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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

4K 2:1...

If you have wide set eyes you should have slightly better depth perception, and a wider FOV. Right?
Having better depth perception and a wider FOV would have made your ancestors slightly better hunter-gatherers.
And being better hunter-gatherers probably developed into a pattern over countless generations making wide-set eyes 'attractive'.
So if you like 16:9...
;)
 
Kyle Presley said:
I have heard (can't cite it) that 16x9 is roughly similar to the aspect of our own eyes.
Click to expand...

Human vision is pretty close to 3:2. About 200° horizontally and 140° vertically.

Personally I like 2.39:1
 
While that may be true... much of that is out of focus peripheral vision (unless we move our eyes to focus to the side or up/down). What we actually focus on looking forward is a different ratio (not measured by me). We also tend to give up more vertical than horizontal.

My bet is that people tend to be more comfortable watching wider than 3:2 on the screen.

Jim

Gavin Greenwalt said:
Human vision is pretty close to 3:2. About 200° horizontally and 140° vertically.

Personally I like 2.39:1
Click to expand...
 
I find it interesting that people attach emotional states to different formats. For instance it's difficult to imagine 2:39 or above to be conducive to comedy. Comedy seems better in a squarer format. Is this because our minds have been "trained" by TV over the years. Maybe. Kubrick favoured squarer formats but mostly because he hated what they did to his films when pan and scanned for TV. But 'The Shining' still looks great in 1:37. I just can't move away from that feeling when the cinema curtains opened and opened on a wide screen film, that aaaah moment, you knew you were going to get something interesting visually, a feast for your eyes.
 
Jannard said:
While that may be true... much of that is out of focus peripheral vision (unless we move our eyes to focus to the side or up/down). What we actually focus on looking forward is a different ratio (not measured by me). We also tend to give up more vertical than horizontal.

My bet is that people tend to be more comfortable watching wider than 3:2 on the screen.

Jim
Click to expand...

Unscientific wild speculation to follow: we tend to think of the world pretty 2 dimensionally. We're bipedal ground walkers so we tend to navigate the world from a sort of bird's eye view. I think just psychologically we're conditioned to be more inclined to look left/right than up down. I don't know that focus has so much to do with it as how we're more naturally inclined to study our landscape. Not a lot of vertical information on the Savannah. You're more likely to be attacked from the side than above and especially than from below. I believe our real "focus" is only about 20*, so scanning the image is going to be important (and at that narrow of a focus probably a mostly 1:1 aspect). I would guess that psychology and anatomy of how easy it is to scan horizontally vs vertically is the most significant factor in what we find biologically appealing more than actual FOV. I have two monitors and I have them arranged next to each other. I prefer that to two vertical monitors. I find it easier to turn my head than to look up and down.

From a purely creative standpoint, there is almost always more important information in frame horizontally than vertically. If you have a panorama then you want to study the horizon not the blue sky. The 'significant data' is along the horizontal axis not the vertical axis. Especially with staging actors. The faces are important and you rarely have faces above one another.

Good oldie on eye tracking There Will be Blood:
http://vimeo.com/19788132
 
Screen size / viewing distance are factors in making a big screen presentation feel immersive. But the problem with bringing in the whole notion of human perspective is that we don't see reality within a rectangular frame. And without a frame you can't really have the art of composition. So the moviegoing experience on the large screen is sort of a mix of these two conflicting impulses, to make the frame disappear and create an immersive experience and to frame elements artistically, to design the frame to create meaning and to tell a story.

If you can build a large enough screen and your image has enough clarity and detail for people to sit closer to the big screen (I.e. IMAX) then you might as well build a 3:2 screen, which is more or less what IMAX did. Then your peripheral vision is engaged vertically and horizontally - but compositionally most true IMAX productions frame things from the center down and leave a lot of headroom... Just like in real life where we are aware of the sky over our heads ( no surprise that a lot of IMAX movies deal with flying...)

Fred Waller, when he designed Cinerama, originally had a taller format in mind but considering the architectural problems of modifying movie theaters, he decided to concentrate on expanding the frame horizontally more than vertically, and CinemaScope people came to the same conclusion - it was easier to expand the sizes of screens in existing buildings horizontally.

So 3:2 (1.50 : 1) is great for huge IMAX screens but otherwise you get more bang for your buck, screen size wise, on the horizontal axis. This has nothing to do with artistic considerations regarding which aspect ratios are better to compose in... Frankly they all have their strengths and weaknesses, and a visual artist can make a shape like 1.33 or 1.85, whatever, look beautiful.

2:1 is a nice elegant shape to compose in, that's for certain. I'd love to have that added as an option for release. However, I have a nostalgic reaction to movie curtains opening way up for CinemaScope presentation, it's sort of that "more is more" excessiveness that I love...
 
Gavin Greenwalt said:
Unscientific wild speculation: we tend to think of the world pretty 2 dimensionally. We're bipedal ground walkers so we tend to navigate the world from a sort of bird's eye view. I think just psychologically we're conditioned to be more inclined to look left/right than up down. I don't know that focus has so much to do with it as how we're more naturally inclined to study our landscape. Not a lot of vertical information on the Savannah. You're more likely to be attacked from the side than above and especially than from below. I believe our real "focus" is only about 20*, so scanning the image is going to be important (and at that narrow of a focus probably a mostly 1:1 aspect). I would guess that psychology and anatomy of how easy it is to scan horizontally vs vertically is the most significant factor in what we find biologically appealing more than actual FOV. I have two monitors and I have them arranged next to each other. I prefer that to two vertical monitors. I find it easier to turn my head than to look up and down.
Click to expand...

I wouldn't say its unscientific wild speculation, if Jim was blind it might be wild speculation. Its mostly to do with the resting point of the eyes vergence. In order to reduce eye strain we naturally spend a lot of time passively gazing and find interest in the focal area, but we comfortably view narrower vertical focus distance when we look down to when we look up (around a 1/5th more in the vertical). Which is natural considering our hunter/gather history. We also do naturally view objects/screen from the top left to bottom right.
 
Why are we discussing this? Why do we need a standard? For sensors? If the recording resolution is higher than the delivery resolution I can crop without harming the picture quality. 5K seems like a good start, doesn't it?

And as for delivery: it's all about choices, isn't it, Jim?
 
Graeme Nattress said:
I think it's more the problem that legacy 4:3 TV was taken into account, and there was effectively "equal weighting" between the extremes of 4:3 and 2.35:1, which is somewhat of a mathy average compromise solution that ends up unnecessarily biassed towards squarer formats. It's also a solution more geared towards a fixed TV rather than projection.

Graeme
Click to expand...

There was also a practical limitation on how wide you could make a flat faced CRT screen of reasonable size for large TV's without it becoming excessively deep too. Very hard to maintain dot focus and geometry at the edges. That was part of the consideration. With flat panel displays that is not an issue.

+1 for 2:1, love it.

Are we talking about a true 2:1 or perhaps the native 1.89:1 of current digital cinema projectors?
 
David Mullen ASC said:
Screen size / viewing distance are factors in making a big screen presentation feel immersive. But the problem with bringing in the whole notion of human perspective is that we don't see reality within a rectangular frame. And without a frame you can't really have the art of composition. So the moviegoing experience on the large screen is sort of a mix of these two conflicting impulses, to make the frame disappear and create an immersive experience and to frame elements artistically, to design the frame to create meaning and to tell a story.

If you can build a large enough screen and your image has enough clarity and detail for people to sit closer to the big screen (I.e. IMAX) then you might as well build a 3:2 screen, which is more or less what IMAX did. Then your peripheral vision is engaged vertically and horizontally - but compositionally most true IMAX productions frame things from the center down and leave a lot of headroom... Just like in real life where we are aware of the sky over our heads ( no surprise that a lot of IMAX movies deal with flying...)

Fred Waller, when he designed Cinerama, originally had a taller format in mind but considering the architectural problems of modifying movie theaters, he decided to concentrate on expanding the frame horizontally more than vertically, and CinemaScope people came to the same conclusion - it was easier to expand the sizes of screens in existing buildings horizontally.

So 3:2 (1.50 : 1) is great for huge IMAX screens but otherwise you get more bang for your buck, screen size wise, on the horizontal axis. This has nothing to do with artistic considerations regarding which aspect ratios are better to compose in... Frankly they all have their strengths and weaknesses, and a visual artist can make a shape like 1.33 or 1.85, whatever, look beautiful.

2:1 is a nice elegant shape to compose in, that's for certain. I'd love to have that added as an option for release. However, I have a nostalgic reaction to movie curtains opening way up for CinemaScope presentation, it's sort of that "more is more" excessiveness that I love...
Click to expand...


This is a really nice thought, David! Completely agree with you... not that my post gives a lot to the thread, but, as usual, yours is a really nice thought.
 
Jannard said:
We believe this should be the future standard.
Click to expand...

I absolutely agree.
I was laughed at by a local rental house in 1970 when I told them about a new format called Super 16.
I was laughed at by a local lab in 2008 when I brought footage shot in 2:1.
History seems to repeat itself.
When Edison (actually William Kennedy Laurie Dickson working in Edison´s lab) decided on 35mm wide film strips in 1893, they set the standard for film formats.
We are almost 120 years later now and it´s about time to put away this glorified TV -`widescreen´ ratio of 16:9 and the other format spiels within a full 35mm frame.
2:1 feels about right.
 
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