question: why movies are shot in a different aspect ratio with bars at the top and bottom
comment: Reason 1: Our eyes are side by side so we see more horizontally than vertically. The art is trying to make their visual story believable to our senses. Reason 2: The artist (director) chose to because they are an artist and liked how it looked.
passages: BULLET::::- 2.76:1 (~11:4): Ultra Panavision 70/MGM Camera 65 (65 mm with 1.25× anamorphic squeeze). Used only on a handful of films between 1957 and 1966 and two films in the 2010s, for some sequences of "How the West Was Won" (1962) with a slight crop when converted to three strip Cinerama, and films such as "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World" (1963) and "Ben-Hur" (1959). Quentin Tarantino used it for The Hateful Eight (2015), Gareth Edwards for Rogue One (2016), Kirill Serebrennikov for Summer (2018).
   Section::::Current video standards.:1.85:1.
  
  When cinema attendance dropped, Hollywood created widescreen aspect ratios in order to differentiate the film industry from TV, with one of the most common being the 1.85:1 ratio.
  
  Section::::Current video standards.:2:1.
  
  The 2:1 aspect ratio was first used in the 1950s for the RKO Superscope format.
   Section::::Problems in film and television.
   Occasionally, an image is deliberately windowboxed for stylistic effect; for example, the documentary-style sequence of the film "Rent" suggest an older-format camera representing the 4:3 aspect ratio, and the opening sequence of the Oliver Stone film "JFK" features pillar boxing to represent the 1960s era 4:3 television footage. The film "Sneakers" uses a windowboxing effect in a scene for dramatic effect.
  
  Section::::Calculation.
  
  To determine the pixel dimensions of letterbox or pillarbox bars, the resolution and aspect ratio of the display as well as the aspect ratio of the content needs to be known.
   Some film directors and enthusiasts disapprove of pan and scan cropping, because it can remove up to 45% of the original image on 2.35:1 films or up to 53% on earlier 2.55:1 presentations, changing the director or cinematographer's original vision and intentions. The most extreme examples remove up to 75% of the original picture on such aspect ratios as 2.76:1 in epics such as "Ben-Hur" and "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World". "Lawrence of Arabia" is an exception to the 75% rule, because its aspect ratio is 2.20:1.
   Other studios followed suit with aspect ratios of 1.75:1 up to 2:1. For a time, these various ratios were used by different studios in different productions, but by 1956, the aspect ratio of 1.85:1 became the "standard" US format. These "flat" films are photographed with the full Academy frame, but are matted (most often with a mask in the theater projector, not in the camera) to obtain the "wide" aspect ratio. The standard, in some European countries, became 1.66:1 instead of 1.85:1, although some productions with pre-determined American distributors composed for the latter to appeal to US markets.
   BULLET::::- 1.19:1 (19:16): Sometimes referred to as the Movietone ratio, this ratio was used briefly during the transitional period when the film industry was converting to sound, from 1926 to 1932 approx. It is produced by superimposing an optical soundtrack over a full-gate 1. aperture in printing, resulting in an almost square image. Films shot in this ratio are often projected or transferred to video incorrectly using a 1.37 mask or squashed to 1.37. Examples of films shot in the Movietone ratio include Sunrise, M and Hallelujah!.
   Later, when the film industry was facing the perceived threat of obsolescence to television, which also was universally a 1.33:1 aspect ratio at the time (and remained so in many countries until the introduction of DTV), studios started experimenting with various competing widescreen formats.
  
  Section::::Current practice.
   Aware of Fox's upcoming CinemaScope productions, Paramount introduced this technique in March's release of "Shane" with the 1.66:1 aspect ratio, although the film was not shot with this ratio originally in mind. Universal-International followed suit in May with a 1.85:1 aspect ratio for "Thunder Bay". By summer of 1953, Paramount, Universal, MGM, Columbia, and even Fox's B-unit contractors, under the banner of "Panoramic Productions" had switched from filming flat shows in a 1.37:1 format, and used variable flat wide-screen aspect ratios in their filming, which would become the standard of that time.
   A common compromise is to shoot or create material at an aspect ratio of 14:9, and to lose some image at each side for 4:3 presentation, and some image at top and bottom for 16:9 presentation. In recent years, the cinematographic process known as Super 35 (championed by James Cameron) has been used to film a number of major movies such as "Titanic", "Legally Blonde", "Austin Powers", and "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon". This process results in a camera-negative which can then be used to create both wide-screen theatrical prints, and standard "full screen" releases for television/VHS/DVD which avoid the need for either "letterboxing" or the severe loss of information caused by conventional "pan-and-scan" cropping.
   Movies such as "The Graduate" and "Woodstock" that made use of the full width of the movie screen often have the sides cut off and look completely different in non-letterboxed copies from the original theatrical release. This is more apparent in pan-and-scanned movies that remain entirely on the center area of the film image.
  
  The term "SmileBox" is a registered trademark used to describe a type of letterboxing for Cinerama films, such as on the Blu-ray release of "How the West Was Won". The image is produced with 3D mapping technology to approximate a curved screen.
   DVD producers can also choose to show even wider ratios such as 1.85:1 and 2.39:1 within the 16:9 DVD frame by hard matting or adding black bars within the image itself. Some films which were made in a 1.85:1 aspect ratio, such as the U.S.-Italian co-production "Man of La Mancha" and Kenneth Branagh's "Much Ado About Nothing", fit quite comfortably onto a 1.7:1 HDTV screen and have been issued as an enhanced version on DVD without the black bars. Many digital video cameras have the capability to record in 16:9.
   Section::::Aspect ratio releases.:Modified aspect ratio (MAR).
   Many different proprietary photographic systems were invented and utilized in the 1950s to create widescreen movies, but one dominated film: the anamorphic process, which optically squeezes the image to photograph twice the horizontal area to the same size vertical as standard "spherical" lenses. The first commonly used anamorphic format was CinemaScope, which used a 2.35 aspect ratio, although it was originally 2.55. CinemaScope was used from 1953 to 1967, but due to technical flaws in the design and its ownership by Fox, several third-party companies, led by Panavision's technical improvements in the 1950s, dominated the anamorphic cine lens market. Changes to SMPTE projection standards altered the projected ratio from 2.35 to 2.39 in 1970, although this did not change anything regarding the photographic anamorphic standards; all changes in respect to the aspect ratio of anamorphic 35 mm photography are specific to camera or projector gate sizes, not the optical system. After the "widescreen wars" of the 1950s, the motion-picture industry settled into 1.85 as a standard for theatrical projection in the United States and the United Kingdom. This is a cropped version of 1.37. Europe and Asia opted for 1.66 at first, although 1.85 has largely permeated these markets in recent decades. Certain "epic" or adventure movies utilized the anamorphic 2.39 (often incorrectly denoted '2.40')
   From studio to studio, the common attempt to reduce the image back to a 1.33:1 ratio by decreasing the projector aperture in-house met with conflicting results. Each movie theater chain, furthermore, had its own designated house ratio. The first standards set for the new sound-on-film motion pictures were accepted in November 1929, when all major US studios agreed to compose for the Society of Motion Picture Engineers' (SMPE) designated size of returning to the aspect ratio of 1.3:1.
   On a widescreen television set, a 1.78:1 image fills the screen; however, 2.39:1 aspect ratio films are letterboxed with narrow mattes. Because the 1.85:1 aspect ratio does not match the 1.78:1 (16:9) aspect ratio of widescreen DVDs and high-definition video, slight letterboxing occurs. Usually, such matting of 1.85:1 film is eliminated to match the 1.78:1 aspect ratio in the DVD and HD image transference.
   BULLET::::- Stereo cameras can betray practical effects used during filming. For example, some scenes in the "Lord of the Rings" film trilogy were filmed using forced perspective to allow two actors to appear to be different physical sizes. The same scene filmed in stereo would reveal that the actors were not the same distance from the camera.
   In the 1990s (before Blu-ray Disc or HDTV), when so-called televisions offered a wider 16:9 aspect ratio (1.78 times the height instead of 1.33), they allowed films made at 1.66:1 and 1.85:1 to fill most or all of the screen, with only small letterboxing or cropping required. DVD packaging began to use the expression, "16:9 – Enhanced for Widescreen TVs."
   By 1932, the Great Depression had forced studios to cut back on needless expense and it was not until 1953 that wider aspect ratios were again used in an attempt to stop the fall in attendance due, partially, to the emergence of television in the U.S. However, a few producers and directors, among them Alfred Hitchcock, have been reluctant to use the anamorphic widescreen size featured in such formats as Cinemascope. Hitchcock alternatively used VistaVision, a non-anamorphic widescreen process developed by Paramount Pictures and Technicolor which could be adjusted to present various flat aspect ratios.
  
  Section::::Film.:Types.
   BULLET::::- 12:1: Circle-Vision 360° developed by the Walt Disney Company in 1955 for use in Disneyland. Uses nine 4:3 35 mm projectors to show an image that completely surrounds the viewer. Used in subsequent Disney theme parks and other past applications.
  
  Section::::Aspect ratio releases.
  
  Section::::Aspect ratio releases.:Original aspect ratio (OAR).
   With television, DVD and Blu-ray Disc, converting formats of unequal ratios is achieved by enlarging the original image to fill the receiving format's display area and cutting off any excess picture information (zooming and cropping), by adding horizontal mattes (letterboxing) or vertical mattes (pillarboxing) to retain the original format's aspect ratio, by stretching (hence distorting) the image to fill the receiving format's ratio, or by scaling by different factors in both directions, possibly scaling by a different factor in the center and at the edges (as in "Wide Zoom mode").
  
  Section::::Practical limitations.
   Section::::Common formats.:Widescreen.
  
  The commonly used anamorphic format uses a similar four-perf frame, but an anamorphic lens is used on the camera and projector to produce a wider image, today with an aspect ratio of about 2.39:1 (more commonly referred to as 2.40:1). The ratio was formerly 2.35:1—and is still often mistakenly referred to as such—until an SMPTE revision of projection standards in 1970). The image, as recorded on the negative and print, is horizontally compressed (squeezed) by a factor of 2.
   Netflix production and post-production requirements state that they prefer content up to 2:1 aspect ratio anything wider must be evaluated and discussed.
  
  Section::::Univisium in use.:Aspect ratio used in music videos.
  
  BULLET::::- Miranda Cosgrove: "Kissin U" (2010)
  
  BULLET::::- Girls' Generation: "Hoot" (2010)
  
  BULLET::::- Shawn Mendes and Camila Cabello: "Señorita" (2019)
  
  Section::::Univisium in use.:Aspect ratio used in devices.
   Most televisions were built with an aspect ratio of 4:3 until the early 2010s, when widescreen TVs with 16:9 displays became the standard. This aspect ratio was chosen as the geometric mean between 4:3 and 2.35:1, an average of the various aspect ratios used in film. While 16:9 is well-suited for modern HDTV broadcasts, older 4:3 video has to be either padded with bars on the left and right side (pillarboxed), cropped or stretched, while movies shot with wider aspect ratios are usually letterboxed, with black bars at the top and bottom.
  
  Section::::See also.
  
  BULLET::::- Computer monitor
  
  BULLET::::- Display resolution
   BULLET::::- 1.:1 (5:3): 35 mm widescreen ratio, originally invented by Paramount Pictures, now a standard among several European countries. It is also the native Super 16 mm frame ratio. Sometimes this ratio is rounded up to 1.6:1. From the late 1980s to the early 2000s, Walt Disney Feature Animation's CAPS program animated their features in the 1.:1 ratio (a compromise between the 1.85:1 theatrical ratio and the 1.:1 ratio used for home video), this format is also used on the Nintendo 3DS's top screen as well.
  