How did people put up with Pan & Scan?

It's like music - all depends on the 'mastering'.

 

Another pan'n'scan favorite will finally pass into the world of widescreen on April 22, 2014, when Friedkin's SORCERER comes out on both DVD and Blu-ray in a new widescreen transfer.

Harry

 

I can relate...

 

I still recall a time when people hated the way widescreen looked on their old 4x3 TVs.

 

Me too. I was the exception: I've always wanted to see the same aspect ratio I saw in the movie theater. I had never seen Ben Hur (the 1959 version, I was too young to see it at the movies when it came out) in wide-screen before I purchased my LD player. Even though I only had a 32" 4x3 CRT at the time, it was a revelation to finally see the full image the director intended.

 

Not sure if you know: there's a Blu-ray Collector's Edition due out next month. I have a copy but haven't watched it yet:

http://www.amazon.com/The-Shadow-Co...1&keywords=shadow+collector's+edition+blu-ray

 

I never really cared about aspect ratio or picture quality until getting into dvd in the late 90s. Growing up, I was used to watching rented VHS tapes and have fond memories of browsing aisle after aisle in crowded video stores. Also used to borrow tapes from friends that had 3 recorded movies on one tape and I'd burn an entire night watching them in sequence. Never really bothered me one bit. That is until we got a dvd player and a few movies. Since that day I've passed on many, many dvds that were in P&S -- ones that wouldn't have bothered me in the least in the past. I similarly am a little critical of blu ray releases that don't offer lossless audio, though the vast majority now offer some form of lossless audio.

 

I did not know that, but it figures, I'll wait till a price drop before I think about double dipping. The current BR is bare bones, no special features. If the picture and sound are the same, I'm good.

 

Well, cmac, shout factory insider, on bluray.com says they did a new HD transfer from the interpositives and added some interviews and trailers.

 

In the interest of full confession, I can put up with P&S on a long flight, but at least they announce the modification. But that said, even on 14-hour flights I'd never choose a Hollywood over my book.

 

I more deeply remember a time, when many people, had no clue WHAT aspect ratio was or why widescreen was better or had black bars...

 

I kept telling them, "Buy anamorphic and wait for widescreen TVs."

 

Yes, Friedkin is a guy who definitely uses every pixel of the Panavision frame. He knows what he's doing when it comes to composition.

It was a compromise either way. It was an artistic compromise to chop off 45% of the movie. It was a technical compromise to waste 45% of the image area with black bars, meaning that the visible picture area has half the resolution available in laserdisc or VHS (which ain't that much to begin with).

At least letterbox in 16x9 HD, you're starting off with 1080 lines and just losing about 25% of that resolution. Not the end of the world. And I also would bet average people have far larger screens today than they did in the standard-def world of the 1990s.

 

I think there's a generation of people who never really knew the difference, or at least didn't care, until Ebert did that quasi public service announcement in the early 90s comparing widescreen and P&S versions. I think widescreen TVs owe much of their market dominance to that.

(Unfortunately, I can't find it on Youtube.)

 

I caught a little bit of WEST SIDE STORY on a local PBS in Tampa, channel 16, WUSF. They do something odd with their weekly "Film Package" showings on Saturday night, and occasionally on some other programs as I surf on by.

They seem to show these programs with very narrow pillar bars and top-bottom bars. It's not the same as a standard station showing a 16:9 image in a 4:3 frame. This is much wider than that - but not the full width of the screen. I don't get what it is that they're doing. It's not unlike the window-boxing of credits that you sometimes see on DVDs of old films in 4:3 where there's a narrow black border all around the 4:3 frame. This has a narrow border around a 16:9 frame. Very odd.

Harry

 

Ah, this is a technique called "incompetant-o-vision," where really stupid people starting turning knobs when they're not supposed to. I hate this.

 

I still think the worst widescreen cropping I ever saw was some Cary Grant movie whose name I can't remember. Back in 1991, Tower Records had a movie trivia contest that I tried to win, and I dived into research heavily. This was a lot more time-intensive pre-Internet, so I rented a bunch of movies to answer questions.

One was the Grant flick, and to transfer it to 1.33:1, they just plopped the "camera" in the middle of the frame. Didn't matter what happened - the image remained centered.

This reached its nadir in a conversation between two characters - all I saw was two noses, one on each side of the screen!

 

Center-crop transfers are awful. I saw quite a few of those in the 1970s. In the old 4x3 pan/scan days, there were quite a few movies I did where when I encountered a "two noses" scene, I'd adopt what we called the 7% solution: we'd squeeze the picture horizontally a little bit to try to get a little more human face into the screen. We just did this occasionally, then went back to normal the rest of the time. Jan DeBont approved it all, so either he didn't notice or thought it was OK.

One movie where I can confess I did that a lot on was Die Hard. For some reason, Bruce Willis' head looked like a football in Panavision anamorphic lenses, so I opted to squeeze those pan/scan close-ups a little bit to make him look more human. In letterbox, the sizing is exactly as it was in the theater. BTW, this is one of the rare films where they used a non-anamorphic Fox logo at the head, because some idiot in the editorial department grabbed the wrong logo. I tried to fix this on as many masters as I could in the 1990s, but you still see it occasionally with the wrong 1980s logo on it.

 

I hated pan and scan so badly that I bought one of the first consumer widescreen rear-projection TVs, a 40" Toshiba model. This was before HDTV, or even progressive scan. Early 1998. It cost $2200, which was a ridiculous sum of money for me at the time, but I loved every anamorphic DVD I could feed to that TV. Remember, back in '97/'98, not even all DVD were anamorphic widescreen! There were plenty of 4:3 cropped DVD titles out there (Blockbuster was the worst offender), but plenty of great DVD movies had 4:3 ratio with the letterbox image burned in, e.g. most laser discs.

 

Ah, YOU were the guy who bought the 16x9 standard-def set. Interesting.

 

Hey, those we some interesting times. Lots of unknowns about the future of consumer video back then. Everyone (broadcasters, display makers) were very apprehensive about HDTV technology and the associated costs. No one knew costs would drop so quickly, and/or what content would be available.

If you were a movie buff (like me), you knew that anamorphic DVD was a savior against 4:3 Pan & Scan, and I just wanted to do everything I could to experience the glory

 

Pan & Scan VHS/DVDs should never have even existed in the first place. Films should always be presented in their correct aspect ratio, the way they were meant to be seen. F**k the people who complain about the "black bars"... it's not my fault they're ignorant.

 

While I dislike Pan & Scan, I do understand why it was done. Imagine trying to watch a movie like Ben Hur (1959, 2.76:1 AR) on a 12" screen. You'd barely able to see what was going on. I think the biggest reason Widescreen movies were made was to get people back into the theater as television hurt business at the box office.