They made a ton of effort on it, recognising it's a different version altogether:
> The new version of The Wire, then, will differ both creatively and technically. In certain cases, such as a scene in season two where longshoreman gather around a body, Simon said he believed the added space would add a vulnerability to the scene that wasn’t possible in 4:3. But he describes other scenes where the added space distracts the eye, and the remaster zooms in on the characters to retain that intimacy.
https://www.techhive.com/article/599415/hbo-remastered-the-w...
I have Homicide on DVD, it also has some good extras.
> This video is not rated. Join vimeo to watch
No thanks. Here's a YouTube mirror: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ufs0Rwx8sOk
I've also sat in transfer sessions where the Pan&Scan decisions were being made to transfer wide screen down to 4:3 vs just doing a center crop extract. It makes you appreciate just how much effort is needed when done as best it could be rather than just the fast/lazy way.
Also, if you shot a movie but wanted it to look good in TV later, you put the most important action somewhere in a 4:3.
(For the pedantic, yes there is a name for this technique, and yes the ratios aren't exactly 4:3.)
So it was not "cropped in the theater"—the theater got a standard anamorphic print. To go from the Super 35 negative to the anamorphic print, they both cropped and optically squeezed the image (in the case of the non-vfx shots), and scanned, cropped, squeezed digitally and printed back to film (in the case of the vfx shots). This was a few years before they did full "digital intermediates."
When digital cameras like the ones from Red came out, you can tell it the aspect ratio so it only saves the active pixels of the full sensor and ignore all of the out of aspect pixels. That's a brave operator doing that, and I've only seen it in the wild once.
The second half of your sentence is misguided.
Unfortunately, Warner Brothers lost those files. Rumor has it when they sent copies to Sierra (really Vivendi at the time, just before the Activision acquisition) for a Babylon 5 videogame the WB Archives team accidentally sent their only copy and that when the videogame project was shutdown they destroyed the copies per the IP license agreement.
There's a high probability that even if WB had had the digital masters of the effects, they probably still would have stuck to the 4:3 restoration over the 16:9 restoration to avoid recompositing costs, but it's still such a weird swing of bad luck that the production team thought ahead about HD technology well enough as well as anyone could at that time and yet the 4K copy we have in this timeline is in the wrong aspect ratio.
In 4:3 it looks good and like the original airing show, in 16:9 any non-digital/composite shot looks freaking fantastic. But once you get to any digital or composite shot it takes a nose dive in quality.
https://www.modeemi.fi/~leopold/Babylon5/DVD/DVDTransfer.htm...
I have these versions, and it's world better than everything beforehand. It's also a good opportunity for a re-watch!
Sheridan was maybe a bit cheesy at times but definitely gave off that vibe of a leader one could follow into battle.
That said, I think letterboxing is a better choice than trying to recompose a shot for a different aspect ratio if it wasn't accounted for initially (eg: The X-Files). And even then, the shot selection and composition would have been different had the aspect ratio been initially different (like TXF's 16:9 versions leaving the edges of the frame largely unused).
One of the first things I learned once I could hear music properly was that I had favorite "versions" of different albums. They truly are NOT created equally, but it's not something you can really appreciate on a crummy Bluetooth headset either. Once you can you really start to appreciate the work that folks like your friend do.
That can be a real double edged sword.
When you realise how good things can be it means many of the everyday/average things can become intolerable.
I'm happy that I've got slightly dodgy eyesight in that I don't really care whether something is in HD or 4K (I can still tell if my wife has selected the SD version of a TV channel, and I'm still way above the minimum standard to be able to drive).
I'm also happy I didn't inherit my father's audiophile hearing. I can do blind listening tests of different bits of audio equipment and barely hear the difference between them whilst my father (even in his 80's) can provide a whole list of things that are wrong/better/different about each of them (and he's not just making stuff up).
The biggest test is that I can also drink most supermarket instant coffee without complaint. I've got some friends that walk 25 minutes each way to their favourite coffee vendor multiple times a day as "everything closer is awful", but then that's more about them having a nice routine to get them away from their desk.
I was the same way for years and appreciated it but unfortunately I did start to treat myself more and it's hard to go back, but my financial situation is also much better. I think it's valuable to stick with the lowest sufferable quality of something until you have the ability to meaningfully upgrade or improve upon it.
Hearing the two masters side by side on some incredible speakers really gave me an appreciation for how different 'versions' of an album can transform the experience of the music.
It's possible (likely) that those prerecorded cassettes had boosted high frequencies because they were intended to be played on a deck that supports Dolby B noise reduction, and will do the reverse operation to get the level back to where it's supposed to be.
Dolby B noise reduction didn't actually reduce noise at the source. Instead:
- During recording: Boost the volume of high frequencies (where tape hiss is most audible)
- During playback: Apply the inverse.
When you reduce the treble during playback, you're reducing the hiss along with it, but the original signal (which was boosted before) ends up at the intended level. This improves the signal-to-noise ratio in the high frequencies.
This is similar to the RIAA equalization curve used for vinyl records.
- During mastering: Reduce bass, boost treble.
- During playback:The RIAA phono preamp applies the inverse curve—boosting bass and reducing treble.
IIRC the reasons for the RIAA curve aren't just about improving signal-to-noise ratio, but something about the physical limits of vinyl.
They would have needed to look at the 35mm negative of Toy Story from '95, picked up the colours from there to then put an intermediate colour correction step. They didn't do it, which is a shame. We lost artistic intent.
I'm guessing about 10-15 years ago I was watching a documentary on the re-release of Ken Burns Civil War.
They were highlighting the digital tools they were using to restore and enhance the original film capture for new streaming services etc.
They showed one of the restorers using a fascinating tool where one window was a video feed of the original film's "first pass" to digital. One of the landscape scenes had a small smudge in the upper right hand corner so the restorer pauses the feed, goes back frame by frame and then was able to drag and drop the frame into another window where he used Photoshop like tools to fix everything and then drag and drop it back into the "feed". Seemed VERY efficient and shows how good tools can really accelerate a workflow.
I'm not sure if the above scene is in the below quick documentary but there are a lot of other cool "behind the scenes of restoration" moments: https://www.pbs.org/video/civil-war-restoring-civil-war/
I've used it to paint out tape dropouts on VHS transfers with remarkable success.
Since then it's turned out that people want their old tapes copied over quite a bit. I don't do it "professionally" simply because I cannot afford to dedicate that sort of time to it, because people actually expect it to be done more quickly than "okay today I have a full day of Teams calls where I don't need to say much so I'll get on with something fun" ;-)
Failing that, you can get a retrotink 4k and any old HDMI capture card to do a "good enough" job for most folks. It has a sort of poor-mans TBC that will work as long as the tapes aren't too bad. You're still looking at a grand for the retrotink, but you can then use it for retro video games if you're into that.
For many years after its initial release, the film was seen only on television in pan-and-scan prints, leading people to believe that DeForest Kelley has a small role near the end of the film. When Fox finally struck a new 35mm CinemaScope print for a film festival in the 1990s, viewers were surprised to see that Kelley is in the film all the way through; he was just always off to one side and thus had been panned out of the frame.
Some night scenes now take place during daytime and you can see booms and camera operators in many shots.
It never even got a blu ray release. The only way to watch it at home without egregious errors is still DVD as far as I know.
The only way to watch this show properly now is the 4:3 NTSC DVD release.
I think the recent streaming releases also have the music altered in many places. The show just got <bleep>ed up basically. It's a real shame.
There was a post here maybe a month ago that exposes how small the actual "high definition" center of vision (fovea centralis) is. You can really see detail only in a small area at the center of your vision. Outside of that, the brain fills in what it thinks should be there.
Execs have less and less shame as the years go on. Pride in artistic endeavour? That’s not going to make the shareholders happy.
People in the business world seems to only know business, and that's the limit of what they care about. Place these people into the arts, and you quickly see how important it is to have at least a single ounce of care when you work on projects where you want some level of quality.
But I think HBO, Netflix and most TV/streaming services are run by business-people still, as they think it's a numbers game, not a arts game. Eventually someone will understand and take the world by storm, but seemingly not yet.
You’d think these people would go off and be executives at a ball bearing manufacturing company or something and leave the arts alone, but it never happens that way.
I know that you are joking, but well-made BBs are incredibly important to just about any modern machine that moves, and indirectly, all the non-moving ones too.
Hell, Albert Speer, Nazi in charge of BBs and other manufacturing, said that the US bombing offensive would have had a huge impact on the war if they had just kept at it with bombing the BB factories instead of giving up.
Because they are businesses? Just because something is art doesn't mean expenses can be more than revenue.
There was an enormous increase in the supply of entertainment over the last 20 years, in the form of Youtube, TikTok, Instagram, Reddit, WhatsApp, HN, video games, etc. Demand stayed the same, maxed out at 24 hours per day. One should expect changes in quality and quantity and price in a market with drastically shifting supply and demand curves.
The public did not spend a lot of money on buying these remasters - they lost a lot of money.
The DS9 documentary "What we left behind" had some HD reproduction. It was great, and I was lucky enough to see DS9 on a big screen at an semi-arty cinema in Hackney (not a chain, but did have popcorn), but doing this type of production is expensive.
Automating it is far cheaper, and although it comes out crap - people would prefer to watch stuff in 16:9 and either
1) Have stuff (like the hold in the Friends wall) which wasn't suppose to be there
2) Crop stuff out (see the first 20 years of Simpsons)
With the Simpsons there was enough outrage that they gave an option to fix it, but for those who remember 20 years ago it was very common for the average viewer to have their TV simply stretch 4:3 to fill the entire screen width. Nowadays a whopping 4 in 5 people in America are using their phone at the same time as watching TV, they simply aren't paying attention.
The number of people
1) Who notice
2) Who care
3) Who are watching older stuff
4) Who will pay for it
Is tiny.
I thought it was a lot, but had no idea it was that high. Man, phones really are like crack to us. One of the main reasons I like having a projector setup at home and no "TV" is when I put a movie on it means a) it's worth dedicating hours to and b) we really actually watch it because the room is dark and it fills our field of view.
All this time I've been wondering how people watch the mindless crap that's on TV. I can feel my brain rotting away as I look at that stuff. But now I realise the answer: they're not watching it.
How depressing. Well I guess I'll have to make do with ~50 years of quality and if it ever changes I'll consider it a bonus.
I love audio commentary, behind the scenes, and other looks behind the veil. I would love the ability to see more of unedited, 'raw', or 'mistakes' in older tv shows. Hell, I would even pay for it.
Whats really interesting to me is that no one 'decided' what's worthy of inclusion like they do with behind the scenes stuff
Can someone explain what was wrong with that _Friends_ screenshot? I can't tell.
I disgree with this. I'm fine with companies putting out new versions of something that are experimental like this, but I tihnk that they need to both acknowledge that they're experimental and put out versions that are true to the original intent.
A grab bag of edits by 'Craven in Outer Space' on Star Trek TNG Season 1 - some of which are related to the restoration/re-release showing things that were not easily seen on old TVs.
If you have an old TV with an off format you will miss a portion of the intended frame.
HBO is the worst about remembering what episode I just watched. Finish episode 6? Next time you go to click next episode, it might play #5. Incredibly annoying, coupled with their interface which makes selecting episodes clunky.
You just sent me how many GBs of data, how could you forget where I am?
Set up a site for fans to point out errors and vote on them.
Then have HBO have just one editor interact with fans on the site, fix the most popular errors, and talk about them, maybe stream a little of the editing process.
>They've already been paid
HBO sells a subscription. Presumably, their goal is to be paid again, and again, and again.
It's the fact that shooting is enormously expensive per-minute, and time-constrained. Think of the sheer number of crew involved. And then think of the sheer number of shots you have to get per day, to stay on schedule and on budget.
If there was a mixup and it's going to take half an hour to get and set up a longer hose, it's much cheaper to have 1 person do it in post if it takes a day, versus delay the shot for half an hour while 50 people wait around. (And no, you often can't just shoot a different shot in the meantime, because that involves rearranging the lighting and set which takes just as long.)
And having the real product on set allows the other actors to give realistic reactions.
Given the volume of material these streamers are handling, I expect QA is minimal. I remember when I was watching Frasier on Amazon Prime, a bunch of the episodes had been configured to play in the wrong aspect ratio. Clearly nobody had ever bothered to check them.
I set up custom ingest workflows many cable companies around the world and they all worked the same. You just had to trust that the providers sent you good copies and get them to fix their shit if it was wrong. Most of the time it was bad metadata (episode description, ect).
Yeah, I expect QA is minimal for these shows that are past their prime. Only fans will really watch them again, it's probably not worth it to spend the extra time to review every single episode. (But of course, fans will care! I'm just saying it's probably not worthwhile for HBO to check)
They were set up to shoot that scene that day and they were on a tight schedule. They started to set up and they realized they only had 12 feet of hose, or that the pressure dropped too much with a longer length of hose. They discussed all the options, and fixing it physically would take too long or be too expensive. Thus another "we'll fix it in post!" moment was born.
Edit: I jumped the gun and thought we were talking about the Friends screenshot.
Edit: and I'm getting flagged lol
The Simpsons > Details > Remastered aspect ratio > Off https://i.imgur.com/pQohgQp.jpeg
Pretty sure all of that does make financial sense: - Being able to write 4k will bring people in to re-watching/watching the show for the first time. - Redoing the CGI, etc., would have cost a lot of money. - Very few people will cancel their subscription or stop watching because of stuff like that - So in the end, no one cares
I.e., it makes financial sense to do the minimum possible. Sure, if this were a project you care about, if it were your company that you are also emotionally invested in and maybe proud of, etc., things might look different. But your actual customers are shareholders, which in the end are predominantly giant ETF brokers and pension funds, that don't care about anything else but what your stock price looks like and whether you are in the S&P500. They probably don't even know what your company is doing.
Sorry, rant over ;P
That said, the general public is more price conscious than most people on HN. Walmart is generously rewarded for finding a good price:quality match for a huge segment of the population.
I think this erosion of trust will have far reaching consequences and people will become less open to ideas and experiences front strangers.
Running your brand into the ground in the early days will be costly.
This is the end goal of a system that doesn't think beyond next quarter, that wants to accumulate vast sums of money above all else, and that treats customers as an annoying side effect of the line going up. They'd take our money and give us nothing, if they could get away with it. Based on what passes for products these days (seriously? A toilet with a camera?) we're very nearly there.
It's not even that it aged poorly. The effects they added are so bad that it's hard to see what happened.
Like a guy's getting shot, and then they've spliced in a red dodgeball exploding, as if his head completely exploded. But one second later he's still alive. Huh?
There's even behind the scenes of them being completely happy with these grade school MS Paint BS.
Most of these shows were shot for 4:3. Directors framed for 4:3, lit for 4:3, blocked scenes for 4:3, and even built their special effects around 4:3. Stretching that work into widescreen feels a bit like deciding to colorize Citizen Kane, Dr. Strangelove, or The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. It solves a problem no one actually has.
Viewers are already used to black bars, and we watch lower-resolution content constantly. Vertical phone clips shot by amateurs on TikTok, grainy GIFs, and IMAX footage down-scaled to fit our phone (and connection). Content that wasn't designed to fill the entire screen isn't the issue.
From what I've seen, most of these old shows end up on free or bargain streaming services packed with ads. I watched an episode of Highway to Heaven with my dad where they sped up the dialogue and trimmed pauses, squeezed the credits into a tiny picture-in-picture box, and still lopped off another minute so the episode ended mid-sentence. All of that was just to make room for extra commercial slots the original show was never designed to accommodate. Disgusting, really... though I suppose you get what you pay for.
Sticking with the original 4:3 and simply adding pillarbox bars is cleaner, simpler, and far more respectful -- and ultimately more enjoyable for the audience.
Relevant :
* "That Was A Mistake": Steven Spielberg Admits He Regrets Removing Guns From E.T. // https://screenrant.com/et-guns-removed-steven-spielberg-regr...
* 5 Worst Changes Star Wars Made From The Original Cuts // https://screenrant.com/worst-changes-star-wars-special-editi...
* 'Casablanca' gets colorized, but don't play it again, Ted | Interviews | Roger Ebert // https://www.rogerebert.com/interviews/casablanca-gets-colori...
This is actually not as common as you think. It is common for "normies" to see 4:3 and think "This is not HD". People really, really hate black bars.
What's more surprising to me is that content providers don't keep stuff in 4:3 and just shove ads on the side.
I learned this from the older X-files DVDs, which have some unusually good special features.