Aspect Ratio Follies

Everyone has these fancy new 16:9 TVs.

But every time I go into a bank or stay in a hotel room or go to the house of someone over 40 it's totally acceptable to watch 4:3 TV shows all stretched out and ridiculous looking. Like it's the NORM now to watch TV all distended and awful.

How did we let this happen?

I stayed in a fancy hotel last week and turned on the news and everyone looked like a bullfrog

I bring this up to friends with widescreen tvs and they say if I didn't point it out they'd never know.
so... there's that.

most widescreen tvs have settings that allow you to vertically letterbox 4:3 pictures--or morph it so its only distended on the edges, like a fisheye lens

yr right, its just wrong. also, i miss the black lines on the screen when watching a widescreen movie on a 4:3 (or i would, if i didn't still have a beaten up 4:3 crt), somehow i like how they frame the image.

it's a plot to make tv stars look fatter to keep the gossip mags in business

xpost to max

but try telling that to my mom or the sheraton hotel

i'm trying to watch this MJ funeral at my mom's house and the stretch limos are stretched to capacity

well lets see what happens when i start a thread called "whiney g weingartens mom follies"

1. conceiving

Like honestly, since most people aren't going to be bothered to manually change the aspect ratio, the onus should really be on the TV manufacturers to make TVs that know what ratio a show is in.

but then people would cry that a Green Acres episode is not taking up their whole screen

is this a quiddity

This is so funny, I'd never heard of "aspect ratio" until my film-degree and tv-news-program-employed friend came to visit a few weeks ago and told every bar we went into that their tv sets were set wrong.

it's time to bring back scan and pan, but vertically

You have to manually set DVD players to do pillarboxing too. What a clusterfuck.

What a disaster for boxes

watched an a certain ratio dvd once and it looked wrong on telly, totally roffled

How did we let this happen?

distended heads will roll

Finally taught my mom to watch the HD channels in 16:9 and the non-HD channels in 4:3--even theough the Sears guy who installed the TV told he she could "throw the TV remote out" that switches between aspect ratios.

And then the history channel goes and shows their stupid UFO show on the HD channel all stretched out

alien dudes get stretched out, totally

Also, how do people "watch their computers on TV"?

Had a friend show me some hulu.com show on his 52" widescreen and the familiar 16:10 aspect ratio of a laptop screen was all goony thanks to his 16:9 tv

super old people = have aspect ratio wrong because they don't know how to fix it
old people = know how to fix aspect ratio, have it right
young people = have aspect ratio wrong because they don't give a shit about how the picture looks

I hate this shit so very much, and on two fronts:

1)Goddamnit what is wrong with you people are your retinas just completely fucked up nothing looks even remotely alright
2)Goddamnit what is wrong with me no one else here gives even one fuck about this

My parent's old analogue TV was broken for over a year - the top half of the picture was stretched out so that it filled over 3/4 of the screen, and the bottom half of the picture was squashed up. So everyone looked like Humpty Dumpty or Patrick "Gamesmaster" Moore. This didn't bother them at all, and they only replaced the set when it finally stopped working completely.

my sister always puts the telly on "autodetect" so that when things have lots of black around the edges the telly keeps enlarging things and stuff

super old people = have aspect ratio wrong because they don't know how to fix it
old people = know how to fix aspect ratio, have it right
young people = have aspect ratio wrong because they don't give a shit about how the picture looks

― Herodcare for the Unborn (J0hn D.), Friday, December 25, 2009 2:53 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

this is otm except for the part about anyone having it right

I hate this shit so very much, and on two fronts:

1)Goddamnit what is wrong with you people are your retinas just completely fucked up nothing looks even remotely alright
2)Goddamnit what is wrong with me no one else here gives even one fuck about this

― ENERGY FOOD (en i see kay), Friday, December 25, 2009 2:59 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

My mom is a type 1 and my dad is a type 2 and I just have to essentially fix it and take the remote away

you know all those old widescreen vhs videos... were they proper widescreen (as in 16:9) or just squashed? cos on my portable tv, when a dvd player is playing a widescreen dvd, it displays full screen 4:3 (this is prob to do with my crappy dvd player though) but if i put in an old w/s vhs, it shows the black bars.

The digital plasma tv I have now knows whats going on and adjusts accoringly. Its p funny when ad breaks come on, flicking back and forth. The interesting one was watching my late 90s Babylon 5 dvds - it would switch ratios during a scene and sometimes get it really wrong, dunno why. Bruce Boxleitner with a giant head is pretty lol.

you can set it so it doesnt keep adjusting it. i plugged my video into my widescreen tv and it kept adjusting every 10 seconds.

Yeah sometimes it is really annoying! I didnt know I could fix it, I'll have to check my settings.

I'm pretty sure VHS videos were 4:3 with black bars on the top. That's the point of the Zoom function on the telly, right? xp

yeah they were almost all 4:3 but the widescreen ones were supposedly 'the whole picture' rather than fitted for smaller screens.

so at the movies, 'cinemascope' aka 2.35:1 or wider is back?

I often hear that 2.35 “feels more cinematic.” The natural question to follow is: What is the cinematic reference? For example, if we’re looking at cinema as Sundance in 2004, 2.35 would look decidedly non-cinematic. If it’s looking at the current cinema, it makes sense, but that merely confirms the convention and doesn’t answer the question of how we got here. I believe the cinematic reference points are a subset of films from a particular time, where the 2.35 aspect ratio was aligned with the practice of capturing physically elaborate subjects. The aims of such films appear to me at odds with the core of many independent films, and so I also interpret this sentiment as a signal. It is a signal of personal history and spiritual alliance but may not emerge organically from the project at hand.

So if the dramatic growth in the use of 2.35 is due to its use as a signal, it would be curious but not the strangest of human conventions. The more substantial question is: Does this convention have aesthetic consequences?

http://www.hammertonail.com/editorial/suddenly-cinemascope-by-patrick-wang/