Miami Vice - Season One discussion

Good catch. I remember that, but didn't put the context together.

 

That David johanson song is rough-the one when he is doing the rapping thing on the boat... Yikes!

Gonna be bummed when Netflix drops the series of it doesn't come right back, as I am enjoying it whilst at the gym...

Fwiw, el Rey is running the series each morning, in case you want to set your dvr's. Wish directv offered that channel in hd, because there is a lot of fun stuff on there...

 

For some reason the show doesn't fill my tv screen either vertical or horizontally.

Wonder if the DVD would look better.

 

I don't know about Netflix but the DVDs are standard TV ratio 1.33:1 and do fill the screen vertically. I've read online (so it must be true!) that the DVDs look better than Netflix. But the DVDs are no great shakes either when it comes to video - they're allegedly from syndication masters and are obviously not from original negatives (MV was shot on film), and have lots of dirt, scratches and softness, as well as a few edits. The 5.1 sound is nice, and of course Universal did a lot of work to track down and secure rights to all the correct music.

The DVDs have been released multiple times - the original S1 and S2 came on flipper-discs with S3-5 following on single-sided discs, all in fold-out digipacks. Then S1/S2 were re-released on single-sided discs. And last year all five seasons were repackaged in clamshell keepcases with flip disc trays. There was also a now-out-of-print complete-series set - in a faux alligator skin box no less! Al-li-ga-tor!

NBC remastered the pilot in cropped 720p and aired it to coincide with the 2006 movie release. Here's a comparison between HD and DVD:

http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/8780/picture:0

 

They should do the whole series like that.

 

Sounds like you're seeing letterboxed cropped 4:3. Geez, how wrong can they make it? Netflix airs them in regualar 4:3.

 

I'd buy them again! (I already have the OOP Alligator case set).

 

[QUOTE: 15809"] They should do the whole series like that.[/QUOTE]

Definitely. I think Hulu had the whole first season in 720p.

 

I was such a MV fanboy when I was a kid and totally remember that crazy opening with the crew jackets. Very cheeky of them! Shame it doesn't seem to be on the DVD or streaming episodes.

This seems like such a relatively easy series to remaster in HD. All shot and compiled on film, few if any process or FX shots done in SD video to recreate. This and 'Crime Story' should've already been done by now.

dan c

 

I worked on the first season of Crime Story and was told that the music rights were a huge, huge problem for home video. Plus the show was not successful and didn't make any money.

 

Vid, I know it took Universal years and piles of money to track down and secure rights to all the Miami Vice music, which held up the DVD releases until 2005/2007. For U2 or Peter Gabriel, or *cough* Don Johnson, it was just "swallow hard and cut a big check", but the real challenges were some of the selections in the later seasons (anyone here got a Cactus World News or Broken Homes disc on the shelf?) where the band had disbanded, the record was out of print and there were questions as to who owned the publishing rights.

Do you know or care to speculate whether those negotiations included "future physical home video formats" so that Uni wouldn't have to call up Belkis Concepcion again?

 

yea, I remember the episode with Cactus World News in it--it was the episode with Willie Nelson. Very memorable use of the song.

 

Universal has about six floors of lawyers whose main job is to clear stuff like this. The trick is getting the rights worldwide and in perpetuity for all formats, now and in the future, and that's where the money comes in. I don't doubt that it cost a small fortune -- I'm guessing at least $50,000 per episode -- to clear even one or two songs. If there were over 100 episodes, they'd be looking at $5 million, which is a huge amount of money. Most likely, that's far more than they could ever recoup in worldwide home video sales.

But... at least it's free and clear for downloads, HD, and everything else, forever and ever. The show was very expensive for its time, being shot almost completely on location in Miami with a fairly large cast and lots of stunts. If they had added another $20,000+ to the 1980s budget, maybe they could've cleared those songs in advance... but it's always easy to have 20/20 hindsight.

 

Just started watching this on Hulu.
Missed it when it was on Netflix.

Darryl

 

Anyone have additional thoughts regarding possible Blu Ray release. On the less encouraging side, my guess is the 1080p transfers reportedly made and discussed in other thread are what is on Hulu? Maybe that was the only reason they were done?

 

I've not heard anything. Hadn't watched any episodes in a while but I put on"Smuggler's Blues" and "Rites Of Passage" the night Glenn Frey died and man does this series need an upgrade, especially since it was shot on film.

 

When I worked on the show in the late 1980s, we transferred the episodes from low-con prints struck from the original cut camera negatives and 4-track 35mm magnetic tracks (stereo LtRt and stereo M&E), mastering to 1" C videotape. The network versions were always time-compressed -- actually, they often came in short, so we wound up time-expanding them to fit the NBC's requirements -- but for syndication and foreign, we went back to the correct speed for each standard.

Technically, the spliced negatives do exist and would work fine in HD, though knowing what a stickler Michael Mann is, he would probably insist on only a 4x3 release.

Well, it's not cropped. It's just 4x3 matted for 16x9 HD (or as the reviewers call it, "pillar box"). The framing generally gets altered a little bit in a retransfer anyway; my advice to the new people doing the remastering would've been to have err on the side of more area, not less area.

 

Here's a question I've been wondering about for a long time: having been a big fan of this show, where are the outtakes? There were rumours that they vanished in a studio fire years ago, but I'm not buying that. My guess is the people involved with the show didn't want them on the DVD's when they were released, any ideas?

 

This was such a successful show, I would bet they hung on to them. I suspect Michael Mann has such iron-clad control over the show, he doesn't want the outtakes out. I don't think there have been "outtakes" per se on any of his projects; additional scenes, yes... but not outtakes. It's a shame, because some of the Vice episodes came in long and scenes got omitted, so it'd be nice to see those restored.

 

Indeed! Just curious, who were you working for when you worked on those shows?

 

Thank you for all of the information Vidiot, it's interesting to know. When they came in too long, were they not final edits? It seems with Mann having so much control, he'd ensure whatever was handed over would already fit the time slot. And I assume Mann decided on scenes to cut? Excuse my naivety, I know a lot about music but tv is another beast!

 

They were not. It was understood by the 1980s that if a show came in a minute long or a minute short, we would just adjust the run time to cram it into the network's time slot. As long as it wasn't more than a couple of percent -- like 23fps or 24.5fps vs. 24fps -- you wouldn't notice it on-air. Where it got bad was when we'd start going beyond 25fps, and everybody would talkrealfastlikethis. More often on the 1987-1988 season I worked on, the episodes came in short, so we had to slow them down. "Stop... or... I'll... shoot!" Not good. The syndication/home video versions were the correct speed.

This was all at Sunset Digital in Glendale, about 2 miles down the road from NBC.

 

I watched an episode recently, I think "The Prodigal Son", where there was a shot of the city from the water and the movement of the water was sped up. The next scene was from the shore looking out and the speed was normal. I suppose that is an example?

 

Nevermind, I apparently forgot your statement about the home video versions being the correct speed. I suppose it's a lesson I should have been working...

 

That could've just been an intentional optical. We rarely changed speed from shot to shot -- it was entire segments before or after commercials. And that was only for the versions delivered to NBC. Again, the syndication and home video versions were always at only 24fps (actually 23.976, but same deal).