Yikes, Bill, you made me go read the entire article I posted earlier!
LOL And I discovered some very interesting tidbits or factoids.
One of what I had thought were only 2 standards. (Either 4:3, OR
widescreen). (I guess for movies being filmed it should be widescreen,
however (16:9 or 16:10).
I think we've just "assumed" that the word "widescreen" has a
meaning/aspect ratio for everything, where the truth is far from that.
In fact, I made the same assumption a couple of years ago when I
inherited my mother's projection TV.
That's ok. I'm somewhat used to it when watching my old 4:3 CRT TV. I
have to admit it's better being letterboxed for some movies (more on that
below).
Well, are there any aspect standards for movie makers? I would have
thought there were. You mean it's completely open as to what ratios they
use? I didn't realize that. I guess I just assume most were shot in some
widescreen format.
From reading the Wikipedia article, there are multiple standards for
images, that page lists 24 different aspect ratio standards.
Would you believe, the 4:3 ratio came from William Dickson and Thomas
Edison? Dickson worked for Edison devising a motion picture camera.
Interestingly enough, there was a Frenchman, Louis Le Prince, who
predated this work, but mysteriously disappeared from a train, and is
considered the father of motion pictures.
Why 4:3? Apparently, Dickson and Edison set the frame height as 4
sprocket perforations on the film. The width, 3, just happened to be
the distance between the sprockets. The size of the film? 35 mm!
This is the size of film used in silent movies.
I don't generally watch movies on a computer - that's what the TV in the
living room with the comfy chair is for.
Same thoughts here.
The computer is for
computer work (web stuff, Office, etc). But I'm probably a bit behind the
times. And my computer monitor is only a 17 inch diagonal anyways, but
that's beside the point, I think.
And on the TV I don't mind too much if its letterboxed or not. Some things
just beg for letterboxing (like Lawrence of Arabia with Peter O'Toole) on my
old CRT TV set.
I just watched an old Cinemascope western, Bend if the River.
Definitely not a 16:9 format, and letterboxed.
If you haven't checked the link, there's a lot of interesting reading on
this. I found out there's pillarboxing. That's where the bars are on
the sides, not top and bottom.
How did widescreen movies come about? TV, which also used 4:3 aspect
ratio, was becoming popular. The movie industry wanted something to set
movies apart from TV. You have to wonder how things would have been
different if they had not invented the rectangular CRT.
Interesting to hear. Well, one would have thought that at least that could
have been standardized (i.e. either 16:10 OR 16:9). I'm surprised the "1"
makes that much difference!
When I bought this Mac, I assumed the monitor was 16:9. It wasn't until
I started some investigating into screen resolutions I found out it was
16:10. I read somewhere that Apple chose 16:10 because of something
relating to web pages, not videos.
<snip>
--
Ken
Mac OS X 10.6.8
Firefox 11.0
Thunderbird 11.0.1
LibreOffice 3.5.0 rc3
