Aspect ratio questions

I think one of the problems with confusion earlier in this thread is terminology. You have to learn the terminology before asking questions, and try to understand where confusion might enter into the equation.

For instance, the OP referenced "Full Screen" earlier, but I believe this was in reference to a 1.78x1 "full screen" presentation on a 16x9 monitor. But this will confuse people, because to many (or most), "Full Screen" means the old 4x3 "TV" aspect ratio (and "Widescreen" means anything wider).

While confusion is possible and there are some weird cases, most of this stuff is easily readable on Wikipedia and similar websites. The "Twilight Zone" show is a pretty easy case, not sure why it would be confusing. It was shot in 4x3, aired in 4x3, and is still presented in 4x3.

I'm simultaneously stunned and find it totally predictable that "modern" audiences, usually pretty young folks, complain about "pillarboxing" on a widescreen monitor the *exact same way* people less than a decade ago complained about "letterboxing" on a 4x3 monitor. It takes mere minutes to research why "the black bars" are there. If anything, the modern complaints are more annoying because displays are bigger and bigger (at home anyway, I'm not talking about people who really want to watch movies on their 6-inch smartphone), so even a pillarboxed presentation (or a 2.35x1 presentation) are still relatively large. Not the same as trying to stick to "OAR" when you're watching a 2.35x1 film on a 17-inch 4x3 TV.

I think the main area where things get confusing is something like "The X Files", which appears to have been shot in a few different film formats and protected to varying degrees for widescreen over the years, so when it was issued in 1.78x1 on Blu-ray, you got a mixture of "top and bottom cropped", "sides expanded", and in some cases a mixture of the two, especially for the early seasons.

 

Part of the confusion comes from the industry too. Somewhere I read that there was a newish DVD set of THE TWILIGHT ZONE that I believe featured the old '60s series plus the newer '80s series. Since the '80s series is mired in processed-on-video 480p, this was a DVD set, not a Blu-ray set. But whoever mis-mastered the set, used some kind of down-rezzed Blu-ray masters that had the effect of rendering some of the '60s episodes pictures in a 4:3 box with black bars on all four sides, basically a postage stamp. That's clearly wrong - and totally adds to the confusion that viewers experience.

As Vidiot has mentioned here many times, there is absolutely NO EXCUSE for a TV station to be sending out postage-stamp images, whether it be commercials or programming - it's just wrong.

 

One thing I've noticed, quite often actually with the syndicated HD version of Seinfeld, is that you'll get a fine HD image most of the time, but occasionally you'll see the image is either coming from an SD source or the shot is simply out of focus. It's pretty jarring.

For example, "The Sponge" episode was on recently and there's a scene where George and Susan are talking in the car. When the shot is on George, things look great, but when it switches to Susan they looked either SD or out of focus. What exactly is happening here? I've seen it in many episodes so it's not just an isolated incident.

(Hopefully this isn't veering too far off-topic)

 

Many shows of that time period had a video broadcast master. So they have to reassemble episodes from the best sources available shot to shot for HD broadcast. Which means SD may be the only source for a few shots, sometimes entire episodes. That 70's Show comes to mind.

 

I suppose it is worth mentioning that zooming can be variable, with the stretching increasing as you approach the edge of the screen. It is nothing I would do, but does not look as bad as a simple zoom.

Postage stamping is inexcusable, but depending on your screen size an viewing distance could be watchable with a simple zoom. But many local subchannels set their flags to prevent this (I think I have the tech description correct).

The worst of this is done by local station engineers on subchannels. It would be interesting to have one of them weigh in on this.

 

It's funny, going back to the late 90s and early DVD era, when people were freaking out over "Black Bars!!!!" for widescreen films, I managed, just by luck, to not have that "effect" sort of burned into my brain. I enjoyed even 2.40x1 films on my 32 inch 4x3 TV in the 90s, and the "effect" was that I never felt like bars were "covering" anything. I always perceived it as an image being overlaid on top of black. Like my 32 in TV was starting with a black canvas, and then whatever film was being overlaid onto that.

So I still feel the same way now watching letterboxed or pillarboxed stuff on a 16x9 HD TV. The only time I feel something is being "covered" is when it actually is, like when Ron Howard letterboxed "A Hard Day's Night" to 2.40x1 within a 16x9 frame for his recent Beatles doc.

 

16x9 somewhat fits the human vision ratio, so it will be around for a while to come.

I watch everything in its original aspect ratio. Those channels that "fatinize" 4:3 images without recourse are avoided.

 

We bid on the Seinfeld HD transfer/color job, but it went to a different company in Burbank. What I was told was that a "handful" of film elements were lost, and so they had no choice but to up-convert the old 1" analog & DigiBeta tapes to HD and do the best they could with them. This also happened with Star Trek: Next Generation, but in some cases they were able to fake it pretty well.

One huge problem with TV shows in general -- especially shows shot on film -- is that after the show is wrapped and off the air, the elements get thrown in a warehouse and forgotten about for years and years and years. Coming back to a show 10, 15, 20 years later and trying to put the pieces together is an immensely difficult, frustrating process. I worked on a major feature film where, 20 years later, they decided to cut back in about 15 minutes of extra scenes, and we went crazy going over and over all the boxes to make sure we hadn't overlooked something, because several shots simply weren't there. The end result wound up being a combination of workprint, IP, and original camera negative, so it was a bit of a mess. I was very surprised that nobody criticized it when it came out on Blu-ray. (The statute of limitations still holds, so I can't say the title yet.)

 

Thanks for the explanation. It makes sense, especially with the passage of time as a factor. I was surprised that it seemed like the SD portions were from the same scene as the HD, so I would've guessed that the original elements were in the same place, since they were probably filmed at the same time (2 views of the same scene). Clearly that's not the case though.

 

If the missing shots were car shots, chances are that was green screen VFX material, worked on by a different company. It figures that these shots would be stored somebody else. At the rate VFX companies have gone out of business in LA, chances are that footage was stored in a building that's long since gotten mothballed and/or bulldozed. Studios are often very lax at retrieving pieces of film after the project is finished. Sadly, they're paying for that problem today.

 

Not to take this thread off topic but as an industry outsider I find it fascinating and astounding how cavalier the film and TV industry are with their "product". Sounds like a wham-bam-thank-you-ma'am scenario. Get the product out, move on to the next, next. Let somebody else worry about the archive.

 

Your comment reminds me of this little spoof in which Climt Howard tries to pitch a movie to execs who have little knowledge of film or television:

 

The photographed aspect ratio for X-Files actually changed from the time they started shooting in 1993. FOX was kind of slow to embrace 3-perf 35mm, but I have it on good authority by about 1997-1998, they had started shooting mostly in 3-perf (even though the show was not being transferred in 16x9). The 1990s were a period of great change in the TV industry, moving from analog standard def (SD) 4x3 to digital SD 4x3 to digital SD 16x9, and eventually to finishing in both SD and 16x9 HD. It was worse for the tape shows, and quite a few held on to 4x3 much longer than they should have. At least with the film shows, they had the option to go back and remaster in 16x9 HD, assuming they shot 3-perf Super 35mm. I worked on plenty of shows that had combinations of different formats, and we had to figure out a way to create 16x9 masters that would still work for people watching in 4x3 SD in the early 2000s.

This is sadly true. My experience is that 90% of the time, they're worrying about what's out right at this moment, and then secondarily they're thinking about what came out over the previous 5 years and then what will be coming out in the next 3-5 years. But 10 years ago or 20 years ago or 30 years ago... no, they're not losing any sleep over that.

 

The black bars never bothered me, and I'd much rather have those rather than having the image altered via pan and scan (there was a very funny Benny Hill sketch that involved pan and scan and what can happen if the wrong person is chosen to do the pan and scanning [cutting off parts of the image that completely alter the meaning of the scene and missing fight scenes that are out of the frame]).

One of the reasons that I went with laserdisc is that it was the only way to get letterboxed movies since the low resolution of VHS made it unsuitable for letterboxing. There was one movie
The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover that I saw letterboxed on VHS and in most of the scenes the images were so blurry that I could not make out what was going on in some long-shot scenes.

Plus, in some movies pan and scan can cause things to be missed. As an example, in the movie Doctor Goldfoot And The Bikini Machine there was a scene where one character walks off the screen and then another character follows her and walks into a door and is knocked out. Due to the way the scene was panned and scanned, we didn't see the first character actually walk through the door like a ghost since we didn't see the door until the second character walked through it. It resulted in a missed joke that left you wondering "huh?"

In the same way, there are some movies that have to be seen letterboxed/widescreen. One director that comes to mind is Robert Altman. In his movies he often puts several different unrelated scenes in different areas of the screen at the same time, but when panned and scanned at least one of the scenes is sometimes lost. As an example, in the movie Popeye there is a scene on a boat where there are many characters doing different things all over the ship at the same time while the boat is underway.

 

I can recall during the height of Tower Video in the 1990s, they actually had a sign by the cash register that said, "The Black Borders on the Movie Are Not Covering Anything Up... You Are Seeing the Entire Image Area as Shown in Theaters." Some customers were very confused during that era.

Note there are variations on pan/scan and letterboxing. When HDNet started showing Hogan's Heroes about 15 years ago, they balked at blowing it up completely to 16x9, but didn't want to show it in the original 4x3. They wound up going for a compromise aspect ration of 14x9 (!!!), so the picture was slightly blown up and also slightly matted on the left and right. Their thinking was that at least you lost less picture than if it was a complete 16x9 blow-up from a 1.33 film element.

Also, with Super 35mm or most digital spherical material, a full-frame version simply fills the entire 1.78 (16x9) frame, losing the letterbox top and bottom and tilting down slightly. Some VFX shots typically will require more of a blow-up. It's a compromise compared to the original 2.39 theatrical release, but not necessarily a severe one. And there are many films intended for 1.85 projection that are routinely shown on 16x9 (1.78) monitors without a matte. The extra 6 lines of black borders top and bottom are kind of superfluous and to me, they don't really matter. But sticklers will insist on a true 1.85 aspect ratio. The trick there is, a lot depends on how the image underneath the matte is positioned: you can technically have a 1.85 image that is still cutting off too much (or revealing too much) if the image was not framed correctly during mastering. This is because typically, much more is photographed than is ever seen in theaters or on TV.

 

Oh God. That looks horrible. So glad my old DVDs don't look like that. I had no idea they remastered Buffy, but then again it looks like I didn't miss anything. Bleh. I'll take a correctly framed SD image over an HD-ified one that's cropped to hell and back.

 

Naw, you can turn anything into 16x9 if you want to. In the above case, you have to pay attention, determine how best to tell the story, and tilt up. Tilting and scanning is how 4x3 material is converted into 16x9. Yes, it's a compromise but done well from the original production elements, it can be made acceptable. But it is a compromise. Keeping headroom is generally the goal, particularly if the actors' heads are up there.

Full-ap 35mm negative (3-perf or 4-perf) can yield another 10-15% of information in some cases, and you can cheat and use that in cases where it works.

 

You're right of course, and you made me realize that there are no tilts in the botched Buffy HD remaster! The first couple seasons were 16mm - couldn't be opened up on the sides - so really could have benefited from tilts.

Fans have deduced that the reframing was likely automated with little-to-no no human supervision, and perhaps part of that automation was the sacrifice of anything such as tilts which could have told a shot's story more clearly.

I should say that the quality of the Buffy HD remaster is not typical of Fox. The Buffy HD remaster was an experiment by Fox to see if a no-name company could do an HD remaster on the cheap. The result was... nope, you really do need to have a person at the helm.

The automation became quite silly. In later seasons, Buffy was filmed in 35mm and even aired in Europe in widescreen, so nearly all of the shots could have been opened up wide. Easy, right?

But it seems someone forgot to change a preference setting before they left the room, and the AI went wild, set to "center and crop" (!) on anything that looked like a person. Some shots are pushed in on to as little as a third of the frame.

One shot sticks in mind as especially hilarious. This is the shot that made people realize the extraction was automated. A shrubbery that looked vaguely like a person was identified by the AI as a person and got the same "center and crop" treatment! It was supposed to be a wide establishing shot of a cemetery. Now it's a semi-wide shot of a bush!

I get worked up about this because in addition to being a fan of Buffy I love wide angle lenses. And when a cinematographer has obviously chosen an ultra-wide lens to be sure to get in every inch of some gothic cathedral or whatnot, it causes me pain to see an AI has decided it should really just locate the people in that shot, and crop out all of that beauty.

I may come back with those screenshots later.

 

"Nice Cathedral you got there… would be a shame if something happened to it"

An example of the Buffy HD remastering having accidentally been set to center & crop to any human figures. (The wide image that includes the Cathedral's pillars and walls is from the original European widescreen broadcast from years ago. The smaller rectangle is from the new, botched HD remaster).

 

Clearly this bush is what the shot is all about. Good work, AI!



Ok, I am done with this rant. I keep hoping someone at Fox will redo this series before the scans of the film elements are deleted. (I don't know how long a studio would hold onto that data. It's 2 or 3 petabytes of data. I hope they still have it and can redo all the extractions.)

 

That's sickening.

 

Fans are wrong -- this is all done by people using color-correction mastering software. If you see bad decisions being made, it's bad decisions made by people.

 

That's exactly how I felt, too. It always drove me nuts (and still does) when people refer to the "black bars" on a widescreen print of a film. There aren't any "black bars" at all, it's simply unused space on the screen.

 

I have a lot of dvds that I play in a 10+ year old dvd player and it puts black bars on the top and bottom on movies that shouldn't have them. It seems that the picture would fit the screen if it was increased in size but there is no setting for me to do this on the tv (LG) or the dvd player (cheap Sony). Is it because the dvd player is too old? I have downloaded some of these movies to check and the downloaded version fills the screen correctly. I believe this player is from a time before flat screen tv's were the norm.