Did Syndication Prints really look this bad?

Discussion in 'Visual Arts' started by goodiesguy, Jun 13, 2013.

  1. lugnut2099

    lugnut2099 Forum Resident

    Location:
    Missouri
    Heh, as far as pan-n-scan/cropped versions of 2.35 films go, I always remember the kung-fu movies that the local NBC station would show at 12:30 AM after Letterman. They'd be cropped in such a manner that you usually wouldn't ever actually see the fight scenes, just a series of disembodied legs and arms punching and kicking at each other.
     
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  2. Vidiot

    Vidiot Now in 4K HDR!

    Location:
    Hollywood, USA
    I have never worked harder than trying to pan/scan kung fu movies. Very, very, very hard to do, especially when there's a ton of fast-paced cuts and you're trying to do the film some justice and make sure everything possible is included in the 1.33 frame. I confess that one of our cheats is to occasionally do a slight squeeze and maybe reduce the horizontal sizing about 5% or even 10%, just to get one shot in where one guy's head is on the edge of frame. There's not much else you can do.

    My joke is, it's kind of like putting blinders on that obscure 50% of the world on either side of you, and trying to walk across the street. Good luck not getting hit by a car. Like I say... a huge compromise.

    BTW, panning and scanning still goes on, now more than ever, with HD cable channels. Many (if not most) of them routinely show 2.40 movies in full-frame 16x9, so there's a little pan/scan going on. Just not as much as with 4x3. You lose about 25% of the picture in HD -- 12% on the left and right, zero at the top and bottom.
     
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  3. goodiesguy

    goodiesguy Confide In Me Thread Starter

    Location:
    New Zealand
    An odd thing. I just watched a Syndicated print of Happy Days on tv. It was the "Big Money" season 2 episode, and title had "Happy Days Again", and yet, it was still using the 1973 Rock Around The Clock Re-recording instead of the Decca version which usually is used on the Again Syndicated prints.
     
  4. Vidiot

    Vidiot Now in 4K HDR!

    Location:
    Hollywood, USA
    I worked on about 75 episodes of Happy Days for syndication in the 1980s, and I can't for the life of me remember hearing "Rock Around the Clock" on any of the main titles. I think the ones I worked on started later, so it was always the regular "Happy Days" theme. These were from the 3-track network mags, so as far as I know, this was it. However, my memory is that we laid down separate tracks for music & effects, so it's possible they went back and replaced music on certain shows after we mastered them. Weird things can and do happen due to logistics and rights issues.
     
  5. goodiesguy

    goodiesguy Confide In Me Thread Starter

    Location:
    New Zealand
    Seasons 1 and 2's theme is a 1973 re-recording of Rock Around the Clock.
     
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  6. Frittenköter

    Frittenköter Forum Resident

    Location:
    Germany
    Completely different on a technical level, but some german tv stations (all?) tend to stretch their 4:3 shows to fit 16:9 screens. Awful, just awful. Also, up until a few years ago, they used really dreadful looking tapes for The Simpsons. I remember watching a Season 1 episode with almost no color left and a Season 9(!) episode with some weird visual breakdown at one point.
    Nowadays they use pristine digital masters (thankfully).
     
  7. goodiesguy

    goodiesguy Confide In Me Thread Starter

    Location:
    New Zealand
    Does anyone actually know what tapes are used for the Simpsons? I've got the first 3 seasons on dvd, and I'm led to believe these are sourced from analogue tapes? They that sort of blurred, analogue look of classic era simpsons before it went a digital looking.
     
  8. Silver Surfer

    Silver Surfer Love Is Understanding

    Thank you, so much, for mentioning this. When 16x9 became standard, I wondered how long it would be before the "wider"-screen images would get the cropping/pan & scan treatment. It drives me crazy that so many compromises have to be made. I often think that the people that would carp the loudest about black bars at the top or sides of the screen are probably not the most discerning about their choice of program or movie to begin with.
     
  9. lugnut2099

    lugnut2099 Forum Resident

    Location:
    Missouri
    Not sure, but the DVDs of those early years look the best the show has looked probably since the first airings. Like Frittenkoter had said, the show just doesn't look good in syndication for some reason. Even episodes from the late '90s often look like crap in syndication. When I first got those DVDs I remember being stunned since I'd honestly kinda forgotten there was a time when those early episodes *weren't* all washed-out looking.
     
  10. ridernyc

    ridernyc Forum Resident

    Location:
    Florida, USA
    I remember watching movies on WPIX and right before the credits would start suddenly everyone would get tall and skinny.
     
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  11. Frittenköter

    Frittenköter Forum Resident

    Location:
    Germany
    I remember watching "Some Enchanted Evening" on my TV and thinking it looks like an unrestored 30's cartoon. Looks ok (not great) on DVD though.

    There were moments in a Season 9 episode where parts of the picture flickered for a few seconds like there was some damage. Not to mention the overall graininess.
     
  12. P(orF)

    P(orF) Forum Resident

    Local TV stations had a lot more latitude in the 70s and early 80s. Most of the syndicated shows were on film and the station had the option of paying extra and getting the whole library. At my first station we had the libraries of MASH, Brady Bunch, and Flintstones. We were the dominant station in the market and commercial demand could get overwhelming. So, a note would get sent across the building and suddenly (after some judicious editing and splicing) there would be a shorter show with more commercial time available.

    One fall the Sales Manager took a massive order from Tyco for the Christmas season, most of it for 4-5PM where we ran Brady and Flintstones. After Tyco had sucked up half the available inventory, we were oversold by about 100% for the entire quarter, which included November sweeps. So, we edited the shows to include three more commercial minutes each and two minute endbreaks. There was about twelve minutes of content left in each show. Fred would be chasing Dino, we'd cut to a commercial break, and come back to Fred in the quarry.

    The station owner was upset, but he wasn't about to turn away the business. He walked up and down the halls all November, grumbling about how we'd pay when the ratings came in. The November ratings arrived just before Christmas and both shows had actually gained a point or two. Proving something or other.
     
  13. Mark Nelson

    Mark Nelson Forum Resident

    Location:
    United States
    Absolutely! That's how I knew a movie was about to end on TV as a kid. Things would pop into "SkinnyVision" and credits would appear a moment later.

    When I think of how shows and films used to look on TV when I was a kid, "dingy" is always the first word that comes to mind.
     
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  14. Texastoyz

    Texastoyz Forum Resident

    Location:
    Texas, USA
    For some reason in my area when Time Warner Cable started to carry Encore it always looked dingy and kind of scratchy. I thought it was the prints that the station had access to as they showed somewhat unknown and rare movies, at least at that time. This was in the early 90's. By the mid to late 90's when TWC changed from analog to digital the picture was bright and clear. So I guess TWC just didn't care how the channel was going out to its customers.
     
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  15. Vidiot

    Vidiot Now in 4K HDR!

    Location:
    Hollywood, USA
    That is correct.
     
  16. His Masters Vice

    His Masters Vice W.C. Fields Forever

    The original poster, goodiesguy, is from New Zealand. He's too young to remember this, but some of these prints would have looked even worse there because of the conversion from NTSC to PAL. It was certainly the case in Australia - I remember watching MASH in the mid seventies and anytime there was a panning shot in the location scenes there would just be appalling judder from the conversion (that's assuming they even did a telecine conversion - I know in the early days they were just pointing PAL TV cameras at NTSC monitors and hoping for the best). The color also looked poor - compared to native PAL programs. No doubt with some shows they received film prints and could just do the usual 4% speed up to go from 24fps to 25fps - but of course not everything was filmed ... increasingly there was a trend for sitcoms to be shot on video.

    Of course, in those days when it was all terrestrial broadcast TV it was hard enough just getting a good picture, without ghosting or static!



    I remember that. Later on they just used to do it on the opening and closing titles - but yeah, imagine an entire film done like that.
     
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  17. Vidiot

    Vidiot Now in 4K HDR!

    Location:
    Hollywood, USA
    Starting in the 1980s, Fox and most of the other studios would transfer every TV show twice: once for NTSC (at 23.98) and once for PAL (at 25fps). There is zero difference in color quality between 525 and 625, assuming a closed-circuit connection (like home video); the real qualitative difference between the two is in over-the-air transmissions. That went away with digital. Note that the exact same color-corrections were done for the NTSC pass as for the PAL pass, so the viewer would see the exact same picture in either standard... only sped-up for PAL.

    All-electronic NTSC -> PAL (and vice-versa) conversion started happening in the 1980s and was perfected in the 1990s. I think the best box out there was Snell & Wilcox' Alchemist, which did an exceptional job at eliminating judder either way. I'm still not happy with the 4% speed-up going to PAL, and I wish this had gone away with HD. Unfortunately, as an engineer/friend of mine used to say, "the beauty of high def is that there's 32 different standards to choose from!"
     
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  18. His Masters Vice

    His Masters Vice W.C. Fields Forever


    Ah, I noticed that at some point in the eighties even some of the seventies shows started looking better - so evidently the benefits of this process were kicking in.

    It is possible to transfer to PAL without the speedup - this was certainly the case with the Beatles Help! DVD - the so-called "European pulldown" (the 12th and 24th frames are pulled down three times instead of two). This does introduce a very, very slight stutter every half a second, of course, but at least the audio stays at the normal pitch.

    Most TVs over here can display NTSC as well as PAL - and usually can handle 24fps as well as 25/50 and 30/60 material. However, I notice most HD stuff on TV here is either 720p50 or 1080i50 ...

    A curious memory from my younger days is shows from the mid-to-late sixties being broadcast in black and white after colour had been introduced here in the seventies. Imagine my surprise to watch the same shows in colour in the eighties - evidently the network's libraries had been updated in the meantime. (The first colour broadcast in Australia was in 1967, but it wasn't made "official" until March 1975 - although of course stations were broadcasting in colour, for at least part of each day, years before the official introduction. New Zealand went colour at the very end of 1975.)
     
  19. Vidiot

    Vidiot Now in 4K HDR!

    Location:
    Hollywood, USA
    Yes, even in America, when all the commercial networks went "full color" starting in September 1966, there was actually a slow transition for about 2 or 3 years for all the local TV stations to catch up. I seem to recall there were a handful of B&W commercials still airing as late as 1969.

    There are a lot of ways nowadays to render files at either 24fps or 25fps, but it's kind of a moot point, since PAL and NTSC are on the way out. Many studios do still require delivery in these standards for small countries, but all the major countries of the world are mainly getting submasters only in HD now. I'm amazed that Sydney and Melbourne still have not shut down analog TV transmission!

    In the U.S., we stopped using analog composite video for mastering right around 1993-1994. Everything was component digital (albeit standard-def) from that point all the way to the end of the 1990s. Right around 1997, we began the switchover to HD, and there was a period of time when the same room would be used for standard-def and high-def in the same day. It got very confusing, especially when you combine that with the issue of different aspect ratios for different standards. And this had a drastic effect on TV syndication, since now the networks and studios had to worry about "future proofing" their shows in HD.

    By about 2003, pretty all our work was being done in HD. But the broadcast networks didn't completely switchover to HD until about 2009. Cable still has standard-def available, but that's being shut off in 2015. I suspect there will be some major screaming when that happens...
     
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  20. His Masters Vice

    His Masters Vice W.C. Fields Forever

    They were going to shut analog down back in 2011, as I recall, but decided to extend to the end of this year. Some parts of Australia already have no analog TV ... but yeah, Sydney shuts down on December 3 and Melbourne on December 10. Of course, we've had digital since 2001, so this is a heck of a long transition (12+ years).
     
  21. Vidiot

    Vidiot Now in 4K HDR!

    Location:
    Hollywood, USA
    Yeah, the U.S. has had HD broadcasting (technically) since about November 1998, which was around the time I bought my first HD set. We still have stations that continue to air brand-new commercials in 4x3 standard-def (up-converted to HD), and I also see syndicated TV shows that I know exist in HD being shown in SD. That '70s Show is a good example, since I remastered about 50 or 60 of them myself.
     
  22. OldSoul

    OldSoul Don't you hear the wind blowin'?

    Location:
    NYC
    I Love Lucy on Hallmark looks HORRIBLE. I can't even watch it. It's so bright and blurred out, you can barely make out the faces. I actually think the little snippets they used on the DVDs to show what was restored look better. Really, every old show on Hallmark looks like crap, except, ironically, The Brady Bunch. It looked like they actually got the DVD remasters for that one.
     
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  23. OldSoul

    OldSoul Don't you hear the wind blowin'?

    Location:
    NYC
    So, will all those SD stations be completely shut down, or will we now have the "pleasure" of 800 HD stations?
     
  24. jupiter8

    jupiter8 Forum Resident

    Location:
    NJ, USA
    My first TV job involved stringing up the most gawdawful looking 16MM copies of M*A*S*H you'd ever have the misfortune of seeing. Our film playback was ultra cheap too.
     
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  25. Vidiot

    Vidiot Now in 4K HDR!

    Location:
    Hollywood, USA
    Shut down. But I bet a lot of the little local HD stations will be airing very little HD programming.

    My opinion is that 90% of the reason for the U.S. going HD was to sell off bandwidth for all the TV stations over 51 (52-69), which raised billions of dollars in a few years. My guess is that they'll eventually do the same thing for other types of spectrum space -- not to improve television, but to give the government more money.

    What's sad is that M*A*S*H actually looks really, really good when you transfer from the 35mm interpositives. It's so clear, you feel like you could reach right into the picture. I have no doubt that scans from the original negatives would be better still. Fox put their best crews on this show, and the visuals are generally spectacular (for TV of that era).
     
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