Jagosaurus wrote:I'd take that over hard coded widescreen bars & a lower resolution of the picture in VHS (or even early DVDs). That was a killer.
So most late model CRTs had a really cool feature that addressed this. It was a widescreen mode that would squish the image down to 16:9 on the screen so that you could set your DVD player output to widescreen and get the full resolution sent to the TV.
isiolia wrote:Just mean that both have picture data that gets cut off in the other. They didn't just cut off the top and bottom of the 4:3 image, but instead went back to the source footage and framed it differently. You can, for instance, see more of the guy's head and more of the chair on the edge of the left side of the image.
Given the air dates for it, I doubt that the show was filmed for 16:9. As mentioned, it would have been shot for 4:3.
Right, that's what I meant. I remember when they announced that Seinfeld would be released on Blu Ray, it was revealed that the show was shot on film so it was possible to remaster it in HD and possible in widescreen. Which was odd for a sitcom in the 90's, most of those were shot on tape and that's that for the resolution and aspect ratio. But yeah...
PretentiousHipster wrote:The shot composition was done with 4:3 in mind so cropping it to make it widescreen ruins everything.
Even though it was shot on film, they shot with 4:3 in mind so I wouldn't call that cropped because it's what they original intended. It's cool that they can go back and remaster it for 16:9, and I'm sure that they're grabbing the widest shots possible, but many of the shots are noticeably cropped. There might be a few that are really wide, like shots where the camera pans around inside Jerry's apartment. But close up shots and the smaller sets are noticeably zoomed in, as there was probably always some set gear just outside of the expected 4:3 frame. These shots are just very jarring to watch.
I watched through the entire X Files series back when it first popped up on NetFlix. That show started in 4:3 then at some point started to be in 16:9, and NetFlix streamed the original aspect ratios. Fast forward to present, it's no longer on NetFlix but appeared on Amazon Prime. I started to watch it from the beginning and right from S1E1 it's in widescreen! Why did they have to change it? Does the majority out there really hate watching 4:3 on their HDTVs?
Freaks and Geeks is a 1 season show from 1999, but got a sort of cult following. For the Blu Ray release, they included two versions: Widescreen and the original aired aspect ratio. Although this might be a bad example. I've never seen it in 4:3, but I watched through it twice in 16:9 and it doesn't seem squished ever like Seinfeld and some other examples do. Being that it came out in 99, they might have had widescreen in mind when they were shooting it. But anyway, that's the right way to do it, release BOTH. But I guess it wasn't as big of a task for a 1 season show compared to 9 seasons of Seinfeld to make 2 remasters of each episode.
isiolia wrote:Air Force One is likely just open matte - the more cropped version was what was intended, but the additional picture data was there for when fullscreen DVDs or broadcast TV versions were there. It's still a thing today, even if not as extreme.
Ah, this didn't occur to me. That must be what it is. This always seemed like the weirdest thing to me. Usually you want to watch the widescreen version because the 4:3 version is pan and scan and cuts a lot out. But open matte actually has more in the frame. I remember in the early days of consumers switching to widescreens, it was revealed that a few video games had something similar. I can't remember examples, but I think Bioshock was one of them. Widescreen was actually just a crop of full frame. I thought it was very strange for a video game to do this.
