[Matt Elder]

Does anyone know why film format (ie the ratio) is the way it is today? I am aware that a number of years ago, there were a couple of competing formats and in the end it was a compromise between the two.

But why did film initially go for such a wide landscape format. A visual art before this was painting and people had been using a rectangle somewhere in between a square and a double square. Ok there were exceptions (large altarpieces, ceiling frescos etc) but what was the initial attraction to the wide landscape format?
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See ya on da flip side
Matt
http://www.mattelder.com

[Ian Jones]

heh, I've got a silly idea... if a screen is wider, you can make the cinema wider. You know that means more seats = more ppl = more money. Well it works in theory. lol.

I like the widescreen, it just looks nice imo.

[jfrancis]

The vistas of the great outdoors, back when sunlight was the main movie light source?

The need to have more than one person on screen at a time?

[Impaler]

Once again, the great Cecil Adams delivers the straight dope.

http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a1_366c.html

The short answer? 70mm film stock looked cleaner and sharper than 35mm. Rather than continually replace movie theatres to match advances in film, they stuck with the spacious screen format, much to the chagrin of VHS owners everywhere.
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QED, sort of.

[jfrancis]

yes, but film was never taller than it was wide, even when first invented. It was always "landscape" -- not "portrait" -- I think it might have been square, at most, early on, but it was never vertical

[Matt Elder]

Thanks for that guys. The article you mentioned Impaler only talks about the rise during the 1950s. This is another article that makes mention of the early attempts at 70mm film around the turn of the century.

http://www.xs4all.nl/~wichm/filmsize.html#widescreen

It still doesn't really explain the take up of the widescreen format and its advantages. There is the mention of the graininess but that appears to be a temporary problem that 35mm film quickly solves.

I've read elsewhere the suggestion that early action would happen in the horizontal plane so if you had a wide enough lenses, you wouldn't have to move the camera around. Any other ideas?[/url]
_________________
See ya on da flip side
Matt
http://www.mattelder.com

[Impaler]

[jfrancis]

http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/70mm%20film

70 mm film is a 5-perf format -- perfs are perforations, the holes along the side of the film. Regular 35 mm film is 4 perfs. That means each 70 mm frame actually uses 25% more film stock than a 35mm frame would.

VistaVision is actually an 8-perf format, like the film in your SLR camera -- so that would use even more film per frame.

A lot of wide format movies are composed as if they were going to be 1.66:1 -- just to be on the safe side -- regardless of what they theoretically could do. It's also a bit inconvenient to put a single person in closeup on a wide screen -- you have to worry about what to do with the rest of the image.

[jfrancis]

"How Widescreen Won" http://slate.msn.com/id/2101354/