Staying 4x3 for as long as I can

"Soap opera" look just refers to something shot on video, so why wouldn't it apply? Also, who is re-encoding video to look like film for the hi-def crowd? Any examples? Thanks.

 

No.

 

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In fact when it first became available sellers would set it at that and use it to help "sell" the TV based how "real" it looked.

 

Nobody ever said that a majority of the people were too smart or had good taste!!!!!!!!! I remember buying my Sharp 60 years back and started to flip out at how bad the picture looked - like a cartoon and I was ready to return the set and then I went through the video menu and turned almost everything off and much to my relief it looked like a TV again.

I want my picture to look like it was shot on film and not using a bad video camera

 

No, in fact I'm quite the opposite. I don't know why it took them so long to finally go to a widescreen screen, but I love it !!!
I too, have a lot of 4X3 DVDs too, and while Frasier may look like crap on a 1080p, Adam-12 and Barney Miller do not.
So I sold Frasier, and won't replace ever, as it's on Netflix, which also looks great.
.

 

We watch a lot of old 4:3 stuff and have no problems with the way it looks on a large Sony LED TV.

We never stretch pictures either horizontally or vertically, though with some "postage stamp " TV stations, we might zoom to stretch both ways.

We can easily go from a high definition Blu-ray movie, to watching a black & white western on MeTV.

Once you are into a program or story, the delivery medium becomes less important.

 

Maybe it's because I'm in a PAL area (about 3/4 of the world is) so we don't need silly interlacing tricks to play film (it is just sped up slightly). For me, most old film looks as good as video, subject to how much grain there is. I also watch heaps of DVD's on our HDTV. In fact, our poor HDTV seldom gets a HD signal thanks to a combination of the lazy Australian TV channels and our DVD/PVR.

I've seen a few examples of "shot on film, edited on video" that look abysmal because of the way the film was transferred. Like our DVD of "David The Gnome" from the UK in 2006: It had 4:3 pulldown during telecine to NTSC 30fps 480i video, then that was converted to PAL 25fps 576i for the DVD. On a CRT TV it looked OK but on an LED TV it looked abysmal. We bought a US release a couple of years ago and that looked way better, partially because it was one generation less stepped on. But most films in NTSC still look OK if they can be de-interlaced and de-pulldown'ed.

But overall, everything still looks good on our screens. Just don't stretch 4:3 into 16:9. I've always hated that. Any DVD I've had like that, I ripped and re-coded to fix the aspect ratio.

 

Right now, my main TV is a 35 inch JVC that's about 23 years old and I have a 32 inch backup that someone gave me for free last year. Maybe someday, I'll get a modern TV as a second set but I would never want to make it my primary. Anyone else feel this way?[/QUOTE]

Nope! I felt the same way as you and held onto a 37" JVC CRT way too long. Thought I would get rid of it when it gave up the ghost. It never did. Bought a replacement LCD and it turned out to be a great move and it cost about 1/3 of what I had paid for the JVC 15+ years earlier. And when I moved out that old CRT I swear it weighed a thousand pounds. The new tech flat panel is just better in every way even on standard def 4:3.

 

Different TVs have different upscaling performances. Some make SD material look fine while others make it look terrible. In a lot of cases, you also have the choice of deciding what does the upscaling between your BluRay player and your TV.

 

When Apple released the Beatles' promos on the deluxe 1+ set, every bit of original 2" PAL and NTSC video was de-interlaced. The David Frost, Intertel, and Ed Sullivan stuff looked really funky. I thought it was really sad that they did that. I share the original poster's view on older VT based stuff; it was acquired and stored electronically at 30fps/60 fields (or 25/50...); it doesn't need to be made to look like film. The fluid motion is inherent in the format.

EDIT: BTW, a great deal of effort has occasionally been put into restoring the fluid video look to VT programming that was recorded to film. When the original tapes were lost/wiped, the surviving film recordings were processed so they looked like video, as they did when they were originally broadcast. A significant number of Dr. Who episodes were restored that way.

 

"Soap opera look" is like smiley face EQ: superficially, it's really appealing as it's "all sizzle" - it amplifies everything in a hyper-real way.

But it's not right - it distorts the source.

Not that I need to preach to you or most others here, of course!

 

What does playing 'film' have to do with interlacing? The speed-up is a matter of framerate differences. Interlacing has nothing to do with that - its original purpose was to reduce the bandwidth of video in the bad old days of limited transmission/processing bandwidth.

 

I've had a complete collection of Stereo Review and High Fidelity magazines going back to their first issues in the 1950s. When stereo was introduced, there were quite a few angry audiophiles who wrote in to their letters-to-the-editor column saying, "stereo is blasphemy! Sound was meant to be mono! Why should I clutter up my living room with another speaker and have to replace my amplifier and preamp and phono cartridge just to listen to stereo records? Mono is all I need! The best music ever recorded is monophonic, after all!"

I think this same attitude can permeate people who cling to standard def and 4x3.

I assume you're being sarcastic, but bear in mind that the grayscale of true B&W changes radically if you're just reducing the chroma from a color signal. Real B&W is a lot more complicated than you might think.

Exactly. I've probably mastered somewhere north of 700 films in the standard def days, and then another couple of hundred in HD (from 2001 on). Anything we did from film in standard def -- and that includes 4x3 TV shows -- generally looks a lot better in HD. There are good reasons for doing more recent films in 4K. And it's not just about sharpness: the color range is a lot greater with the new color standards. There's detail that exists in 50- or 60-year old color negatives that you just can't see until it's remastered in HD (or 4K).

 

I had a 32" Sony in a plastic case that sat on a table. Weighed around 250 lbs., about 114 kilo.

 

Delivery mans second most unpopular carring item, first being upright piano.

 

. . . because very few people have baby grands or grands delivered.

 

I seek out MONO recordings to play behind the monochrome TV.

 

Jackie Gleason loves ya!!!

 

I don't feel that way at all, went to 16 x 9 years ago and never looked back, but if you're happy that's all that matters.

 

I'm a holdout as well, though it's not like that for me at all.


But please help me out, and I hope I'm explaining this right.


Very recently, I was watching a DVD from at least 10 years ago on someone else's brand new 1080p Sony TV (I have no idea what model). This is a movie I've seen several times on my own Ol' Nellie Sony.


When watching, I finally was able to put it into words and said, "It doesn't look like a movie anymore. It looks more like Grand Theft Auto."


It just looked very weird and artificial. Is it me?

 

I've been 16x9 for 16 years.

Me and the Mrs. watch quite a few of the 1/2 hour HGTV shows like Island Life or Beach Hunters and I crack up every time they look through a house and I see an old tube 4x3 set still being used.

 

It might be your set. There are settings on all modern TVs that make the image look weird and artificial. They may come out of the box with these settings on. You can dig into the menu and turn them off and the results are much nicer.

 

This is somebody else's TV. I can try to change the settings, if you can tell me what settings to tweak, por favor.

 

Well, with that person's kind permission of course.

Usually there is some kind of setting called TruMotion or MotionFlow or any other number of dumb names that somehow mention motion. Turn it off. I usually also turn off any noise reduction settings (or put them on low if that's the only option). Avoid user settings like Gaming or Movies and try to set it on something like Normal. Also turn the sharpness all the way down. It won't be needed for most HD material and I find SD stuff looks fine with it turned off as well.

If none of this turns out to be helpful, there are probably youtube videos or articles on line about it. Good luck!

 

GUYS! GUYS!

GUYS!

What @Pinknik said. This "soap opera" look is a TV setting to make motion look artificially smooth, and once that setting is turned off everything will look fine.

You MUST -- I can't emphasize this enough -- you MUST adjust the settings in widescreen TVs. Take ten minutes online and find out what the settings mean, or just poke around the menus and figure it out by trial and error. Often the contrast, brightness or color are off as well. With a little fiddling you can see old films and TV shows look fresh as a daisy.

I watch lots of movies made before 1950 and no way would I ever want to see any of them on a standard def CRT screen again. The luminescent beauty of Carole Lombard in Criterion's restoration of My Man Godfrey is something you will not experience fully on a CRT screen.