More About Aspect Ratios

Back in July I made a post about aspect ratios you can read it here.  Well I'm back today with some more information that I learned about aspect ratios in older movies.

On Christmas night the wife and I sat down to watch "It's A Wonderful Life", the timeless Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed 1946 classic.  I had a digital copy on Vudu that I fired up and I was a bit surprised to see it was in 1.33:1 or 4:3 scale.  I looked up the original aspect ratio of the film and fount that it was filmed in 1.37:1, which is essentially 1.33:1.  This lead me to the website The Digital Bits where I learned so much about the early days of Hollywood and how movies were filmed. 

From the late 1890's until the early 1950's all movies were filmed in the same aspect ratio 1.33:1 or 4:3 which means for every four units width the image has 3 units of height. During this time the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences made the Academy standard 1.33:1.  So all classic films before the 1950's were shot in this format and any anamorphic widescreen cuts of these films the print has been altered to make it look widescreen by cutting off the top and the bottom of the image.

When home televisions stared becoming mass produced the National Television Standards Committee (NTSC) selected the Academy Standard as the official aspect ratio for broadcast television.  This is referred to 4x3 or NTSC standard.  

In the 1950's Hollywood started altering the aspect ratio of movies to lure people out of their homes and see movies on the big screen again in a format their home television couldn't duplicate.  Although there are several different versions of widescreen images the most common ones used is the 1.85:1 ratio also known as Academy Flat and 2.23:1 or Anamorphic Scope.

With the home video boom of the 1980's this lead to movies being released in a full frame version via pan and scan.  Essentially the image was modified by cutting of the edges of the film so it would fit the 4x3 home television screen.  Yes you could rent movies in widescreen format but as a former video store employee I can tell you most casual movie fans hated the black bars on the top and bottom of the screen.  

It wasn't until 1996 that the first HDTV's were introduced with 16:9 aspect ratio, it wasn't until the mid 2000's that they became mass produced.  I got my first one in 2007.  16:9 is now the standard format for television.  

The X-Files is the first show I remember watching on television in widescreen.  Starting with season five in 1997 they began filming the episodes in 1.78:1.  I have the original DVD releases of the X-Files and Seasons 1 - 4 are presented in the 4:3 aspect.  However, in the digital versions on Hulu and on the home video Blu-ray releases they have altered the images to make them 1.78:1 anamorphic widescreen.  This, of course, irrorates me!

As you can see in the example above most people will think it's no big deal, but it does bother me.

Until Next Time!