Why are old movies and videos are in a square frame and nowadays they are in a rectangle frame?
In: Technology
It’s all relatively arbitrary. The old 4:3 square-ish look was chosen because 4:3 was the most common type of film on the market when movies started being a thing. TV came along later and the key players in early TV had the chance to choose a different format since they weren’t reliant on film. They settled on a wider aspect ratio because they thought having more horizontal space would be useful for capturing a bunch of people on screen at once. That change was later emulated by movies and frames have generally continued to trend wider over time, but it has always been in the interest of aesthetics more than anything else.
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