(N/A) Yellow jackets (N/A)

[Rushie]

I dislike all portrait videos on YT and comment as such

But what's more annoying... with phone tech these days you should be able to hold your phone however and during media playback select orientation and aspect ratio

Very good point! Now I’m going to reveal just how old I am. I hate wide screen. All video should be filmed in 4:3 or Academy ratio. Or just plain square. (4:3 had to do with sprocket holes, and Academy, with sound on the actual physical film with the advent of “talkies”.) I despise letterbox. The whole reason we even have widescreen is because the movie industry invented it to win back audiences it was losing to television. What’s the point of shooting in widescreen today? There is a false idea that because humans have two eyes side by side that we naturally “see” in wide screen. This is untrue. We merge the two images into one. Our eyeballs are spherical and we have a macula and therefore focus vision and attention on a single, more or less circular image. Yes we have peripheral vision but its purpose is to alert us to something to which we may need to redirect our attention, not to provide us with tons of additional visual detail, because that’s not possible. You can’t focus your attention on the left side of the theater and the right side simultaneously. In widescreen you’re always missing part of the picture. And then they bring all this to TV sets and computer monitors. That’s good for Access or Excel spreadsheets but not Word, entertainment, or internet cruising. And it keeps going. The screens are getting ever shorter and wider and pretty soon I’m going to have a 1” tall picture that wraps 360 around me.

 

[flyingron]

Well, it's hard to argue cause and effect. Edison defined a frame as four sprocket holes high, but if he had made it 5 holes high, the ratio would have been more square. The cinematic wide screen came from the very early days of cinema, it's widespread adoption was to differentiate movies from TV (which had subsumed the 4:3 ratio as standard). 16:9 is a hack abomination that matches nothing.

As for horizontal vs. vertical, while your eyes are cylindrical, most action isn't and your eyes aren't fixed on the entire frame (which is why most of the wide screen/large screen stuff is impressive). IMAX is actually close to 4:3 (1.43 ratio).

 

[Tantalum]

In widescreen you’re always missing part of the

Yes! The ultra mega widescreens that cut an additional inch or two off the bottom and top of even a modern widescreen are unreasonably frustrating