them before!
The Intakes are so good, eh. I love Worf walking in to the door with Troi going 'oh my god!' -- haha
I've got some other great edits for you that I was sent today:
Barren Planet! A Star Trek / Sopranos Crossover!
First and foremost, I agree with @granfdad that the intended aspect ratio is paramount. When everything is framed with a particular aspect ratio in mind, it's no surprise that late stage changes to that will at best be lackluster if it doesn't outright ruin the shot. Any older media framed and released in 4:3 needs to remain in 4:3.
I'd say in general, though I can and do thoroughly enjoy media in any aspect ratio, I prefer wide aspect ratios a default. They fit and better fill our natural field of view, wider than it is tall. It also lends itself well to larger home and theater screens; it's easier to take in an entire wide aspect image with peripheral vision than it is a 4:3 which may need some vertical scanning. This, to me, feels more immersive and less like I'm looking at a flat screen or through a window.
There have been a handful films and shows that have used varying aspect ratios. It can feel gimmicky sometimes, but can be impactful when when used with care. Different ratios for time periods, for controlling the scale of different scenes, for subtly highlighting character growth and realizations. This seems like a worthwhile approach to explore so that the aspect ratio can become another tool rather than a fixed constraint (which, to be fair, can also be creatively useful)
It is very interesting when filmmakers does experiment with aspect ratios rather than just doing the defaults. Mommy from 2014 changed ratios throughout the film, which I at first thought was a bit gimmicky, but the close narrow frame did help in highlighting the very "up close and personal"-feeling the film was aiming for. Films like The Lighthouse and Godland used it to give everything a look of a classic old photograph, which I think fits those films perfectly. And then we have Tarantino going somewhat contrarian with taking a very wide 70mm and then use to film mostly inside a crammed cabin. It would be great if more filmmakers dared take on the ultra wide 2.76:1 of Ben Hur again .
Marvel’s been doing varying-aspect-ratios in their movies for years at this point: it’s gotten so tropey that I point and say “aspect ratio change!” every time I’m watching with my friends and everyone groans.
Im so tired of every establishing shot taking the same time, having the same aspect ratio, and having the same panning. The plot of Marvel movies isn’t the only thing that’s become rather formulaic, it’s also the cinematography as well.
My understanding (someone correct me, please!) is that 16:9 was designed to be a middle ground between 4:3 and cinematic widescreen. I don't think that any aspect ratio is inherently better than any other (relevant CD video), but I certainly believe that intended ratio > any post-creation adjustment. I often play old games in 4:3 and with letterboxing on my widescreen display, just because it's the ratio that the game devs would have designed the game around (not that it really matters, though).
EDIT: I just realised that my source for that 16:9 middleground fact was the CD video I linked!
This hits the nail on the head. The best ratio for a given piece of work is the ratio intended by the creators. I'm fully against cropping 4:3 piece to fill a 16:9 screen. Much like I was against most movies getting cropped to fill a 4:3 screen in the VHS and DVD days.
I hard disagre with OP that one ratio is better than another. For every circular framing or Simpson's Duff factory argument, there's a Fellowship of the Ring or Lawrence of Arabia. The best ratio is what the creators intended, and studios and stations and streamers and everyone re-distributing should just stop messing with it. No more BBC 2001: A Space Odysseys, no more crop-chopping, period.
I genuinely don't understand why all 4:3 shows have to be cropped. Is it so hard to just (vertically) letterbox them and show black bars on the side? I wanted to watch the old Simpsons seasons: they're cropped on Disney+, and they're also cropped on the pirated version I downloaded. It's becoming literally lost media.
Disney Plus has a toggle to watch in the original 4:3 ratio. In the menu where it shows the episode list, go to "Details", and click the toggle switch.
https://www.techradar.com/how-to/how-to-fix-the-simpsons-aspect-ratio-on-disney-plus
Thank you!
It's too bad that 16:9 caught on instead of 16:10. I've always thought 16:10 to be the better-balanced of the two and more cross-functional between entertainment and productivity. It handles 4:3 video a little better too, with less extreme letterboxing. That 16:10 has become popular for laptop screens (for a second time – it was the standard for laptops up until the mid-late 2000s when the "HD craze" came about) in the past few years has been wonderful, unfortunately there's no chance of that for TVs and desktop monitors.
The 4:3 screens these shows were originally composed for were almost certainly smaller than the letterboxed 4:3 area on any modern 16:9 TV.
Just like the benefits of tall aspect ratios you point out, there are also very good reasons artists will choose a wide aspect ratio as well.
This is why 16:9 was chosen for the switch to high definition. It's a decent middle ground that allows both 4:3 and 2.39:1 content to be presented with minimal pillar/letterboxing.
I did rather enjoy The Grand Budapest.
David Bordwell has a lovely writeup on the aspect ratios used in that film.
https://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/2014/03/26/the-grand-budapest-hotel-wes-anderson-takes-the-43-challenge/
Growing up, I was chasing for those rare VHS tapes that featured the original widescreen version of a film, rather than the general release 4:3 crop. These days, I find myself going through streaming app settings trying to figure out if a favourite series of mine is still available in its original 4:3 ratio, rather than a widescreen crop. History is funny sometimes.
Not all conversions are equal, of course. David Simon, the creator of The Wire, has written a really good article on the efforts that went into converting his series into widescreen and HD. Too bad the embedded videos seem to have been taken offline since its publication, but I think it's still an interesting read.
It is also fascinating to witness the transition that filmmakers make when they switch aspect ratios. Akira Kurosawa, for instance, first used the widescreen format in his 1958 film The Hidden Fortress. And boy does he use the wideness of the screen space there! The contrast is especially marked if compared to his previous film The Lower Depths, which used its 4:3 aspect ratio to the fullest to present the film's claustrophobic setting.
When Kurosawa switched to colour with the 1970 film Deduskaden, he did something similar. That film is not just "in colour", in many ways it "is colour". He actually also went back to a less wide format there (1.37:1), as he felt that widescreen camera lenses couldn't capture colour information properly at the time.
Which I think underlines that a good creator picks the format that best serves their intentions.
Turns out that David Simon article was saved with videos intact by quite a few intelligent people over the years before they were made private.
There's an excellent video by Noodle about the history and limitations of different aspect ratios. "how TV screens made watching movies worse" It's a 180° VR video (you can view it on a regular screen, but here's the 2D version also) so he can show various content at arbitrary aspect ratio. It's neat!
His most recent video is in a similar vein but a different subject, about color grading. There are a lot of parallels and the challenges are generally similar. "am I crazy or did old movies look different before...?"
I've always thought that this could be an interesting use case for scrolling/rollable screens once the tech gets common place, I know people that hate black pillars on media so will change the aspect ratio to fill their home TVs, ruining the composition.
The ability to match the intended aspect ratio on your device would be nice.
How this would work mid movie I have less of an idea, might get quite distracting.