What determines a network showing letterbox or pan and scan for films?

I ask because where I live we have two movie sub channels. One is called THIS and the other is GET TV. I noticed that THIS shows their movies in pan and scan but GET seems to always show their films in letterbox. GET TV's films are older films while many or THIS's films are 'newer' 1970's and above. Do studios have rules about showing these newer films in their original format on network tv?

 

I don't get GET but I get THIS.

I hope the forum resident expert has better info than this: GET is owned by Sony, THIS is part owned by MGM. That said, they are both cheapo makeabuck channels loaded with horrible commercials with no strong curation. I think at the channel origination end they just play what the studio sends. The studios may have a preference of what they send and which format. Newer films tend to have no pan-and-scan version available. Sometimes these channels show a widescreen version just showing the middle section of the picture as fullscreen 4:3 with the sides just chopped off, with not even the thought a pan-and-scan version might have received. So, I don't think the channel or the studio has "rules", they just don't particularly care with these type channels. Just filling time. If a digitally frame by frame superduper restoration of something makes it to these channels, that's just accidental and just the easiest source they pulled to send over.

It is nice to see some less known never-on-DVD movies on these channels, however they come through.

 

I appreciate GET TV more because they show some nice old films. I rarely watch THIS.

I Never Sang For My Father was on a few weeks ago. That's a good film you don't see on tv too often.

 

And that is basically the deal. Unless there's a higher-echelon executive who gives a **** and picks up the phone and calls the distributor or studio and says, "hey! We need the original theatrical aspect ratio for this film!", it's not gonna happen. Inevitably, you either have a non-technical person in charge who does not care, or you have a company where at least one person makes that call. It doesn't cost them a dime more to request the letterbox vs. the full-frame or pan/scan version.

I know of cases where relatively-small cable channels have called the studio and complained that a certain title looks like crap, and the studio has gone out and redone a brand-new transfer from scratch just to placate them. In cases like this, the studio pulls the master and realizes it really is bad, so they can justify doing a new one.

But sometimes there are internal studio political problems that affect what you see. As one example, I was good buddies with the former head of Fox Worldwide, who made the decisions on what and when to transfer older films. I can recall instances where Fox's own Channel 11 would show some beat-to-hell version of a movie I had remastered within the previous year, but for whatever reason they wouldn't pick up the phone and request the new transfer. To this day, KTTV here in LA is showing horrible-quality standard-def versions of I Love Lucy, when we know that perfectly good HD versions exist. My gnawing suspicion is whoever is in charge doesn't care and doesn't notice what they're airing as long as the ratings are OK.

 

If it's a title made from the 70s to now, it also depends on what versions are pre-edited for time and/or content. Some studios (Sony, Universal) are extremely particular about providing a ready-for-air version with further alterations prohibited (and if you request edits that Universal is willing to make, you have to pay for them). I think this is why you still occasionally get the TV version of "Fast Times at Ridgemont High" on cable in 4x3 format. The cable network would rather accept the already edited version than pay Universal to master an edited HD version.

Warner Bros. (at least from the situations I am aware of) is less strict about licensees editing their films for time and content, but they also seem to be most inconsistent about their 2.40 movies being pan & scanned or letterboxed in the 4x3 frame. I imagine the same hit or miss chances might apply to the movies delivered to GET or THIS.

 

the price

 

THIS has been showing a pan and scan version of Star Trek The Motion Picture

 

Fixed



Since 16:9 televisions have become the standard, the studios have ceased the editing process of converting films into a pan & scan format, so at least you won't have to deal with it while watching any newer films going forward. The process was really only done to movies made between the mid-50s and late-90s/early 00s. Prior to the 50s (and the advent of Cinemascope and all of the other studios' versions of widescreen), it was rare for films to be shot in anything wider than 1.6 to 1, so pan and scan was never needed for the television conversion. I always preferred letterboxing for watching films on 4:3 televisions, but many people did not like seeing the black bars. At this point, most of the films you see on television that are being screened in the pan and scan format, can be purchased or rented on DVD, Blu Ray or streamed in the native aspect ratio.

The new issue is that when watching shows and movies that were originally shot in a 4:3 format on a 16:9 television is that television channels now tend to zoom in to the middle of the picture so that the screen fills, thereby cutting off the top and bottom of the original picture. It's a vicious, never-ending cycle of film butchery. This is one of the reasons why I keep a standard 4:3 CRT television hooked up in my basement. I still like to watch older VHS films and television shows, and it's nice to be able to see them in the proper ratio instead of on my 16:9 HDTV.

 

That is not true. We typically do three transfers of 2.40 scope films:

• an original 2.40 letterbox transfer reflecting the theatrical aspect ratio

• a full-frame pan/scan 1.78 transfer blowing up the 2.40 for HD, doing a "mild" pan/scan

• a 1.33 "4x3" pan/scan version, usually for foreign release to countries that have not yet gone HD.

The full-frame 1.78 pan/scan version shows up all the time on many, many channels. I've seen numerous films in this format, particularly on cable channels tied to Disney. I just saw Stargate presented this way on one of Sony's movie channels... and they own the film! Independence Day, too. There are tons of scope films that use every pixel of the 2.40 frame, so a 1.78 version is quite a compromise -- losing about 25% of the image area.

 

sorry, but I do not get Get, nor do I get THIS

 

Got it. I liked it when I was 10 years old.

My tv is still CRT! It won't die.

 

That's interesting, thanks for the insight. It seemed as though I had seen some wider aspect ratio films on standard cable television (i.e. not pay movie channels) the last few years in letterbox format, so I had just assumed that that's how they did it nowadays. I didn't realize you were converting wider 2.4 to 1 ratio films to 1.78 with pan and scan at times. It certainly makes sense to, I just didn't realize it.

I was also under the erroneous assumption that the 16:9 TV ratio was 1.85:1, not 1.78 to 1 (I know, I know, how hard is it to divide 16 by 9 and find out the ratio ). It seems as though 1.85 to 1 and 2.4 to 1 are the standard for the vast majority of Hollywood movies today, so I don't know why television manufacturers settled on 1.78 to 1 instead of 1.85 to 1. Perhaps there is a technical reason for this? Also, in cases of 1.85 to 1 movies, do you guys simply zoom in a tiny bit and letterbox them? It seems like even with standard Blu Ray discs I own of films shot in 1.85 to 1, the picture will fill up the entire screen. So, does this mean that the picture has been formatted to fit the 16:9 screen?

 

The ASC was incensed when all the Japanese manufacturers came up with the 16x9 standard more than 25 years ago (!!!), which the companies insisted was mathematically necessary for transmission and recording (1920x1080 pixels). The ASC responded that movies are shot in either 1.66 or 1.85, and that (for the most part) 1.78 is not a real aspect ratio used by any modern films. They grudgingly went along with it, and to this day we still have mild letterboxing for 1.85 films.

Usually with 1.85 shot digitally, the cameras being used have a native aspect ratio of 1.78, and we just remove the slight letterbox for an HD transfer. In the rare cases where a film was shot hard matted, then yes, we have to blow up the image to eliminate the matte. I have had this debate with cinematographers before, where I warn them that the difference between 1.78 and 1.85 is trivial (less than 4%), and visually there is no real difference. Some demand the matte, most others will let it go.

There are also a lot of digitally-shot films nowadays where the native aspect ratio is 1.78 or even 1.33, and they mask off the entire frame for 2.40. In cases like that, you'll wind up seeing more image in 1.78 than you did in 2.40. In Blu-ray, though, what generally goes out is 2.40. The 1.78 version winds up on AXS and Cinemax and stuff like that.

Aspect ratios are a huge headache for everybody: viewers, distributors, cinematographers, post-production people, and viewers. Getting everybody to agree on one aspect ratio is not always easy. I do concede that ultimately, it's the artist's decision as to what size the canvas should be.

 

What do you call it when you film something for 4:3 tv but then want to make it look letter boxed by placing black bars at the top and bottom? In China they did that a lot on tv shows. They often wouldn't get it quite right and you could see a tiny strip of the picture ABOVE the top black bar.

 

Pan & scan in 2014?

 

I'd call it "screwed up."