What is your favorite Blu Ray aspect ratio???

[42041]

Which is why technologically outdated, vague terms like "fullscreen" and "widescreen" should just be abandoned in favor of non-ambiguous numeric ratios.

[Homerx]

OAR is the only way to go why crop the picture to fill the screen..

[tbizzle]

Originally Posted by 42041

Which is why technologically outdated, vague terms like "fullscreen" and "widescreen" should just be abandoned in favor of non-ambiguous numeric ratios.

I agree, I was just goin by his terms

[deado]

2.35:1 is my favorite.

[Kryptonic]

Of course OAR, but I find scope films to be more cinematic.

[Stu123]

i dont have any borders at all with 1:85

[RiseDarthVader]

Originally Posted by stubiedoo

i dont have any borders at all with 1:85

Overscan

[LetoAtreides82]

1:85:1 is my favorite, I like to use the entire screen. Despite what some directors claim I think you can fit a lot of information into a 16:9 screen.

[Rinzler]

whatever IMAX is in, the scenes in TF 2 or TDK, or IMAX documentaries.

[Mahatma]

My fav is 16:9 format that fills the screen.But that is only if that is the aspect rate of the movie (or close proximity).

Anyone here bought the new 21:9 format TV here?2001 must be awesome on one of those. . . . .

[retablo]

Originally Posted by KennedyZL

whatever IMAX is in, the scenes in TF 2 or TDK, or IMAX documentaries.

That's not IMAX. IMAX is 1.44:1. The scenes in TDK and TF2 are cropped to 1.78:1.

[alposnacks]

Full screen (16:9 full screen obviously, not 4:3) feels cramped to me. I prefer my movies wider.

[pappy97]

OAR of course, even if it's 4:3 (Gus Van Sant's Elephant, a movie I hope one day gets a blu ray release but I am not holding my breath).

Since I have a 100" 16:9 pull up screen and a painted on 180" 2.35:1 screen in the dedicated HT, I suppose I prefer 1.77:1 (16:9, but you never see any blu rays with this AR unless it's a TV show) and 2.35:1. 2.39:1 and 2.4:1 to one also work well on my 2.35:1 screen, but I can't say I am a fan of those old movies that go 2.5:1 or smaller.

So OAR first, filling up my screen(s) second.

P.S. I second and third and etc any comments about how 1.85:1 does not fill up 16:9 screens. I doesn't without overscan. Sure on my HDTV's it fills up the screen, but those automatically overscan to make 1.85:1 fit in 1.78:1. My PJ doesn't do that and I see very slim black bars on 1.85:1 material on my 16:9 screen.

[Digital Filmmaker]

My favorite widescreen aspect ratio is 2.35:1. It doesn't matter what media format it's on.

[buffetfroid]

Originally Posted by Digital Filmmaker

My favorite widescreen aspect ratio is 2.35:1. It doesn't matter what media format it's on.

winner

[Canada]

The Original aspect ratio.

[styl3s]

honestly it doesn't matter to me.. i mean sure i prefer wide to full but as far as like 1.78:1 and 2.40:1 etc goes i could care less long as its a good movie and looks good.

[garyrc]

If they had made the HDTV screens 2.39:1 we wouldn't be having all this trouble. Almost every film would fill our screens from top to bottom, yet would include virtually all of the information to the sides, except for the handful of films that used an Aspect Ratio that was wider. These exceptions would include the few CinemaScope films that came out before the AR was reduced to 2.35:1, the two films in CinemaScope 55, the two films in Camera 65, the ... what ... 10 or so films in Ultra, and (perhaps, see below) those in 3 panel Cinerama. Even these films would be bigger, although there would be small black bars top and bottom; the images would look a lot less like ribbons stretching across a pointlessly larger rectangle.

Back when HDTV was just coming out, I think I heard that Lucasfilm was urging a wider flatscreen shape, I think a 'scope shape. I think a quote from one of their guys was something like, "If you can't make it like 'scope, at least make it the shape of some movie, rather than narrower than any shape that was ever considered to be widescreen."

Now for Cinerama. From the earliest days of the process to now, I have occasionally seen the projected aspect ratio of Cinerama specified as being less extreme than the aspect ratio of the combination of the images on the three strips of film. On the other hand, I also heard that in some theaters in which the architecture limited the height of the screen, they cropped the top and bottom of the image to allow the center of the screen to be crammed into the proscenium arch, with the sides protruding out into space to provide a sufficiently large absolute width of image to provide Cinerama's legendary impact. I also heard that Cinematographers were warned to not include vital information at the top and bottom of the frame, to prevent it from being cropped out in these theaters.

In a 1952 article on Cinerama -- after the premiere and the initial audience reactions -- in American Cinematographer (available on the American Widescreen Museum site), John W. Boyle, ASC, cites the screen size as being 51 feet by 25 feet (2.04:1), but doesn't say whether the 51 feet is the chord of the arc, or the distance along the curved surface of the screen from left to right. I suspect it is the width of the chord. I'm convinced that the chord of the screen arc in the original San Francisco Cinerama theater (the Orpheum) was considerably wider, but not as wide as the much later Century 21 San Jose for "single lens 70 mm Cinerama," which was about 85 feet across the arc. The same AC article cited average human vision as being 180 degrees by 90 degrees (unlike the totally false 165 degrees wide often seen in the literature when an author was comparing the arc of vision to the Cinerama camera's 145 degrees) ... the 180:90 cited by Boyle for vision is obviously 2:1.

In a Home Theater article discussing ARs on disk, Smilebox -- created to simulate Cinerama from a specified seat -- was cited as being 1.96:1, but which of the methods of measuring height was used was not clearly specified, as I remember. Since Smilebox attempts to depict a curved surface on a (usually) flat surface, there is a problem in measuring the height to derive an AR. Does one measure the height in the center, at the sides, take an average of the two, or what? In any case, I agree with an individual, who happened to be a professional projectionist, quoted in the Home Theater article who had seen How The West Was Won many times in Cinerama; in a real Cinerama theater, sitting close, and below the center of the screen, Cinerama doesn't seem to dip down as much in the center as Smilebox does. Perhaps this is partly the effect of something like Object Constancy.

So, in a theater in which the architecture does not require top/bottom cropping to achieve width, what was the usual AR of Cinerama? About 2.04:1, as we might infer from Boyle's report of screen dimensions? This would be pretty close to HT's report of 1.96:1. Or the wider AR of the images on the three strips of film?

[Kryptonic]

Originally Posted by alahuk

2.35 (Open Matte)

2.35:1 is scope, not open matte. Open Matte is, for instance when Kubrick shot The Shining - he shot the film in 1.37:1, but matted it at 1.85:1 for cinemas, hence the 1.37:1 is "open matte".

[coralfangs]

My favorite ratio is always the original ratio intended by the director. I hate it when they crop shit out wrongfully (classic examples include Tideland)