Widescreen



A widescreen image is a film, computer, or television image with a wider aspect ratio than the standard Academy frame developed during the classical Hollywood cinema era. Silent film was projected at a ratio of four units wide to three units tall, often expressed as 4:3 or 1.33:1. The addition of sound and a thicker frame line in order to hide physical splices in prints caused the frame dimensions to standardize by 1932 to Academy framing, which is actually 1.37 but often erroneously called 1.33.

Widescreen was first widely used in the late 1920s in some shorts and newsreels, including Fox Grandeur News and Fox Movietone Follies of 1929, both released on May 26, 1929 in New York City in the Fox Grandeur process. Other films shown in widescreen were the musical Happy Days (1929) which premiered at the Roxy Theater, N.Y.C., on February 13, 1930, starring Janet Gaynor and Charles Farrell and a 13 year old Betty Grable as a chorus girl, and the western The Big Trail (1930) starring John Wayne and Tyrone Power, Sr. which premiered at Grauman's Chinese Theatre in Hollywood on October 2, 1930, both of which were also made in the 70mm Fox Grandeur process. RKO released Danger Lights with Jean Arthur, Louis Wolheim, and Robert Armstrong on August 21, 1930 in a 65mm widescreen process known as NaturalVision, invented by film pioneer George K. Spoor. United Artists released The Bat Whispers directed by Roland West on November 13, 1930 in a 70mm widescreen process known as Magnifilm.

By 1932, the Depression had forced studios to cut back on needless expense and it wasn't until the 1950s 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.

Widescreen methods
Note that aspect ratio refers here to the projected image, which may be different to the image that was initially recorded. There are various methods of producing a widescreen image of any given proportion. These are listed below in the order of popularity in the shooting of films for presentation in a theater.

Masked, aka Flat The negative is shot exposing the Academy Ratio, but the top and bottom of the picture are hidden or masked off a metal aperture plate, cut to specifications of the theater's screen, in the projector. Subsequently, a hard matte in the printing or shooting stages may be used to mask off those areas while filming. A detrement 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. In such an instance, a photographer will compose for widescreen, but "protect" the full image from things such as microphones and other filming equipment.

Common aspect ratios for flat widescreen are 1.85:1 and 1.66:1, as well as the lesser used 1.75:1 and 2:1.

Anamorphic. As introduced to the general public by CinemaScope, and utilzed by systems such as Panavision and others, anamorphic camera lenses compress the image horizontally so that it fits a standard frame, and anamorphic projection lenses restore the image and spread it over the wide screen. The picture quality is at maximum because this method both uses more of the negative frame than any other traditional 35 mm film process, optically compresses twice the image width, and does not require an intermediate conversion stage.

Super gauges. The full negative frame, including the area traditionally reserved for the sound track, is filmed using a wider gate. The print is then shrunk and/or cropped in order to fit it back onto release prints. The aspect ratio for Super 35, for example, can be set to virtually any projectable standard.

Large gauge. A 70 mm film frame is not only twice as wide as a standard frame but also has greater height. Shooting and projecting a film in 70 mm therefore gives more than twice the image area of non-anamorphic 35 mm film with no loss of quality. Few major dramatic narrative films have been filmed entirely on this format since the 1970s; the two most recent are Ron Howard's Far and Away and Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet. For many years, large budget pictures used to sometimes strike 70 mm blow-up prints for "roadshow" tours in select cities from the 35 mm camera negative in order to capitalize on the extra sound channels provided. The introduction of digital sound systems and diminishing number of installed 70 mm projectors has made a 70 mm release largely obsolete. However, blowups from 35 mm formats to IMAX has recently become popular for a limited number of blockbuster films.

Paramount's VistaVision was a larger gauge precursor to 70 mm film; it ran standard 35 mm film through the camera horizontally to achieve a widescreen effect using greater negative area, in order to create a finer-grained 35 mm prints in an era where standard monopack stock could not produce finer results. 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 opticals without image degradation, and is notable for its use in Lucasfilm's original three Star Wars films, among others.

Multiple cameras/projectors. The Cinerama system originally involved shooting with three synchronized cameras locked together side by side, and projecting the three resulting films on a curved screen with three synchronized projectors. Later Cinerama films were shot in 70 mm 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 one feature film, How the West Was Won was shot in "pure," three-camera Cinerama. With the exception of a few films created sporadically for use in special Cinerama theatres, the format is essentially dead.

A non-Cinerama, three-projector process was famously pioneered for the final reel of Abel Gance's 1927 epic, Napoléon. Consisting of three 1.33 images side by side, the total aspect ratio of the image is 4:1. The technical difficulties in mounting a full screening of the film, however, make most theatres unwilling or unable to show in this format.

Between 1956 and 1957 the Soviets developed Kinopanorama, which is identical in most respects to the original three-camera Cinerama.

Anamorphic 70 mm. 70 mm with anamorphic lenses, popularly known as "Ultra Panavision" or "MGM Camera 65", creates an even wider high-quality picture. This camera process was most famously used in the 1959 version of Ben-Hur, resulting in an aspect ratio of 2.76:1, one of the widest prints ever used for a feature film. 70 mm anamorphic was not commonly used, due to the very high production costs, although it was favoured 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, despite its ease in setting up.

Comparison of Flat, Anamorphic, and Super 35 systems
''"Flat" refers to non-anamorphic films shot with a standard 35 mm gate. 1.85 and 1.66 tend to be its most common ratios.''

Pros

 * 1) More compact visuals
 * 2) Sometimes better for films with many interior compositions
 * 3) Better depth of field than anamorphic
 * 4) More vertical format; better for taller composition
 * 5) Simplest system technically and most standardized; therefore has the most equipment at its disposal
 * 6) Equipment is less expensive and thus better for stunt cameras
 * 7) Easier to "protect" for video

Cons

 * 1) Inefficient use of negative space; anamorphic uses 59% more than 1.85, for example.
 * 2) More visible set ceilings (or lack thereof)
 * 3) Grainier opticals
 * 4) Greater magnification than anamorphic and more noticeable projector movement
 * 5) Incompatible with 70 mm blow-up

Pros

 * 1) Larger negative area lowers grain, improves opticals, and increases sharpness
 * 2) More interesting compositions possible
 * 3) Preferred by big action, event, or epic films
 * 4) Closest to normal human field of vision
 * 5) Less vertical set design needed
 * 6) Highest resolution format; still far ahead of HDTV
 * 7) Most compatible with 70 mm blowup

Cons

 * 1) Anamorphic lenses are generally slow and cut down light in projection
 * 2) Format most hurt by pan-and-scan conversion for television
 * 3) Close-ups on a single person leave wide areas of the frame open, or limit themselves to an extreme close-up
 * 4) Lenses are hand ground, bulkier than flat lenses, and are too expensive to use with a stunt camera
 * 5) Early systems detrimented from weakly designed lenses, which effected definition, including sharpness, weak depth of field, and issues such as barrel distortion

Pros

 * 1) Better depth of field than anamorphic
 * 2) Final ratio can be changed between anamorphic and flat later in post-production, if the frame has been adequately protected
 * 3) Smaller lenses than anamorphic allow the camera to go to tighter places with less weight

Cons

 * 1) When used for 2.39:1 aspect ratio, has the smallest negative area of any 35 mm format, which makes for more grain and magnification
 * 2) Increased contrast due to optical printing, and depending on how the image is cropped, may result in a grainer image
 * 3) Requires an optical intermediate step of printing in the lab, which is more expensive than contact printing
 * 4) Prints can not be struck from the original negative with a soundtrack
 * 5) Grain from the smaller negative must be countered with either slower film stock or overexposure of faster stock
 * 6) Pan-and-scan from a small negative magnifies grain
 * 7) The need to protect a film for varying aspect ratios (2.39:1, 1.85:1, or 1.33:1) can and often does compromise shot composition
 * 8) When originally used for 2.39:1 aspect ratio, creates burdens and confusion among consumers when it comes to purchasing decisions between the widescreen and pan and scan versions if they are sold separately

Widescreen TV and computer displays


Historically, consumer TVs have been 4:3 and since many U.S. TV viewers seem to prefer to see a TV screen completely filled with image, U.S. television networks often show widescreen movies with the sides truncated, using a technique called pan and scan. Because of this truncation, part of the image is concealed. While many film viewers consider this a great loss, this has not always been the case; the original standard aspect ratio for films was 4:3 (which is why television sets were originally built to that specification), and the switch to a wider format was met with some resistance within the film industry. Today, however, it is solidly the norm.

In Europe, the PAL TV format with its higher number of visible screen lines (576 vs. 480 for U.S. NTSC) means that the low vertical resolution associated with showing uncropped widescreen movies on TV is not as bad, which has resulted in most European television networks showing widescreen movies uncropped, and in the general unavailability of cropped "fullscreen" DVDs of widescreen movies in the European DVD market. There is even an extension to PAL, called PALplus, which allows specially equipped receivers to receive a PAL picture as true 16:9 with full 576 lines of vertical resolution, provided the stations employ 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. This system has no equivalent in analog, NTSC 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 the UK, Ireland and Belgium have taken up widescreen at any great rate, with over half of all Widescreen channels available by satellite in Europe targeting those three countries.

The past two years have seen a rapid growth in the number of 16:9 TV monitors. These 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, or letterbox and pan-and-scan formatting for 4:3 sets; however the pan-and-scan mode can only be used if the producers of the material have included the necessary panning data. If this data is absent, letterboxing or centre cut-out will be used instead.

HD DVD and Sony Blu-ray disc players reached U.S. market in 2006. It remains to be seen whether they will stimulate the sales of HD pre-recorded films on disc, and more HD monitors and tuners. Consumer camcorders are also available on HD-video format at fairly low prices. These developments will result in more options for viewing widescreen images on television monitors.

"Widescreen" can also refer to computer displays, which can be used to view widescreen movies, among other things. Widescreen computer displays are typically of the 1.6 (8:5, typically written as 16:10) aspect ratio.

Widescreen Computer Displays
Recently, a great number of widescreen format monitors has been introduced to the market. Many manufacturers have practically abandoned the traditional 4:3 format, instead opting to manufacture 16:10 models. The main reason for the popularity of widescreen computer displays is the increasing availability of widescreen media on computers (such as downloadable movies and TV shows), as well as the capability of many modern computer games to be rendered in a widescreen format.

There are both advantages and disadvantages to widescreen computer displays:

Pros

 * Wide format is well suited to office multi-tasking, allowing the user to run several applications side by side, particularly on larger displays with a wide horizontal resolution (e.g. 1920 x 1200)
 * Since most modern DVDs and TV shows are in a widescreen format, these types of displays are optimal for their playback on a computer.

Cons

 * A widescreen monitor with the same diagonal size has 6.5% less area, meaning that you buy less screen space in total.
 * Some office applications, such as word editing, do not benefit from the widescreen format of the display. The extra width of the display does not allow more of a vertical document to be shown, and rotating the display to show more of the document is a feature not implemented by some displays, and it can also prove to be a hassle for the user.

Comparison to Human Vision
The normal limits of human vision are not rectangular, so a direct comparison to widescreen formats can not be made. However, based on the max angle of view aligned nasally and along the line of the eyes the Visual field would have an aspect ratio near 9:5, or 1.8:1. The common widescreen format 16:9 is very close to that ratio.