I don't want to lose 1/4 of the picture just so it'll fit neatly on my screen without black bars. The worst is when the first HD release of a program mastered on film is in 16:9, so we never get the full picture in HD and have to choose between higher resolution and seeing the whole damn picture
back in the long ago times, I was like an 8 year old watching Star Wars on cable TV and it was in "letterbox" which was uncommon enough that at the commercial breaks the station liked to remind us.
I asked my father, who I believed to be a genius, "why don't they just do this for all movies?" and he said, "the black boxes are annoying to look at."
it was a pivotal moment in my development, because that is when I realized adults could be fools.
the black boxes are annoying to look at.
But you're not looking at the black boxes, you're looking at the movie!
The tragedy is that 16:9 was invented as a compromise so that both 4:3 TV and 2.35:1 movies would fit with the smallest black bars possible (it's the geometric mean between those).
Why is it 2.35:1 and not integers? Like that's close enough to 7:3 might as well set it arbitrarily in a way that looks nice.
It comes from taking the dimensions of a 35mm film, subtracting room for the perforations and the audio track, multiplying by 2 for the anamorphic lens, adding more clearance on the sides for flare, a margin for cutting and splicing, and so on. The actual ratio is 1678:715.
Seinfeld suffered from this when it was put on Hulu in 'HD'. Nauseating!
It trains people to not really care about proper aspect ratios too. I'm rewatching Twin Peaks with my roommate since she's never seen it and I was like "oh, I have the blu-ray version of all 3 seasons and the log lady intros/missing pieces/etc on my external HDD let's just watch it off of that". Throw it on the TV and of course it's in its original 4:3 aspect ratio. Immediately I hear "can you get rid of the black bars??" and I have to pause the episode to inform her that I'm not losing 25% of the picture just to satisfy her insane desires for 'FULL SCREEN'.
Always wind up just putting on this video to explain to people why I'm not going to 16:9 from a 4:3 video!!!
I watched Twin Peaks a while back, and I was so happy that the HD releases are in 4:3. When given the choice between HD and original aspect ratio, I nearly always choose original aspect ratio.
Pan and scan is as old as film itself.
Also if you have the studio matsters you can sometimes make it work without sacrifice, but you run the risk of showing the set because you're putting the margins in the final product.
As an aside, I was 2.5 hours into Justice League before I realized it was in 2.39:1
Was just watching the simpsons earlier and its awful, it's actually painful to watch because they cropped it and tried to deinterlace it.
So glad that the Avatar: The Last Airbender blu rays were released in the original 4:3 aspect ratio.
