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Stranger Things. Arguably Netflix's most important television phenomenon of the last decade. One of the IPs where No, wait. That can't be right. What is What is this? No, this can't be. This can't be right. It's got to be the TV settings. I screwed it up last time. You're telling me that Netflix, the platform that's trying to kill movie theaters, is making content that doesn't fit the screen where it's meant to be seen. Are you kidding me? True Detective is full screen. Of course it is. Game of Thrones full screen. So what's up with Netflix? Now the Hollywood answer to this question would be something like bars are cinematic. But what does it even mean cinematic? Slow frame rates or
flickering screens. Like I would argue that filling the screen is actually more immersive, not showing you black bars. So why is content that is made specifically for TV shaped different from the screen? And so that night I started diving into this mess. And I discovered that there is a war that didn't start with Netflix. It's a war of two industries looking for the last laugh. And for almost 100 years, we have just been caught in the middle. We've been investing in the wrong format. So what is the right format? And are our TVs ever going to fit the content that we put on them? Now, every single HD TV set sold everywhere in the world today is this shape 169. There are two ways to see that proportion. 169 as a fraction or
actually dividing 16 by 9 to land at 1.78. Now, I'm not a big fan of this whole decimal system, but it is the only way to make sense of the absolute shitow of formats that we have today cuz we have 1.33, 1.78, 185, 22, 235 395, 29, and 276. I am not you. Even to this day, there are movies produced in most of those formats. So here we have a shot from the opening of our film centers. This is the same shot captured on IMAX film format just 15 perforations per frame. And this is that same image as it would look if it was captured on ultra pan vision. Every single one of those numbers is a different reason why you have black bars on your couch. So how did we get here?
It's very clear that these guys are to blame, right? It's Hollywood's fault, right? It is. and we're going to get there. But the shape of our current TVs 169 or 1.78 was not TV manufacturers trying to screw you. On the contrary, 1.78 was essentially like a peace offering a truce an olive branch of TV people trying to adapt. When widescreen TVs were first proposed, this is around the 80s. This is the widescreen 1000 with a picture three times bigger than a 25-in diagonal set. The broadcast of television at the time was squareish, right? standard 43 or 1.33 which of course matched perfectly with the TV sets at the time 1.33. But
TV went through all this trouble decades to switch the devices and then the broadcasts to 1.78 to try to be better to watch movies. Now I remember this time when you bought a good old VHS tape to watch at home and you had two choices. You could get the original theatrical which was widescreen. Great. you have all this wide content, the original movie, but on a typical 1.85 Hollywood flick that would waste about 28% of your TV space in those black bars. Okay, the alternative, you buy the full screen VHS that cropped the movie on its sides, but it erased like 28% of the movie. And I remember arguing with my high school friends about this, getting bullied because I preferred the full screen version. So,
what was the right format? If you were old enough to live those times, I actually wonder what you guys preferred. Let me know in the comments. But anyway, 1.78 was this truce and it made sense, right? If you watch a 1.85 movie in a 1.78 TV, you only waste about 4% of the screen in black bars. Great. On traditional 1.33 broadcast TV, you would waste around 25% of the screen on black bars on the sides. For years, TV broadcast was just stretched to fill the screen. And most people didn't notice. TV just made you look fat, right? Shut up. The camera adds 10 lbs. Ah, so how many cameras are actually on you?
The whole plan was that broadcast TV would eventually convert to 1.78 and they did. Great. Problem solved, right? Right. So, what's up with Netflix? Like Netflix is essentially television. Like movies that are produced by Netflix, like they play in movie theaters for like 3 days and then they go straight to TV. Wasn't Netflix supposed to be the anti-Hollywood? Rome 239, M 220. Marriage Story is 1.66. It has vertical bars. Why wouldn't they make it the right size? And what the hell is this? Sax Snider director streaming and 1.33.
Come on. I don't believe it, man. Now, these aren't accidents. This is intentional. They don't want movies to fit in your TV. But how do they keep getting away with breaking the format? The only way to make sense of what's going on is to go to the root of the problem. So, let's go. Let's go to the So, so I'm traveling to meet up with Paul Carlin. Paul has credits in over 100 Hollywood movies and TV shows, some of my favorites. And he's got some thoughts on this whole black bar cinematic content type of mess. But first, we have to get on the same page
about this format war and where and when it even started. This is a strip of good old 35 mm film stock. And each of the images in this strip is this little square. It's not technically a square. It's a 43 or 1.33 rectangle that spans four perforations of the film. Now, these perforations were there so that the camera could just move the film, get it into place, but they're going to be really important soon. Now, this is how most movies have been shot for over 100 years. But it has two fatal flaws that got us into this whole mess. Number one, this idea of square images is an echo from the era of theater, right? These early movies, they even looked like
staged plays because that's what people knew. That's what people understood. And then second, we made a square format despite knowing for over 100 years that our eyes, our field of view is kind of horizontal. Like our eyes focus on what we look at, right? But our peripheral vision can see around 200° wide, but only around 130° tall. So our view is wider than it is taller. Kind of like a widescreen movie. So much of our world responds to this thing subconsciously. You have the shape of windshields and cars or even the way we arrange our desks. And filmmakers, they had a choice. Back then in the 1920s, you had formats like 65, 50, 68 mm, even 70 mm film back then. And companies, they were
all experimenting a little bit with widescreen. But this was all too expensive to shoot. So the industry settled for this 35mm 1.33. Now with the help of Nickelodeons, which were actually these small theaters where you paid a nickel to watch a short movie, the industry figured that, hey, there was there's money to be made with these moving pictures. And so basically, Hollywood was consolidated. Movie theaters started popping up everywhere, and they mostly agreed on this 1.33 format. Now, every single one of those movies was silent. There was maybe some music playing in the theater, sometimes
live, but definitely not in sync with the movie. At least not until Sunrise was revolutionary because it had a soundtrack that was synced to the movie. And they did that by actually placing this visual soundtrack print on the film. And a new format was born 1.19. Now people of course loved sound but they hated the square shape of this film again because our vision is horizontal. It's widescreen. So 1.19 didn't really last but the sound definitely stayed. This soundtrack that got printed on the film was a very clever solution. And so the academy that academy, oh wow, responded by standardizing and establishing this official academy format of 1.37. And 1.37 was just as wide as 1.19 in the film, but they placed this gate on the
camera that cropped the top and the bottom of the image just to make the image look a little lighter. You would think that switching would annoy all these movie theaters back then, but really back then movie theaters were owned by the movie studio. So, it was kind of their own problem. So, everybody adapted, everybody followed suit, and they lived happily ever after. No, of course not. A literal war was just brewing. Now, in parallel to all these changes, television had been invented, and this was very different. This was an electronic signal. It wasn't chemicals on a film, but TV was after all moving pictures, which people loved and they loved from the comfort of their couches. Now, back then you had a bunch of different TV formats. You had one
full square TVs. Some of them were vertical, but in the mid1 1930s, TV people started to adapt to something that started to look like movies, you know, so we can all live in peace and harmony. And TV went with 1.33. They didn't get the memo that the academy had switched to 1.37, but also this squareish format was easier to work with for electronics. Now, 1.33 was so close to 1.37 that it didn't really matter. But for an OCD like me, the fact that there is this gap in time where the two were almost in sync, but that never really happened, man, that just breaks my balls, you know, because this is the exact moment that the black bars were born cuz TV emulated movies. But they
missed by just enough to guarantee that nothing would ever fit perfectly again. For the non OCD people, 1.33, 1.37, it's the same. They coexisted in peace. I mean, I mean, not in peace cuz there was a war. There was literally World War II going on, but peace between Hollywood and television, I guess. But two catastrophic things happened in the ' 40s that would burn black bars into every screen forever. First, TVs finally became a thing from 1% adoption in 46. By 1954, 55% of homes had a TV so you could get the moving pictures in your couch. And second, that Hollywood monopoly of owning the theater, the studio, the actors, that got broken up by the Supreme Court. And now studios didn't own theaters anymore. They had to
compete for screens, not just for screens in theaters, but against the screen in your home. And thus began the format wars of the 50s. All films made from 1953 on, for the past 50 years, have been made in one widescreen form or another, whether it's just normal widescreen or the 70 mm or uh Cinemascope or Panavision. Okay. So, how do you make your paid moving pictures compete with the free moving pictures that you can get from your couch? Well, you make movies a grandiose experience that by design you can't really replicate at home. Ring any
bells? Hollywood's mission was simple. Survive by making a movie so impossibly wide that it would look ridiculous in your home screen. So, you have to get out of the couch. You have to go to the theater. They fought this battle on three fronts. Some of these fronts were smarter than others. The first front was brute force that came with attack called synorama. Ladies and gentlemen, this is curama. As crazy as it sounds, synorama meant shooting a movie with three cameras pointing to different directions and then projecting that with three projectors to get this ultra wide view.
Now, if you think that those modern like ScreenX guys invented anything new, nah, they're just doing like a modern shittier curama. Cuz in cinema, the director actually shot with all three cameras. There was this intentional wide thing going on. Screen X is just a mix of CG and unused footage, but more of an afterthought. Now, each one of the images for the three screens was vertical on the film, and it used six perforations instead of the typical four. Plus, there was another magnetic coated 35mm strip for sound with seven different tracks. Curama basically invented surround sound for film, and this gave the audience an incredible experience and a massive 2.59 field of view. Hitch a ride and careen across the
countryside as the wonderful world of The Brothers Grim sweeps you into an exciting new world of rollicking entertainment, happily enlivened by a distinctive cast of stars. Already acclaimed and applauded the world over in How the West was one. Metro Golden Mayor and Curama have brought together the biggest and most distinguished allstar cast in entertainment history. An utter punch in the face for TVs, but a completely unsustainable one. Cura needed 390 ft of film per minute. In the 1950s, that meant around $880 per minute. That's inflation adjusted. So, Hollywood, they just couldn't bankrupt themselves just to spite your living room. They needed a cheaper weapon. But notice what's already happening here.
All the way back in the 50s. Every front that Hollywood built in this war just ignores television. They were fighting each others. They were fighting to get butts on seats, but the real common enemy was your TV. And the more incompatible this format was with your 1.33 TV set, the better. But anyway, if strapping three cameras together was too expensive, how else do you stretch an image to defeat the TV people? Well, you change the canvas. So, another approach was running the same 35 mm film sideways through the camera instead of vertically. So, if you're into the whole IMAX 1570 thing, these advanced tickets to the Odyssey, that's where this idea comes from.
Are you okay? As someone who got IMAX 70 mm Odyssey tickets, uh, I'm in a very unique position, but I'm going to get to that movie soon. So, instead of four perforations per frame vertically, now you have eight perforations horizontally. That's double the negative area, double the resolution. This was called Vista Vision, and it was a hit. The new Vista Vision film negative. Twice as big, twice as clear as the old style negative, bringing brilliance and glowing colors never achieved before. Now, this format was 1.5, which happens to be the exact form factor that we still use in modern SLR sensors to this
very day. But remember, widescreen was the trend. So, even though stuff was shot in 1.5, which is a more squarish format, studios would put film gates at the movie theater to turn films into either 1.66 or into 1.85. So, we ended up with a movie again that was shot that had the full picture on the film, but with some sections hidden when it was projected. In other words, that could have been more compatible with television, but they chose to go wider because ah, screw your TV. But, but the thesis of Vista Vision was actually pretty solid. So, why did it die so quickly?
Hello. Hey, welcome to a lead finishing lab. Good to meet you in person, Paul. Yeah, you're you're beating our um editing rooms. Now, I don't know why it failed because I'm not that old. So, if I had to guess, it would have to be with the projection. You need to convince theaters to get a Vista Vision projector, which is a completely different mechanical beast. And they probably didn't want to do that.
Yeah. And this is post the monopoly breakup of the studios owning the theaters, right? So, and the studios no longer own the theaters. So, they don't You're going to have to convince the theater now to convert their projectors and that was a big deal. Now, Vista Vision did give us Star Wars. George Lucas dug up some old Vista Vision cameras and they used that to shoot the miniatures in the original trilogy because they needed to overlay multiple layers of film. Vista Vision gave them that extra resolution. And the same trick made it to Back to the Future and to Jurassic Park and to Inception.
All of which used Vista Vision cameras to shoot their effects plates. The Brutalist 2024 was shot all with Vista Vision cameras, which was great for marketing, bad for streaming because 1.66 gives you those pesky vertical bars. So the answer of why would you shoot any aspect ratio, whether it's 166 or 239 or whatever, I mean it all depends on what the director wants. I mean that it is the creative control of the director to decide or the DP. All those decisions go into the creative process to give you the viewer a certain feeling. Like they're trying to get you to feel something. They're trying to get you to see something.
Great. That's a great answer. We should ask the director of uh what was the movie? This was The Brutalist. You should ask him. Yeah. We're not there yet with the channel, but we'll Can't hurt to try. Yeah. I still have all these people. They're all just I know. They're just that you should reach out and ask him. Yeah. Go on IMDb Pro, find his agent, send him an email. Um, I don't know if this is going to work, but let's give it a shot.
I don't even know who I'm supposed to email here. Producer, manager, executive producing a video around aspect ratios. I know this is a long shot, but we'd love to have a chat with you about it. Thanks in advance. send. We'll see if they reply. But remember, 35mm wasn't the only film stock around. In the middle of this format war, maybe it's time to go back and dig up some of these alternatives. So these movies, they're all super panavition 70, a stunning 2.20. So instead of flipping the negative, they replaced 35mm film for this massive 65 mm negative. Now, while you don't have pixels of resolution on film negative, we do have the resolution of the actual
silver particles in the celluloid. And that's the grain that you would see, for example, on an 8 mm or a 16 mm piece of footage. And so by going to 65 mm you get these massive grandiose clear images. Here are the negatives compared side by side. Now filmmakers shot in 65mm film stock and they transferred that those images to a 70 mm film for projection. That saved a little bit of money on this very expensive film. So the 70 mm version had the image that was actually the exact same size as we captured originally, but it had some extra space that allowed them to place the soundtracks.
By the way, so when I was a kid, we used to look in the ads of the newspaper for the theater that had 70 mm. Oh, really? Yeah. Kind of like and it back then I believe it was six track mag sound. So it would say 70 mm six track and we would go to those theaters. I remember like looking at the newspaper ads in the newspaper to find the theaters that had cuz that's how you knew show times before the internet. Growing up in Costa Rica, we had no there was no 70 mm. No, no, there was that was not a thing. And we still use super panavision to this very day. They call it Panavision System 65 now. And it's what Nolan uses for the dialogue scenes cuz IMAX is his
whole thing. But before the Odyssey, IMAX cameras were just too loud to be used in any dialogue scene. So this panavision system is what worked to capture more resolution in the non-action sequences. But how does that fit in your TV? Like of course, it doesn't fit at all. On 1.33 TVs back then, a super panovision film would mean about 39% of wasted screen space or an equivalent crop on the sides. Now, even today, a 2.20 film, it still wastes about 20% of our HD TVs. But what if you don't have the budget for cura or for 65 mm film? It'll be a lot easier with that. So here in Italy, there's a notable alternative which is that Italian filmmakers in the spaghetti western era, they would use 35 mm film, but they
would use only two perforations instead of four. So they would get the widescreen shot but you know they would lose a lot of resolution in the process. That'd be like us posting 480p videos on YouTube these days. Now you might have noticed that Slidebean has started to operate a lot more like a media company lately which for us has meant spending a whole lot of time you writing newsletters and blog posts and titles and thumbnails. So and we all kind of know that AI should be able to help us with that somehow. But the hard part is making those workflows actually understand context because every company has context. We have our tone and our audience and our archive
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get 75% off. You can just click the link below and build your first workflow. Now, back to the Americas, cuz the last front on this war was basically to try to cheat on the optics. And they pulled it off. So, how do you capture a movie that is widescreen that looks good without using twice the amount of film? Well, you squeeze it with this. This is an anamorphic lens. It's it's actually inspired by the periscopes viewfinders in army tanks from World War I. So the deal with these lenses is that they give you this wide view of the enemy and it's what these guys did. So the first anamorphic approach was called cinemascope. It captured this wide image widescreen and it squeeze that image
into a 35 mm negative. So this was again a widescreen image compressed to be about 1.9 to still have room for the soundtrack. then all you needed to do was reverse that process when you were projecting the film with another anamorphic lens at the theater. That means that the negative though was always going to be stretched vertically, but that still let you capture this 2.35 widecreen format. And at that point that was the absolute widest format available in the old days when they would shoot anamorphic onto film and edit on film the image on the film. So if you held up the film yes it would be squished but the optics of the machine they were using would have a dquish. So they would be able to see the image properly
unstretched you know when they were working on the film. But if they were to look at the film and hold it up to the light, it would be anamorphic. So Paramount and MGM, they all bet on the canvas front. They pushed movies like White Christmas and Lawrence of Arabia with these alternative film stocks. On the other hand, 20th Century Fox was committed to this visual hack front and they started shooting all their films in Cinemascope. Now, anamorphic came with its own set of problems, man. Hollywood, as they do, they cleverly renamed all these problems to cinematic lens flares from the shape of the lens, distortion around the edges, but more crucially, distorted faces cuz all of this stretching. Now, getting a
stretched face, a deformed face might have been a dealbreaker for some actors that allegedly started writing into their contracts that they would not shoot anamorphic films. So Panavision whose business was absolutely selling guns to this war. I mean cameras of course they helped the visual hack front by improving this a bit which did land us a little by accident in another format called 2.39. But ultimately the last laugh by panovision was mixing these two fronts together. And so we got ultra panavision. Remember the name of the game here is spectacle. Ultra Panovision 70 was shot in that huge 65mm film. It had the high resolution of these wide shots, but it also used an anamorphic lens. It
squeezed this extremely wide image into this negative which was then unsqueezed at the theater. But that yielded a massive 2.6 76 format is the widest possible format in film history. Only nine films were shot in ultra panavition during these format wars. The format was dead for 50 years. The lenses were just collecting dust until Tarantino revived it for the hateful eight making that the 10th film shot in ultra panavision. Not Tarantino's 10th fil though. These lenses hadn't been used since uh the movie Cartoon and I took those lenses when we flew to our locations in Talide. And the test came back and now it's up to him to look at and say, "How do we feel about it?"
Cuz I wanted to show them inserts, close-up, wide shots, landscapes, faces. All very cool, but absolutely incompatible with TVs. 35% of your screen is black bars if you've ever watched this at home. Even more ironic, consider that Netflix actually released The Hateful 8 as a limited series. But that is kind of the point. These directors, they do not want you to watch the movie at home. Everyone talks about how great television is now. And it's it's pretty good, I got to say. But it's still television to me. I imagine the ' 50s were like this wild west of new movies, new formats, new experiments. And if you were there and if you had money to
afford these tickets, I'm sure you were in for a treat. But still, many of these premium formats, they just stopped existing after the format wars. And those that survived, they were reserved for like premium big budget productions, only really a handful a year. Now, this became a double-edged sword for Hollywood, which ended up restarting this war and giving us another mess where we live now. You see, the rest like the typical Hollywood film, it was still shot on standard non-anamorphic 35 mm. That's about 75 to 80% of all films. So, from the '60s through the '90s, a typical flick was just shot in Academy Standard 1.37 and then gated down into widescreen. So the movie theaters would get this widescreen version in 1.85. So you get the
widescreen that people expect in the theater without any of the other complications. A little boring. I'm being mean here. Don't get me wrong. Some of my favorite films when I was a kid are just the boring gated 1.37 movies. But those complications, I think they were part of the vibe. You know, the distortion, the flare, the spectacle of seeing something that you don't usually see at home. There's an artistic vision in those too. Now take for example Wes Anderson. Like it or not, there is something unique about his use of squares and symmetry. And if you compare his earlier work to his newer
work, you'll see that his vision can't be fully realized with the widescreen format. Another example is Roger Eagers with The Lighthouse. He deliberately shot that movie in 1.19, which is basically this claustrophobic kind of box that people hated back in the day. And that wasn't just this retro gimmick. was intentionally using those massive black bars to physically trap his actors on screen. It made the movie feel anxious like they were literally trapped inside this lighthouse that was closing in on them. Another movie is Mummy by Savior Dolan. The entire film is this perfect one square. It made the character feel completely suffocated and trapped by his life. But in the exact
moment that he finally feels free and hopeful, halfway through the movie, the character reaches out and literally pushes the black bars off the screen with his hands, expanding the movie into widecreen right in front of me. The format was part of the story. But back in the 1990s, the unintentional 1.85 and the 1.37 openmates, they backfired terribly for Hollywood because that original openmat capture was still physically sitting there on the film. So that made it really convenient to use those negatives to convert the movie into full screen for those 43 1.33 VHS releases. In fact, because they opened up the top and the bottom of the frame, many of those VHS tapes revealed new parts of the movie.
Titanic was a great example cuz the VHS version had more of the ship, more of the set design that we had not seen in the theater. This also happened in Jurassic Park as well and in The Shining where Stanley Kubri was actually very intentional about shooting this film with an open mat to have all that extra footage for the eventual home release. It's almost as if the film had this special IMAX version exclusively for the home. So, to my high school friends who argued that widescreen VHS were better, take that. Now, full screen had some value to it as well. That backfired sometimes because the extra frame also caught like edges of sets or occasional boom mics that sometimes made it to the
full screen VHS tapes. But, but this is great, isn't it? Like TV compatibility. Why was this bad for Hollywood? Why didn't they stick to 1.85? At first, Hollywood had no problems with this system cuz '90s TVs were still shitty. It was still very far from the movie experience. But the 2000s came with goodies for home theater nerds like me. Once you've experienced the Sony home entertainment universe, nothing else seems to matter. HD TVs with that friendly 1.78 shape, less screen wasted than home projectors and DVDs with their whopping 480p resolution.
This is what happens when you watch DVD. And then Dolby and DTS who had designed this digital audio system that also went in the negative on the side between the perforations. They started licensing devices so that you could get Dolby audio at home. And then Blu-rays 1080p home movies started to look like the real deal. And then streaming of course and once again Hollywood panicked. And just like in the 50s, Hollywood figured that they could just not let this stand. The theater experience had to be better, had to be superior, and it had to be incomparable to the home. They tried to answer that with 3D movies, though that didn't work for a bunch of other reasons. A video for another day, which
we're already working on, by the way. But Hollywood found a way to strike back. Look guys, I have nothing against IMAX. I love the experience of IMAX films. I'm one of those idiots that would buy the tickets a year in advance if I actually live near a 1570 theater. But seeing everything we've seen today, you have to notice that this is kind of Hollywood pulling the rug on us again. Now, real IMAX, not the digital version. That's that's crap. Real IMAX is shot on 70 mm film that runs horizontally. So, it takes that lesson from Panavision, takes that lesson from Cinemascope. It is 15 perforations wide. That's what they called it. 1570. Crazy expensive. $500 to over $900 per minute in raw film stock and processing. An absolute
massive format. so large that it can't even be edited digitally. Like real IMAX films, those that are shot in this negative, they're edited by this relic of Hollywood, the negative cutter that physically cuts and stitches the film together. That's because scanning this negative in a way that retains the resolution would have to be like a 12K or 16K scan, maybe more, which even modern computers couldn't handle. Like I've been lucky enough to experience some films in that true IMAX, and it is incredible. But one thing that we can't deny is that IMAX is an absolute spat in the face to the TV people cuz things were peaceful, man. The entire broadcast TV
industry had converted to widecreen. I bought my widescreen TV thinking that was going to be the best viewing experience for the rest of my life. And here comes IMAX pushing us back to 1.33. The answer is simple. Since 69 TVs made with normal, well, now height has become the luxury. This is a bit like a sick joke. For example, the streaming versions of Interstellar or The Dark Knight, they get full black bars for the entire film, despite having those sequences that were shot on IMAX that could take up the entire screen. The only way to see the movie in full screen in our modern TVs is to buy the Blu-ray. And that still crops a part of
the movie, a part of the movie is lost, the further top and bottom sections of the film that you are only going to be able to see in theaters. The fact that we're all drooling over seeing the Odyssey in IMAX, that tickets were sold a year in advance, that is Hollywood getting the last laugh in these format wars. It's Hollywood giving TV the finger once again, just like they did in the 60s in an attempt to get butts back in their movie theater seats. Now, as someone who has spent far too much time and money like tinkering with my TV, my home theater settings, I actually think it is a good thing that people experience movies at the theater. It is objectively better than 99% of home TV
setups, but I'm not going to lie, it is a bit shady how they pulled it off. I do have a problem with so there's a lot of the movies that were shot in 239 the way the director intended and then they opened it up for the IMAX and what I see is I see the streaming services like let's say Disney Plus they try to push you into the IMAX version because it has more picture but what concerns me is the director may not have intended that to be the framing that they wanted the world to see but the marketing ing engine is pushing the audience to see the IMAX version because IMMAX is a brand and it's marketing and you know it's an upsell. But let's go back to streaming for a sec cuz I've been trashing on Netflix but
they're not the only ones. Paradise which streams on Hulu is 2.39 same as Rings of Power in Amazon and then of course Stranger Things and House of the Dragon. Those are shot in 21. It's a format that we haven't even talked about. And then Zack Snder with this direct to TV 1.33 release. Like why do they do this? because they have no say. The creative content that goes to Netflix is done by creative talent. If you have an A-list director and they want to shoot in whatever format they want to shoot in, if Netflix can sell it, they're going to accept it in any aspect ratio they get. I get that. You know, they cannot limit the director's intention and they have to allow them some creative freedom to shoot in whatever aspect they want.
Another reason is VFX. you know, that extra space above or below the frame gives you extra space for motion tracking, for example. Or, you know, you save a little bit of render time by not having to render the other 25% of the frame that's going to get covered by black bars. When you give digital animators these insane super short timelines to come up with visual effects, saving a little bit of render time helps. And last, but not least, believe it or not, there is a streaming factor because that black bar on the TV, that's content that you don't have to stream. That's data that you don't have to fill. So by giving the movie these black bars, you actually get a better quality, more bit rate in the part of
the movie that you are actually getting on your screen. But more than all of those, there is a simple obvious subconscious reason here. Like compare that shot at the park with this shot at the park. I don't know if it affects you the same way it does to me, but it's different. One is a YouTube video. The other one is something else, right? It's they're they're similar framing. It's the same color grading, but it's different. Maybe if you've watched any recent like 1.33 movies, maybe you have felt some sense of nostalgia, which again works great for my 37year-old ass, but I'm not sure that younger generations get that same nostalgia.
I've been switching aspect ratios all throughout this video. And I wonder I really wonder how each one of those made you feel. That is what Netflix and all these companies, that's what they're trying to do. Netflix seems to think that even the smallest black bars make a difference. They have this Univision 21 format that I'm sure they think is a compromise between 169 and the cinematic bars. But in my opinion, they just seem to forget that 1.78 was already a compromise. The point is, it's supposed to feel more like a movie instead of a TV show. It's dumb almost if you think about it. But the fact that broadcast television optimizes for full screen while movies make this deliberate artistic choice to
show you less, well, that's what sets one apart from the other. For good or worse, it may be a legacy psychological thing that only works for millennials like me. I feel it sort of works. Yes. But I wonder what you guys think. But if you're in the rabbit hole of streaming movies at home in the way they were intended, you didn't do anything wrong. You have the right size of TV. You probably have the right streaming connection. You're paying for the right $25 IMAX ticket. Thing is, we're not going to win this war. We are all together just funding it. But if we get the occasional IMAX spectacle in return for all of this, then I think it's all worth it. Now, there is a major problem with those streams. Something related to
a fatal mistake that Hollywood made about 30 years ago in the way they master their films. Made a whole video about that. You should check it out. Thank you for watching.
