There's no question that 7.6:1 is extremely wide. Personally, I really like wider "film" aspect ratios like 1:78, 1:85, 2:35 and 2:39. I've got to admit that I haven't yet had the oportunity to work with anything wider that 1:78 (16:9). Personally, I dislike 4:3. My girlfriend recently took some of my photos (which probably have an original aspect ratio of something like 5:3) and cropped them to fit into square picture frames and I think the cropping has seriously damaged the aethetic impact of the images.

Square (and 4:3) is just wrong. As far as I'm concerned, the only reason 4:3 was invented was because of technological limitations (i.e. it's easier to make a square CRT than a widescreen one).

I've always favoured letter box to 4:3 myself when I'm watching something, but I think that when it comes to designing something in your aspect ratio you are faced with a technical problem, in that the vertical height is very limiting. Personally, in your shoes, (and forgive the film terms!) I'd be looking at panning up an image, rather than trying to keep everything on one level with sideways movement. There's prob more to play with that way ;)

Personally, I love squares. I also love extremely wide images. Coming from a photography background, I've always enjoyed the cropping process and generally find working to the 5:3 ratio of standard 35mm quite limiting. But in general I think all these aspect ratios can work and work well, but only if the images have been created to fit the shapes. Most Pan and Scan transfers of widescreen movies look aweful, but films deliberately shot in 4:3 can be very poweful. See Full Metal Jacket for instance. Kubrick really makes use of the rigidity of the square frame and the use of a central point of perspective in many of the scenes makes for a very impactful image. So, for me, the problems only really arise when you are trying to fit a round peg in a square hole, and it's in situations like these that working in a different ratio can seem like banging your head against a wall.
So there you are, squares rule!

Last night I watched a bit of "The Hits" which is a music video channel broadcast on FreeView. I was amazed to see them broadcasting in 4:3. I mean, come on

Supposedly their argument is "well, some users don't like black bars at the top and bottom of their 4:3 screens". Fine. But one of the nice things about digital TV is that the user can CHOOSE whether or not to have 16:9 images shown as letter-box or pan-and-scan.

I just don't understand why The Hits would want to force users to view in 4:3. It's nuts.

And don't get me started on those damn pop-up graphics that music channels slap over music videos as they're playing.

(And whilst I'm on the ranting tip... I also flicked onto "Men and Motors" for a minute last night. They were showing some very pretty ladies walking along a catwalk. The problem was you could hardly see the images for all the damn compression artifacting! It amazes me that The Powers That Be have gotten away with the whole "digital = better quality" lie. Digital COULD mean better quality but no sensible person would claim that MPEG-2 at 1Mbps is better than analogue TV.)

Not just dogsdinner solidarity, I also have similar views to Andy's. There's nothing intrinsically wrong with 4:3 as an aspect ratio. In fact, some directors find the converse, i.e. extremely wide aspect ratios, difficult to deal with because it makes it difficult to compose close-ups.

I think that you use whichever aspect rations suits your needs as a cinematographer/director. No aspect ratio is better than any other per se. I think we have come to be suspicious of 4:3 because we associate it with panning and scanning. Also during the 1980's, in the US particularly, as video rentals and television sales began to replace theatrical rentals as the studios' primary revenue stream pressure was applied to use 4:3 and aspect rations more sympathetic to panning and scanning. That too was unfortunate.

The real issue for me is that I am able to see the film as intended. It can become impossible to make a value judgement about the quality of the direction and photography for one thing. Panning and scanning means that something is missing in every shot. There is no point in watching some cropping of a movie when highly paid and highly skilled people spent so long getting it right. I should also say that having invested in some high end kit to avoid this problem I have still had aspect ratio nightmares. I also went to see Syriana the other day at a night west end cinema and they butchered the movie. Not only were they using a screen with rounded edges which cut the corners off the image but they were also using a badly scratched print. To make it worse you could actually see where the image escaped from the edges of the screen. One has to wonder what the point is of paying 8 quid to watch a movie with less fidelity to its creators' intention than a decent home cinema system and dvd can offer (and that's far from perfect as I have pointed out.)
One apocryphal story: legend has it that when Goddard was asked about putting Breathless on TV he said go ahead just as long as you make sure you colourise it and insert lots of commercials.

Yes, I have to agree about how crap some cinemas are. We have two local cinemas. One is utterly useless. The projection is either out of focus or poorly framed or it's WAY too hot in the theatre. Once they even used the wrong lense to project the movie (I think they used an anamorphic lense when it should have been spherical).

Our other cinema (a Vue) is wonderful. Consistently spot-on projection and sound. It's a slightly further drive but that's fine by me if the film looks like it should (I thought Syriana looked great).

On the general topic of aspect ratios...

Personally, I do dislike 4:3 per se. You could argue I've been "conditioned" into disliking 4:3 but that's academic. The fact is that I dislike 4:3 and I don't believe anything's going to chance that.

It's interesting that movies started in 4:3 and then started experimenting with widescreen formats when TV started to threaten box office sales.

One thing that amuses me at the moment is sport broadcast on FreeView. They broadcast the programme as 16:9 (which displays as a letterbox on my 4:3 CRT TV) but a lot of their content is 4:3. The end result is that, because the programme is tagged "16:9", the set-top-box puts the show in a letter box and the 4:3 content is displayed within that letter box... so I get black bars on all four sides! Crazy.