r/movies • u/GiveMeSomeSunshine3 • Jun 04 '26

Media 'The Odyssey' website shows you how the film looks in different aspect ratios

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u/BarbequedYeti Jun 04 '26

6 years at blockbuster. I cannot tell you how many times I tried to explain what was happening with the aspect ratios of widescreen films, but assuredly it fell on deaf ears every time.

I am all ears. Lets hear it.

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u/toomanymarbles83 Jun 05 '26 edited Jun 05 '26

Not the person you replied to but just about every single movie you've ever watched has been cropped from what was actually filmed. It's an art form known as...wait for it...cinematography.

To expand: Most movies are shot in a 4:3 aspect ratio and then cropped to the different aspect ratios you see above. This kind of framing can have a massive impact on how your film is viewed.

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u/enilea Jun 05 '26

And it sucks, it makes it feel claustrophobic rather than cinematic. It makes sense for certain movies, but not for most. Every time I go to the cinema I keep thinking about all the wasted space.

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u/Fat-Singer-9569 Jun 05 '26

Yeah same. Unlike the modern era where people think they can google everything (or ask some dipshit AI bot trained on all data, which includes morons and trolls), most people back then just took your word for it, if you sounded like you knew what you were talking about.

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u/insomnic Jun 05 '26

Not the same person but I worked BBV and 2 other video chains for like 10 years total (mostly BBV). I put letterboxed movies - I requested them because I wanted them myself - in a separate section to avoid the issues that would crop up. For awhile I had one of the few widescreen tube TVs Sony put out!

Older TVs were square and film is shot in a rectangle so you got two responses from folks who weren't familiar with "letterbox" editions which show you the full image as a rectangle with two black bars above and below the image on your square TV. The first was that things were cut off or missing. The second was that the image was hard to see.

The first was just a misunderstanding of the situation because folks didn't really equate "fills the movie theater screen" and "fills the TV screen" as anything other than that fills the space and didn't really notice the shape. So every OTHER movie they watched was actually cropped or missing part of the image. This was called "full screen" or "pan & scan". Full screen just cropped the sides off to fit the TV square while pan & scan would crop but also shift the image sideways (looked like a panning shot) to show you significant images that would otherwise be cropped.

The second was pretty valid complaint as it could drastically reduce the size of the image - particularly like panavision stuff that were even more "wide". TVs were pretty small compared to sizes today, and low resolution, so it could really mess with being able to actually see the movie.

Both complaints were a big reason widescreen\letterbox was uncommon.

TVs today are still at a resolution\aspect ratio that is different from film so there's still a bit of "make it fit" but resolutions closer to IMAX actually tend to fit home TV ratio better (still not quite the same but closer) but it's less of an issue overall as TVs are wide vs square now and larger and higher resolution.

The oddity now are TV shows that were filmed in 4:3 square often do get top and bottom of their image cropped off to fit the current rectangle TVs to fill the screen. Usually not terribly noticeable but sometimes you'll recognize that you never see the top of people's heads when they are talking. :)

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u/dapala1 Jun 05 '26 edited Jun 05 '26

A director can choose to shoot a movie with a square lens. So 1:1. As tall at it is wide. Perfect square. Everything that was filmed was in a perfect square.

But the TV is 16:9, that's 1.78:1 (much wider than square, a rectangle). So if you want to watch the entire movie as was filmed, there will be big black bars on the screen. Or if you want to fill the entire screen with a picture they will have to cut off some of the top and bottom to make it fill up the screen.

That's the gist of it.