On 01/25/2011 09:54 AM, Sal Sunshine wrote: > On Jan 25, 2011, at 11:34 AM, Bhairitu wrote: > >> Roger Ebert has >> commented before on his disdain for 3D but this article has a letter >> from award winning editor Walter Murch on 3D pretty much nailing the >> problem with 3D. I predict it will go away just as it did in the 1950s >> and remain only for an occasion "road show" feature. BTW, 3D TVs aren't >> selling either no matter how hard they push them. People are saying "I >> just bought a new TV a couple years ago and 3D gives me a headache." >> >> http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2011/01/post_4.html > This article nails not only 3-D but special effects as well > as wide-screen TVs in general~~they send confusing > signals. My eyes get exhausted flitting around trying to > take in everything on a super wide-screen TV. I'd maybe > feel differently if I'd grown up with them, but I didn't. > > And SEs I feel have their place but seem to be often > used more to mask thow-away plots along with bad acting. > > Sal
I have to disagree on widescreen TVs and have always thought the 4:3 "Academy Ratio" was an abomination. No one knows for sure how the 4:3 aspect ratio came about as Edison's engineer didn't document why he chose it. At the same time in Europe the Lumiere brothers built a competing movie system based on 5:3. My theory on 5:3 was that they had stock on hands for "panorama" postcard photography and people wouldn't be interested in a "portrait" format for movies but instead "landscape." This aspect ratio still is being used in Europe. You must be sitting too close to your TV as you want to sit where the screen fills your eyes. That is the idea of widescreen to match the way we see. Early TVs were stuck with 4:3 because they were based on the tube technology for radar. And when widescreen TVs were offered in the early 1990s there were these tube sets and engineer mentioned how difficult is was to spread a cathode ray beam over that wide a surface. This is a non-issue with LCD panels. My favorite ratio is CinemaScope or 2:35:1 or in TV terms 22:9 (Phillips makes a 22:9 set). Today's widescreen TVs (and computer monitors) are 16:9 slightly under the 1:85:1 ratio of VistaVision which is the other popular format cinematographers use. For the record Hollywood experimented with widescreen back in the 1920s but ditched it until the 1950s along with 3D to get people back into the theaters away from their TVs. In fact at the beginning of the 1950s the studios instructed producers to even shoot Academy ratio films composed for widescreen. Those will sharp eyes will realize that many films presented in 4:3 from the 50s seem to have a "dead area" at the top or bottom (or both). In fact I would go so far as to say that many cinematographers were still photographers to begin with and that were used to composing for a wider frame and I find 1930's films including "Citizen Kane" with dead area at the top or bottom and the presentation does not suffer at all being cropped to widescreen. Money drives a lot of this and for years movie prints have been shipped in their original Super 35mm format. If you had some dummy running the projector they would get the matte wrong. Back in the 1990s I went to a movie with relatives and had to go out to snack bar to tell the kid that the film wasn't framed right (remember that little knob on your folks 8mm projector) and you could see the top of the set and the lights and boom mike. I wanted to buy a widescreen TV in the early 1990s but kept thinking that I would be buying a house and might buy one too small. I actually was going to buy a 55" Panasonic set but the following week Congress passed the HDTV bill so I decided to wait for those. When I bought this house in 2000 I bought a 53" widescreen HD set. I'm still using it. And widescreen should not hurt your eyes like 3D which is a gimmick. Besides don't you want to see the whole movie instead of just the center of it?
