"Lil' Abner" Framing Disaster

Does anybody know if this film is going to get a quality transfer to Blu ray at some point?

 

Things like that is why TV is so infuriating, especially in "historic" programs. If something was shot in 4:3, instead of cropping the sides (which would require just a little effort), they stretch it to make it 16:9. Then everybody is short and fat. Then two scenes later, the aspect ratio is correct. So I have to keep switching between regular and wide screens. It's like listening to an album made by a hearing-impaired mastering engineer.

 

It's interesting only in a behind-the-scenes kind of way, but I also dislike it because it's taking the whole set illusion away.

Honestly, there's no excuse for this. Why wouldn't you have someone actually watch the film before getting it out there? How do I become a transfer supervisor?

 

Lawrence of Arabia and 2001 are two of the movies I often cited where I said, "it's as if they weren't shot for conventional television." 4x3 framing is going to ruin them, and there's just no getting around it.

One interesting facet of modern filmmaking is that most people are using cameras that natively shoot in 16x9 and they mask off the framing for the theatrical version (similar to Super 35mm back in the day). The problem there is that you have to use taste and experience to know what to reveal and what not to reveal in the final 16x9 home video version. Too much headroom just looks like total crap, putting the people's faces in the middle of the frame, which is artistically wrong and unbalanced, plus it could very well reveal boom mics, lights, edges of sets, and all kinds of unwanted details (like in the Lil' Abner example). This a case where more picture does not make the movie better, which I've argued many times before. If you're seeing more than the director or DP ever intended for you to see, it's just wrong.

There's a lot of stuff that goes on out there where I shake my head and say, "is nobody watching this crap?" There's been huge layoffs and cutbacks at studios in the last few years, and a lot of the people who used to be responsible for watching this stuff and making the right decisions are gone. It's clear in a case like this, somebody just grabbed the wrong copy, or maybe the files were mislabeled, and so Turner Classic Movies just aired it as-is. TCM isn't watching, either. A lot of places are just using automation to "inspect" the tapes and digital files that come in, and the software can't tell that the framing is bad -- only that the levels are illegal, the blanking is bad, or there's a glitch or a dropout in the data.

 

Who was in charge of placing the poka dots on that gals costume?

 

What a disaster!

 

That is known as "center cut" in some circles. You can somewhat get away with it with 1.85 or 1.78 (16x9). The usual issue is credits being out of "title safe". Someone in QC is (hopefully) looking at a monitor with hash marks to determine this issue. In the case of that clip....yeesh. Looks like no one was awake.

This is the HUGE drawback, in my opinion, of everything being file-based now. Picking up a tape which has been physically labeled "Submaster" or "Not For Air" or something like that stands a chance of being flagged by an operator/QC person. Sometimes, that same info is somewhere on the slate preceding the program. Flipping a file into a server is just asking for trouble. Many houses do not even require a slate on their files, which is just insane: apart from the file name, which any person could completely mess up, there is much more of a chance of a wrong version of a show airing or being duplicated.


Dan

 

or just don't care!

 

Ha ha ha. This reminds me of the time my friend and I watched a widescreen VHS of Lawrence of Arabia on his 12 inch AOC-brand TV! That was pretty hysterical. I think we sat about a foot away from his TV.

 

Sounds like the equivalent of looking at a postage stamp through a magnifying glass...

 

That would seem to be the right title. If so, a Vistavision release just like L'il Abner.

 

Center cut is fakakta crap. If it has to be shown on 4x3 TV, then it's gotta be carefully reframed and panned as needed. Even in the best circumstances, you wind up with way too much headroom, which can very well lead to seeing the boom mic in every shot (as Steve describes above). Even making a 1.78 version of a 2.40 scope movie requires care and experience to do well.

Some years back, I worked on The Muppets' Treasure Island and I was chagrined to discover they had hard-matted the 1.85 film in production. I asked one of the staff and they explained, "we don't want any shots to get out with some guy's arm shoved up Miss Piggy's backside, so this way there's no chance any misframed shots will ever get out."

There's a cartoon around somewhere with somebody trying to watch Lawrence of Arabia on an iPhone. Same deal.