GET-TV- Showing Pan and Scan with LETTERBOX BARS!

Wonder what is going on at GET-TV??? This month (November), GET-TV is showing the 1973 musical version of LOST HORIZON. What is troubling is, that in 2014- they are showing a PAN AND SCAN version that is SQUEEZED DOWN top-to-bottom with LETTERBOX BARS!!! GET-TV has shown many widescreen films correctly letterboxed. The first showing of LOST H was followed by a showing of the movie PEPE (c.1960) in one of the widest letterboxed image I've seen. Though it too, seemed a bit squeezed from top to bottom. (Everything else- commercials during and movies before and after these two looked fine- not squeezed down.) // Stranger yet!: They just showed the 1951 THE HARLEM GLOBETROTTERS the same way- SQUEEZED DOWN- with LETTERBOX BARS at top and bottom. GLOBETROTTERS was *NOT* a widescreen movie!!! Widescreen really didn't arrive for a few more years! // Continuing: Saturday MACKENNA'S GOLD- a widescreen/70mm movie- was shown in pan and scan- and squeezed down from top to bottom with letterbox bars!!! // Now follow that with a showing of the 1975 FUNNY LADY- also with correctly wide titles, then reverts to a squeezed down PAN AND SCAN with letterbox bars! / Re-viewing the opening/closing titles of LOST HORIZON/ MACKENNA'S GOLD/ FUNNY LADY- both films had the titles in CORRECT WIDESCREEN- **before** (after the titles) switching to the fullscreen w. letterbox image. So far, these are all COLUMBIA titles. Has anyone else seen this? Or the same on other channels/outlets? As of day before yesterday- the most recent showing of FUNNY LADY- was shown correctly. (Pan and scan with NO letterbox bars.) I someone just hitting the wrong button? Call out to VIDIOT- What's going on??

 

Ugh. Reminds me of when I go visit my father and he has his widescreen TV set up to squeeze everything to fill the frame. I explain to him that it's wrong and fix it, then he immediately sets it back

 

Unfortunately, as it is with audio, most people don't care about original intention and quality.
'If I'm gonna buy a big 'ol TV, by golly the picture better fill up the entire screen and look like the dvd or Blu-Ray I just bought!'

 

Sounds like they got old, full-screen (pan and scan) prints, which often did include the titles in widescreen so they could be read, but some technician has (1) mistakenly decided that all films are widescreen and need to be presented as such, and (2) somehow determined that to present a widescreen film in its proper widescreen format all you need to do is strrrrretch it out horizontally. In other words, the guy is completely insane and has no business working there. What's amazing is that no one else at GET has noticed this and corrected the problem. Don't they watch their own programming?

 

It's blindingly obvious to me when the framing or ratio is off, and if I don't fix it I'll spend the entire movie fretting about it. I'll occasionally watch a PAL disc on my multi-region player and those will often come up looking all funky. It took me a while to figure out how to tweak it. There is nothing worse than seeing spheres flattened into eggs.

 

As of today. They did re-show THE HARLEM GLOBETROTTERS in the correct ratio. But they have since also shown an early 50's Judy Holliday movie- full screen- but squeezed in from the sides. Everyone was tall and thin the who way thru. When I hit the zoom button- it did nicely fill the rectangular screen in the correct ratio. I've been watching the GET-TV channel for months and nothing like these messes have happened before on such a consistant basis.

 

A banner month at GET-TV. In the week after I last posted, they showed all mentioned films "correctly"- albeit "Lost Horizon" was shown pan and scan- without the letterbox bars. Now this week- they have changed their picture again and everything is shown in a"windowbox." With black around all 4 sides. So now- even correctly letterboxed films have black on the sides. Is there not a consistent "broadcast standard" for widescreen yet? And is there not at least one human manning the broadcast studio on a channel like GET-TV. Who could take a look at the output once an hour so and make sure things are going out the right way? And another thought- might the output be handled differently on say a cable broadcast than my viewing on digital rabbit ears (28.2 in Columbus Ohio.) Who's puling the strings???

 

But I am grateful for channels like these.

 

I am grateful, too! I watch GET-TV, ANTENNA-TV, THIS-TV, ME-TV and more on my digital rabbit ears every day.

I'm just baffled why- closing in on 10 years- since they forced us to switch over to digital broadcasting and widescreen TVs- and yet there is no standard way these channels are dealing with letterboxing and widescreen.

And that a "major"player in this game (GET-TV) would make the broadcasting mistakes they did earlier this month.

And as I type, they are again showing IT SHOULD HAPPEN TO YOU. Slighty letterboxed- inside a square windowbox- yet the image is squeezed in from side to side. On my old tv- ZOOM only makes the whole squeezed-in image bigger. On my newer digital widescreen one- it does stretch the image out to fill the screen correctly.

Leading me to wonder if they actually have humans manning the outgoing broadcast- or if it's just a bunch of machines with movies and commercials loaded- spinning all day without observation.

 

I think the problem is one that plagues many companies: The people in charge don't use their own product ... so they're utterly oblivious to the problems that their customers encounter.

 

So wouldn't you think they'd want it to at least look serviceable on Sony TVs? I've noticed the idiocy on these channels too. I have to say that MeTV is generally no problem as it's almost exclusively 4:3 shows in a 4:3 standard. Antenna TV sometimes looks a little squished, vertically - I think that's a result of them showing a lot of old videotaped series (the Norman Lear age stuff). The filmed stuff on Antenna usually looks fine.

GET TV has the problems described by the OP. Sometimes the widescreen stuff is horizontally squeezed, other times it's windowboxed. If they'd just get the aspect ratio correct, I could deal with zooming the 4:3 letterbox image up a notch.

COZI is just plain stupid. They're showing largely old 4:3 TV shows and are somehow windowboxing them, while still cutting off tops and/or bottoms. Just bad broadcasting.

Harry

 

Sure there are standards. But there's always the possibility of incompetent people not reading or understanding the standards. I use Brad Allen's "Aspect Ratio Cheat Sheet" all the time:

http://unravel.com.au/files/Unravel_Resolution_CheatSheet.pdf

Every aspect ratio for every resolution. But... it also depends on the master coming in from the studio.

 

Now here we are- a year and a half after my original post and my OTA rabbit ears signal (viewed on an older "square" tv) of Get TV has changed again! About a month ago, it began appearing- whether it be an older 4:3 TV show or movie OR a widescreen letterbox image- what I see is "squished down." Note that they are now showing many vintage 60s and 70s-80s tv shows (THE GHOST AND MRS MUIR, SWAT, THE EQUALIZER, HARDCASTLE AND MCCORMICK, FELONY SQUAD, etc.) All are squished down to fit in a widescreen area. And actual WIDESCREEN movies- with letterbox bars top and bottom are also distorted and SQUISHED DOWN. I have posted on their Facebook page and written directly to GET TV. Of course they tell me to "re-scan" my digital converter. And that it is a "head end" problem from my local provider. (I'm near Columbus, Ohio.) But I emailed a friend in California with GETtv and they report that their image is also distorted. I re-scanned with my converter and nothing changed. NOTE: Over last 4th of July weekend, the image reverted back to looking ok. no longer distorted. Old tv shows were back in a "window box"- so if I hit ZOOM- they correctly fill my screen. but 2 days ago- it's back to "squish-o-vision." Also note that the other 30 or so OTA digital channels I get- all are in correct ratio. No others changed. Final note: Of those 30 channels- only "ION TV"- which arrived here about 6 months ago- has appeared with letterbox bars and "squished down"/ distorted image since day one. Hard to believe after nearly 5 or more years of digital tv, that they can't seem to get it right. OK- there was one other channel GRIT_TV- it originally appeared with distorted aspect ratio- but after 2-3 months- got corrected. So what is going on here?

 

On a similar subject, just this past week, MeTV has switched over to a "technical" widescreen format. The net result on their 4:3 programming is nil. It's still 4:3 with black bars. But it now broadcasts in a 16:9 overall format, allowing commercials and promos to be widescreen, and whenever it shows a rare widescreen format TV show or movie, it'll be able to do it properly. Prior to this, it was just a 4:3 channel, and any widescreen commercials would be postage stamps in the middle of a widescreen TV.

 

Maybe they are just being over-responsive to customer complaints without knowing what is right. One customer complains it doesn't fill the screen so they change something, then someone complains it is in the wrong aspect ratio so they change something else. Then someone with their TV set wrong complaints things are stretched or squeezed and they change things again. Just sounds like they don't really know what they are doing.

 

I bet 90% of this change was due to advertisers complaining that their commercials were being aired incorrectly, and they weren't going to pay if their spots continued to be "impaired" (as we say in the world of broadcasting).

I think that's precisely the problem. It's always sad when a non-technical person rises to a position of authority. I would also bet that they're about 99% automated and don't have enough people to check the shows before air so they can make sure they're a) the correct version, and b) they're being placed in the right frame.

 

Even more likely, MeTV can now raise their rates for widescreen commercials. Complaints are one thing, but money talks.

 

Nope, the various local and network stations did not raise rates for HD vs. SD or widescreen vs. 4x3. It's all about air time.

 

So any idea what is going on in my situation? Right now they are showing KRULL (c.1983) a widescreen film.

On my older 90s model tv- the "normal" image is squished down- and the ZOOM only makes the whole image larger- taking part of the left and right image OFF the sides!

On my "modern" digital widescreen TV, the "normal" image is being shown with letterbox bars top and bottom and the actual image (touching the left-right of the screen) is squished down/ elongated. On this TV- the ZOOM control makes the entire image *smaller* with bars now on the left-right sides. BUT the image appears more "normal."

This can't be right.

 

It's free. If I want to see it in the OAR I'll buy it on DVD. No biggie.

 

For several years, part of my job was as the liaison between the president of my company and our ad sources in the Washington, DC market. For our industry, prime time was 10 am to 3 pm and he'd almost always have his office TV tuned to one of our main stations at a low volume. While working he'd listen for our ads and our competitors' ads. While we didn't have SD/HD issues, I'd occasionally get calls instructing me to complain about the station running the wrong ad, running an ad at the wrong time slot, a missed ad, or running our ad after (not before!) a direct competitor's ad. I got the sense that this was not uncommon at the TV stations, especially on the occasion that advertisers had severely lower-than-expected response (and we tracked and analyzed our numbers very closely).

Different companies probably handled it differently, but in our case we never withheld payment since long-term it could only hamper contract negotiations, among other things. Relationships are important. Instead, we lived by "the make good." They screw up and we get a free ad. If it was a big screw up it would be in a comparable time slot or maybe two ads in one almost as good; if it was a little error then we'd get maybe three free ads in late night or on one of the subchannels like MeTV or one of those cable channels so few people watch that their logos should have cobwebs.

Even if MeTV raised their rates, their slots are very cheap. It's been six years since I was deeply involved in this stuff, but at least in my time those channels would cost maybe 1/2 the cost of even mid-to-low tier channels. We even sometimes got free ads on those stations just because they needed to fill unsold space (it doesn't look good if a station runs too many promos or PSAs). That may have changed and/or be market-dependent.

 

Since then, ME-TV has expanded to nation-wide coverage (It used to be only available in Chicago and Milwaukee). I assume they charge more for ads now.

 

ThisTV does this as well.

 

For about the last couple of weeks, I've noticed a change in MeTV. As noted, they recently changed their aspect ratio to a 16:9 canvas with generally 4:3 programs in the center - two pillarboxes, as it should be.

But with the latest change, the side bars appeared narrower than usual. I'd noticed it on prime shows I'd pass by like M*A*S*H, ANDY GRIFFITH, and HOGAN'S HEROES. But the odd thing was that to my eye, there hadn't been any fattening to the people on the shows, nor did there seem to be any cropped headroom or footroom.

Today, I decided to investigate a little farther. Measuring on my TV screen with the full image showing (on a 32" screen), a width of the picture of 24 inches, and a height of 15.5 inches. This would break down to an aspect ratio of about 1.55:1, wider than what should be 1.33 or 1.37:1.

I caught a bit of GUNSMOKE this afternoon, it looked like the people were normal width, yet the bars on the side were small. Later, an episode of BONANZA had a stretched look about it - doing no favors for Hoss who was fatter than usual!

Just now, while measuring the screen, the program EMERGENCY was on, and again, it looked normal to me with narrower pillar bars. When the end credits finished, the globe in the Universal logo looked normally round, as it should.

At 5 PM, CHiPS came on and appears to be a full 16:9 cropped master. Headroom seems a little compromised to have accomplished this.

Just wondering what the heck they're up to...