Did Syndication Prints really look this bad?

I don't know about watching old copy of a copy of a copy of a show, when the DVD looks perfectly clean and clear. Why not use these prints?

From the same episode about Kitty Karry All

 

Naw, it hasn't gotten that bad yet. As long as we still have really great shows like Mad Men, Breaking Bad, and so on, I think there's enough good on TV to warrant keeping the light on.

I confess, I'm as dismayed by the success of reality shows as anybody. But the trend over the last few years is that the popularity those shows appear to be dying out. In particular, the competition shows (X Factor, American Idol, etc.) have really fallen from grace.

I have seen cases where the home video department of a major studio remasters an entire series from the original negatives (or IPs), and it looks absolutely pristine and beautiful, like it was shot last week. And then the TV syndication department keeps sending out the same crap transfers from 1987. In one particular case, I asked the home video exec I dealt with about it, and he shook his head and said, "when I call up the other department, that guy yells at me and says, 'are you trying to tell me how to do my job?'" There are a lot of politics and fiefdoms within studios.

As one example: Channel 11 here in LA continues to show the 1980s transfers of I Love Lucy, when we know there are nearly-perfect, very high-quality transfers done 15 years later by Viacom. Nobody seems to care, and there are days when they show at least 2 or 3 episodes in a 24-hour period.

 

Speaking of syndication prints, they looked better on some stations than they did on others, since some stations had better telecine machines than others did. 16mm film on Boston's Ch. 56 ALWAYS looked very grainy or blurry, with dim colors or greys and muffled sound. This was frustrating because 56 owned the classic Warner Bros. films. I wonder what kind of Telecine they used? Sometimes at least the sound on them would improve, but then would get muddy again. ("No, it can't be clear! It has to be muddy! Clear sound is bad for the system!"). All the other Boston stations had far better film to video transfers, the MGM films looking fine on ch. 5, and vintage Paramount and Columbia films looking good on Ch. 38. And we once went to New York, and the syndicated repeats there looked like 35mm!! "Why cant 'Star Trek' look as good in Boston as it does in New York", I thought. I assumed that the New York stations cared enough to make 16mm prints resemble 35, but New York stations probably ran 35mm copies! (Did they? can anybody confirm that? I speak of the 70s here).

 

The disparity in Boston sounds like the same situation in Philadelphia. There was a fierce three-way battle for UHF supremacy back in the day. The three were Channel 17, WPHL-TV, Channel 29, WTXF-TV (WTAF-TV for a time), and Channel 48, WKBS-TV.

WPHL 17 was originally owned by a group of local investors, WTAF-29 was owned by Taft after the local people sold out, and WKBS 48 was a Field Communications station.

48 had by far the best presentation as far as equipment, film chains, and general class. If a show/movie ran on 48, it generally looked pretty good. The tech folks at the station did a good job keeping it in good order, and they looked almost as good as the local network affiliates - better than some when it came to film chains. They were the first to show STAR TREK, and even went to the trouble of reducing commercial load to show the full episodes with original "Next Voyage" promos. Field ultimately turned in the license after the two brothers fought each other. Today, the frequency is used for religion.

17 was by far the worst. They picked up STAR TREK after 48 finally dropped it a decade later. Spock was green - but so was everyone else. I swear, they had the single, most awful prints of STAR TREK I'd ever seen. And since they aired them in the early VHS era, that's what we had to tape from. 17 ultimately came to be owned by Tribune and is the MYTV Network station.

29 was sort of middling technically. Some of their stuff looked OK, some didn't. I recall their early (Fall 1967) run of THE TIME TUNNEL, fresh off of the network, and it looked and sounded pretty bad - lots of splashy "S" sounds - and they hacked it up into a half-hour episode each evening, picking up where the prior night left off. And that meant losing even more broadcast time by running credits sequences twice. After Taft bought them, their technical presentation improved. They're now owned by FOX and are top-notch as an affiliate.

Harry

 

Yes. Somewhere I have a VHS of an old movie that I was a fan of ("My Side Of The Mountain"), which has this style of letterboxing. Of course the rest of the film is full-tilt scope-to-flat mechanical pan-and-scan. I only kept my recorded VHS copy for this very reason--as a long-gone television/movie quirk.

Another one I seem to recall having this "style" of letterboxing was "Paint Your Wagon". Come to think of it both of them were Paramount films, so maybe it was strictly a Paramount thing?

As for Scope movies on TV with the whole Cinemascope picture being squeezed into a 1:37 frame, even up until just a few years ago the opening and closing credits of GREASE were still being shown this way.

Thank God that practice has pretty much vanished.

Worst ever Pan-and-scan Scope film ever? The WPIX (NY) print of "It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World".

 

As far as syndication reruns go back in the day, who else besides me remembers that each and every single episode of GILLIGAN'S ISLAND dropped out the words "EACH WEEK" when they sang "So join us here each week my friends" by way of simply cutting out the audio?

 

That was very common. Any shows that had "Next Week" in their included episodic promos, like LOST IN SPACE and TIME TUNNEL had those frames snipped out.

Harry

 

I'm currently watching I Dream of Jeannie on TV right now (just a poor man's Bewitched IMO) and it's in Widescreen.

I'm confused as to whether these are showing more, or less information than the original 4:3 versions, as the channel it's playing on (the new JONES! channel in NZ) play's everything in their original aspect ratio (eg, they keep 4:3 content 4:3).

Are these just digital "remasters" sent out to appeal to contemporary audiences, or is this like Seinfeld and Friends, in which the widescreen masters contain more info than the original 4:3 versions?

 

I might flick a message on their facebook page. I'm guessing it's just the masters they've been sent, as everything else they show is kept as it's original aspect ratio.

 

We are at Season 5 currently in NZ, and they're looking pretty bad. Defintaley 1980's syndication prints. Seasons 1 and 3 looked pristine and were identical to the DVD's picture wise. Season 2 was hit and miss due to them being the original uncut versions with Rock Around The Clock intact. Season 4 oddly looked absolutely shocking and horrible, which makes no sense considering the DVD is the best picture quality wise out of all the DVD's.

I might upload on youtube later, but yesterday I taped a couple of Episodes (simply to get Potsie singing Wild One, although I was originally gonna tape them all, I might start from now to get the rest). And "Joanie's First Kiss" looks like a blurry VHS copy.

 

The worst situation was living in rural areas circa 1960 pre-cable satellite. We lived in Somerset county, PA near the Mason-Dixon line. We could barely get 3 stations in good weather, sometimes 4 in total. 2 were an hour away in Johnstown, "From High Atop the Alleghenies" as they used to advertise. We also got KDKA from Pittsburgh in pretty poor quality. I was lucky that my favorite "Daniel Boone" was aired from Johnstown so that it was likely to be tolerable. No matter what antennas people used, it was just a miserable situation. The cable later helped my relatives who remain there but even that was substandard.

 

Just an odd thought, but Whenever they play The Simpsons here (classic episodes) They always seem to show the really short intro with The Clouds, then straight to the Garage scene with the cars (the 20 second or so intro). They all also have Either a Dolby Stereo or Dolby Surround logo at the start as well.

 

I wish i still had a screencap of the Prosieben broadcasts of the Simpsons. Wow, Season 1 looked in quality like an unrestored 40's movie with all color completely washed out and Season 9 from the late 90s suffered from flickering and wobbling image. It was really funny, yet sad. They have since replaced some of their masters with the dvd versions, but only SOME. It's kind of weird seeing Season 9 in 1980's well-preserved videotape quality. Really grainy and faded, looked almost like someone took an old Betamax dupe digitized it, threw up on it, encoded it in bad JPEG and threw it on the air.

Edit: And before i forget it, there was this german b-movie i like. They showed it on tv and almost every scene had something edited off. That movie was from the mid-sixties. At one point they repeated a scene slowed down and in reverse, but in the actual original cut you'd see the murder victim bleeding from his heart and clutching his heart. Very violent for its time, that movie. An earlier movie from that series (it was a long-running movie series, lasting over ten years with several movies a year, very successful despite its budget) shot in the early sixties had a janitor being shot in his eye. Oh and that movie i saw on tv was called "The Blue Hand", but the color had faded to an extent that the titular murder weapon (a metal glove with knives on it) was black. The movie looked very grainy and yet blurry, there were lines everywhere, the soundtrack was beat up too. I still enjoyed it, but when i saw the beautifully (all movies from that series were beautifully and extensively restored!) restored version on the DVD, i was shocked. I never knew how much a print could degrade until then.

 

Less. Either they've fattenized it by forcing the 1.33 frame to fit the 1.78 (16x9) HD frame, or they zoomed in 25% and cut the actors off at the knees. I see both sides of the argument on whether it's a good idea to blow up an old show for 16x9. I have said a hundred times here over the last 6 or 7 years that the days are coming when younger audiences will immediately be turned off to 4x3 square-frame content because "it looks old."

And I've had mild arguments (shall we say, "discussions") with studio execs who insist we do a full-frame 16x9 transfer on a 2.40 scope film, and their excuse is, "we believe part of our audience doesn't want to ever see black borders around the picture." Since I make more money doing additional versions, I shrug and give them what they want, while also pointing out that this will not make the DP happy. And the studios could rightly say, "well, it's our film... not the cinematographer's film." You can't argue with ignorance on that scale, particularly when it comes from a powerful executive

The first three or four seasons of The Simpsons were mastered from 35mm film to 1" C analog videotape; the entire 1990s run was mastered from film to Digital Betacam 525; and I think by the early 2000s, they were going to digital HD but still in 4x3; and then in 2009, they finally started shooting the show in 16x9. I'm not sure when they stopped using film, but my guess would be late 1990s. Larry Field was the mastering colorist on the show for the first 20 years, at Unitel and later Level 3 Post, but his name has not been on the show for the last few years so I assume he retired; they now give no credit at all to the colorist, which is a crime.

I can't comment on the HD conversion since it was done by a client of mine. If I were in charge, I would've gone back and redone the shows from scratch, but it was Fox's decision and Fox owns the show. My choice would've cost them at least $1 million per season, but also future-proofed the show for at least 40 more years. Now, they're stuck forever in 4x3 uprez land.

 

I've posted on their (the tv channel) facebook page, so I'll hopefully get an answer. But I think it's just the copies they've been sent, as they are very pushy about keeping 4:3 content 4:3. It's a mix of stretching and cropping though, With the end credits being the only thing stretched.

 

Up here we get M*A*S*H on two different channels: The History Channel and Deja View (a Canadian retro channel I guess is along the same lines as Hallmark). Two episodes on each daily, an hour apart (same episodes, might I add) and the difference between watching it on the two channels is like night and day. The History copies are okay (nowhere near as good as the DVD's, plus all the annoying syndication cuts, etc) but the Deja View episodes just look awful- brighter, and fuzzier colour, with the same cuts and whatnot. Clearly it's a case of generational differences in the video quality, yes? Mind ya, I remember watching M*A*S*H with my folks when I was a kid (mid 80's) and those versions of the episodes were really fuzzy, up till about the middle of Season 8 as I recall. They had different syndication cuts than normal, as well.

As for The Simpsons, some of the Season 1 episodes do look really dreadful Understandably though, a show where they had to work out a lot of kinks on the production end of things and it shows. Funny thing is, The Simpsons almost looks too good nowadays...almost as though as the quality of the animation and overall look of the show improved, the scripts, etc went into decline...

 

They've never looked good, even on the DVD set. There's one episode (the one where Homer wears the red Striped shirt and they go to Mr. Burns) and the opening scene honestly looks like some blurry VHS tape, it then cuts to another angle and it's crystal clear.

 

Just recieved a reply, they say:

I had asked:

They replied:

They're just as annoyed as I am. I must say, it's probably the only Channel i've ever encountered where they care about the shows and their viewers.

 

It Takes A Thief on Antenna TV has some of the worst prints I have ever seen in my life. They look like 16mm prints find on YouTube when trying to look up some rare opening, or something. The opening is all I've really ever seen til now, and that just looks so flushed out and grimy. The actual show, admittedly looks better, but it is still pretty flushed out.

 

When I worked on the syndication of M*A*S*H for Fox, this would've been 1988-1989, and we did all the transfers in digital standard-def NTSC and PAL, working from perfect 35mm IPs. Not soft, very sharp, and the color was phenomenally good (at least on what I saw). At that time, KTTV locally was showing what looked like 16mm prints projected against a bedsheet, with a picture that was almost underwater. I couldn't believe it, because it was beyond a night and day difference. That's when I found out about the internecine wars at studios, where Department X wants to do things their way, even though Department Y has something that's ten times better.

I think great writing and great technical quality have to go hand-in-hand for a show to wind up being great. I can recall when Seth McFarlane initially balked at doing Family Guy in 16x9, literally saying, "I'm not sure that widescreen is funny" (or words to that effect). He eventually did when the show moved to HD, and I don't think the show is any more or less funny than it was in the five years previous.

 

On a similar note, Groening and most all the other Simpsons producers and animators don't really seem to like the shift to digital coloring away from traditional cel animation either. On the DVDs they pretty much express the same frustrations seen in this thread, ie., that the show just looks "too perfect" now and lost something as a result of it. It's said that they held off on the switch as long as they could though, possibly longer than any other show, but were ultimately left with no other option because there just weren't any studios left that would do hand-painting anymore at a price that was workable under the budget.

 

I think speed is the other issue. You can make changes in digital animation 10 times faster than you ever could with cels and film. I actually prefer the look, and I can get past the "cleanness" provided the show is funny and well-acted (which it sometimes still is).

 

I have to agree. Unless it's animated, I just can't enjoy today's comedies due to them being widescreen. It just doesn't work for me, that and the digital perfect image. Maybe it's because i'm so used to the British custom of Videotape for indoors and grotty 16mm for outdoors.