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Lonos Oboe posted:Someone might be able to explain it better, but as far as I remember because it was basically squeezing more frames onto a reel. It meant that Leone was shooting a very wide format So for every 12 perfs of film you had 4 frames instead of 3. It meant it was cheaper, but the ratio was much tighter (2.35 : 1) Also, because of the cheapness of the stock the images were quite grainy and hi contrast. That meant that the close ups looked amazing because of the composition and quality and the wide vistas really popped. It was a mixture of limitations that really made it work. Like I said, I must try and dig out the exact quotes. But as far as I remember it's to do with that. If someone knows more, please chime in. Techniscope used the same stock as other color films of the time, but they were printed with dye transfer Technicolor. It softened the grain and enhanced contrast. I saw The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly in 35mm from one of the restoration prints and it looked incredible with a velvety grain texture.
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Oct 26, 2015 03:36
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Sleeveless posted:Digital may degrade quicker but it's also infinitely easier to copy, so you can't chuck a HDD into a vault and expect it to work 100 years later but you can have it copied and backed-up to sites all over the world at the click of a mouse. And with It's not safe to assume that any of those things are actually happening though. From the end of the article I linked before, they talked about how one of the record companies are using tape to store their digital files long term. And we've lost stuff from the late 90s. Also, you have to realize that there's a ton of data out there that needs to be backed up, and it needs to be kept organized, and once again, from the article, there are examples where they go back to these files and just find them in total messes with names that are meaningless. And things get complicated quickly. So, for a movie, you have all the footage they shot, you might have the various layers for effect shots, you might have the various edits that were made, you have the various masters for cinema, Blu-Ray, DVD, HDTV, possibly Netflix (even if they're all sourced from the same place), you have the various audio mixes. It takes a lot of work. It's easy for us to over simplify preservation because we're dealing with a much smaller amount than these companies are. As far as digital piracy, it will definitely preserve some stuff. But I wouldn't count on that to keep everything that's been broadcasted or released, since it requires people to care about it to keep it stored. And there's no way to ensure that it's in good quality and not in some weird codec. We don't want a future where the only copy of some great TV show exists in a Real Video file. That's not a future worth living in.
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Oct 26, 2015 04:56
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it's very unlikely that anything that is ever broadcast or released with truly be lost, since people are saving everything.
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Cemetry Gator posted:As far as digital piracy, it will definitely preserve some stuff. But I wouldn't count on that to keep everything that's been broadcasted or released, since it requires people to care about it to keep it stored. And there's no way to ensure that it's in good quality and not in some weird codec. There's torrent sites out there specifically dedicated to fixing this problem, actually. e: And I've seen poo poo on one of them that shouldn't even logically be in the wild. Half Human (1955) and Prophecies of Nostradamus (1974) are somehow available uncut because of these crazy-rear end wizards. WeedlordGoku69 fucked around with this message at 05:10 on Oct 26, 2015 |
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Oct 26, 2015 05:01
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There are some libraries that converted a huge amount of historical photography to digital and are now paying to get it converted back to a physical mediums since they make it easier guarantee future access.
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Oct 27, 2015 02:52
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EL BROMANCE posted:Then one final but very important one - the Pixel Aspect Ratio. It's easy to think that a pixel is a 1:1 square dot on your screen, but when it comes to video that wasn't the case. Why would it be? Video is a constant pain in the rear end of formats and standards, and nothing should be easy. Not even a loving pixel. Are these issues with post-CRT video display ever issues of technical limitation, or is it all just a series of bad/weird decisions by home release producers?
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Oct 27, 2015 14:19
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Way back in 2002, Turner Classic Movies was running a promotion where viewers could request a film to be shown. Even better, the letter you submit would be read on the air by Robert Osborne. One of my favorite childhood movies, the 1956 version of Around the World in 80 Days, had never had a widescreen release outside of theaters. Ever. Even the laserdisc was pan & scan. It was shot in 65mm - only the second film of the 1950s to be shot in the format. So, my request would be for TCM to air the film in widescreen. They were nice enough to reply back and tell me they had accepted my request, but they would have to show the re-release version that was about 30 minutes shorter because that's all they had access to. Robert Osborne read my letter and proudly announced they were about to show the film in widescreen on TV for the first time in history. Two years later, the DVD finally came out with the film not only in the original 2.20:1 format, but a completely uncut version with a scene that wasn't even in my pan & scan tape. From what I've heard, while the 2004 movie remake bombed, the DVD did much better than expected considering it's not one of the most loved Best Picture Oscar winners. Then again, how many people made that decision from seeing the old ratty pan & scan tape? You can watch the uncut version on Netflix in HD. Don't expect Lawrence of Arabia quality, but it's a good rainy day film.
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Oct 27, 2015 16:14
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LORD OF BUTT posted:There's torrent sites out there specifically dedicated to fixing this problem, actually. Much in the same way that thanks to kids holding up tape recorders to the TV, we have the soundtracks to all the missing Doctor Who episodes. Unless these torrent sites are sharing masters and not just a digital copy of an ancient home video release, they're not fixing much, they're just making sure a form of the movie survives. Better than nothing, sure. But it's not really comparable to what the studios have to deal with in preserving their digital masters.
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Oct 27, 2015 21:29
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That Filmmaker IQ video was good. I'll have to watch the others on their Youtube channel. I've also had that Side by Side film in my Netflix instant queue for years.  Another thing I don't like about DVDs is how the companies never got together and clearly came up with a system for differentiating between ones designed for 4:3 CRT TVs and 16:9 TVs. Instead they came up with dozens of contradictory odd terms. Watching an old Oklahoma DVD on an HDTV is like watching a film in IMAX from a mile away using binoculars. Well, maybe not that bad but it feels wrong. Cemetry Gator posted:What's worse is that a lot of British shows used film for exterior shots, so you end up with shows that look really inconsistent. So the character will be outside walking into a store, and it will be film, and then they get into the store, and then it's back to video. And of course, let's not get into wiping. That's always been noticeable. Fawlty Towers did that IIRC and I've seen it on a handful of other shows to place the setting when characters were traveling somewhere. I think it was Growing Pains or Family Ties or some other 80s family show where it was clear they were using stock footage for exteriors. Zogo fucked around with this message at 23:15 on Oct 28, 2015 |
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Oct 28, 2015 23:11
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Zogo posted:That Filmmaker IQ video was good. I'll have to watch the others on their Youtube channel. I've also had that Side by Side film in my Netflix instant queue for years. It's funny that you use Oklahoma! as an example since the DVD editions are two of the worst put out by a major studio. The first edition was non-anamorphic, full of chroma noise, and incorrectly mastered so that it had interlacing artifacts (which should be impossible with a 30fps film) The second edition was anamorphic and progressive at least, but the color was terrible and was noise reduced to the point of looking out of focus. The Blu-Ray came from a 4K restoration from the 65mm negative and supposedly had a gigantic amount of work done on it.
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Oct 29, 2015 01:15
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Egbert Souse posted:It's funny that you use Oklahoma! as an example since the DVD editions are two of the worst put out by a major studio. The first edition was non-anamorphic, full of chroma noise, and incorrectly mastered so that it had interlacing artifacts (which should be impossible with a 30fps film) The second edition was anamorphic and progressive at least, but the color was terrible and was noise reduced to the point of looking out of focus. The Blu-Ray came from a 4K restoration from the 65mm negative and supposedly had a gigantic amount of work done on it. Yea, I definitely watched the non-anamorphic nightmare. Probably in my top ten worst DVD viewings along with others like fullscreen Chariots of Fire, non-anamorphic Sophie's Choice and an older one of The Last Emperor that had all kinds of strange issues. I'm sure a lot more of those 1990s DVD releases were junk. The other issue back then I suppose was that a lot of people were using those software DVD decoders on their computers (before everyone had a DVD player) that were pretty unreliable and probably messed with quality at times too.
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Oct 29, 2015 23:16
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Zogo posted:Yea, I definitely watched the non-anamorphic nightmare. Probably in my top ten worst DVD viewings along with others like fullscreen Chariots of Fire, non-anamorphic Sophie's Choice and an older one of The Last Emperor that had all kinds of strange issues. I'm sure a lot more of those 1990s DVD releases were junk. I kinda feel in the early years far more people were watching dvds on their tvs thru dedicated dvd players than watching them on their computer, except for probably college students.
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Oct 31, 2015 02:19
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Skwirl posted:I kinda feel in the early years far more people were watching dvds on their tvs thru dedicated dvd players than watching them on their computer, except for probably college students. Playing DVDs on computers was a nightmare until deCSS existed.
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Oct 31, 2015 18:46
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SwissCM posted:Playing DVDs on computers was a nightmare until deCSS existed. Plus, if you're a middle class family that just has 1 computer that you use for school projects and internet stuff I can't imagine why you'd get a dvd-rom before you got something you could plug into your tv. That's what my family did and we had like 3 computers and my dad provided internal tech support for Microsoft at the time.
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Oct 31, 2015 20:26
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Skwirl posted:I kinda feel in the early years far more people were watching dvds on their tvs thru dedicated dvd players than watching them on their computer, except for probably college students. Yea, I was a college student and probably a late DVD adopter. I remember some stalwarts clinging to only VHS even ~2002. Being able to use VLC is a lot better than any of those glitchy old ones like early versions of CyberLink PowerDVD. Random reboots during a film.
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Oct 31, 2015 21:51
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This thread reminds me to hunt down and try and find a theatrical showing of The Searchers.
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Nov 1, 2015 04:43
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Cemetry Gator posted:The Oddest Widescreen Release I Know Of I can personally confirm at least one other movie did this, Karate Kid Part III. It must have been a Columbia thing. An unsourced bit of trivia from IMDB (for whatever that's worth) says it was part of a "wave in the late '80s/early '90s to introduce widescreen letterbox movies to the general public" that of course didn't take because customers were confused - and so were retailers, because the packaging made no mention of a letterboxed presentation. Amusingly, later reprints would add a note to the packaging about the widescreen even though the tapes were actually "fixed" to fit a 4x3 screen.
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Nov 2, 2015 10:29
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Well, considering how poo poo the clarity was on TV's back then, and how many TV's were lovely 13" TV/VCR combos, I think the logic was that a 2.35:1 widescreen would have been too small on most TV's. I don't think it's a horrible idea on a technical level, but it was probably done in by poor marketing and having to explain to the average joe what the hell they were buying
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Nov 2, 2015 10:46
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Steve Yun posted:Well, considering how poo poo the clarity was on TV's back then, and how many TV's were lovely 13" TV/VCR combos, I think the logic was that a 2.35:1 widescreen would have been too small on most TV's. I don't think it's a horrible idea on a technical level, but it was probably done in by poor marketing and having to explain to the average joe what the hell they were buying Well, I think the lack of notifications on the packaging had something to do with it. By 1989, there were films that were only being released in a letterboxed format. For example, the Color Purple was only available in letterbox, as was the restored Lawrence of Arabia. I know there were others that were only released in a letterbox format.
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Nov 2, 2015 14:54
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At least when watching letterboxed films on cheaper CRT TVs, the terrible geometry was less obvious with less of the picture being used! Every time I go to my parents, I'm stuck with a early 90s 20" CRT in my bedroom (amazing that it's still working to be honest, as that thing has been used and then some) and not a single line on that display is straight.
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Nov 2, 2015 15:21
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lizardman posted:...that of course didn't take because customers were confused Looking back the studios could've gotten together and put out some short infomercial/seminar before every VHS release explaining aspect ratios in a variety of nuanced ways. Maybe right after the part with the FBI warning screen stating that you could to go prison for 5+ years and be fined $250,000 USD. I wonder if that ever happened to anyone.
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Nov 2, 2015 22:20
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Zogo posted:Looking back the studios could've gotten together and put out some short infomercial/seminar before every VHS release explaining aspect ratios in a variety of nuanced ways. Maybe right after the part with the FBI warning screen stating that you could to go prison for 5+ years and be fined $250,000 USD. They did that with some releases. The Color Purple showed the screen zooming out from a fullscreen image to the widescreen image, and some stuff, like the director's series release of Star Trek IV actually explained panning and scanning and how it changed the composition. Fox also had a Widescreen series that showed the difference between the two. I don't know if it would have mattered much. There are still people out there who don't like the black bars, and don't understand why everything isn't set to fill up the television screen.
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Nov 3, 2015 04:40
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Cemetry Gator posted:They did that with some releases. The Color Purple showed the screen zooming out from a fullscreen image to the widescreen image, and some stuff, like the director's series release of Star Trek IV actually explained panning and scanning and how it changed the composition. Fox also had a Widescreen series that showed the difference between the two. That's interesting. I saw a lot of VHS tapes growing up and can't ever recall coming across one. Yea, it's debatable as to how much of an effect it'd have on the VHS market and/or changing preferences but it would at least have cleared up a lot of the confusion people were having.
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Nov 3, 2015 06:03
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Zogo posted:That's interesting. I saw a lot of VHS tapes growing up and can't ever recall coming across one. It wasn't common. Aside from the Fox Widescreen series, the ones I listed were pretty early on in the days of releasing films in widescreen. The Fox Widescreen series was happening around the time of DVDs, so who knows. But by that point, if you were buying movies in letterbox, you were going to the letterbox section of the store and getting your films there. When I told one of my younger coworkers about that, their minds were blown.
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Nov 3, 2015 06:39
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Other widescreen-only tapes: Pearl Harbor - The film switched from 2.00:1 cropped to full 2.35:1. There wasn't a full 4x3 version even made. Shot in Panavision The Last of the Mohicans - Mostly 2.00:1 with the credits in full 2.35:1, also shot in Panavision. Innerspace had a short intro about widescreen and was about 1.66:1 on tape. Probably due to all the effects being shot in VistaVision since it was 1.85:1 theatrically. It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World was around 1.85:1 on tape prior to the extended cuts. I don't know if it was only the late 1980s tape since there's a 1980s making-of with full pan & scan clips. The extended cut has only been in widescreen. Ben-Hur had a later video issue that letterboxed the chariot race and credits, but I think the initial tapes didn't. 2001: A Space Odyssey was issued as widescreen-only since the 1991 VHS tape. It's also one of the few roadshow films that doesn't have "OVERTURE" and "ENTR-ACTE" plastered instead of just black screen (which is literally what the film reels looked like). The pan & scan version has re-done opening credits. Vertigo and Psycho were widescreen-only on tape after the mid-1990s restorations. I once caught a few minutes of Moulin Rouge! on VHS. It's one of those films I thought they'd not even bother with pan & scan because it not only uses every bit of the Panavision frame, but it has over 2000 cuts. It's unwatchable between the constant panning, the cramped framing, and overall ineffectiveness to convey the movie properly. It's not a surprise that the film gained its following on DVD.
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Nov 3, 2015 15:02
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Is it possible for a VHS tape to trigger the anamorphic mode on a TV? I swear I used to have a Pioneer anime (I was young and foolish) tape that would kick in to the proper WIDE mode on my Panasonic WS CRT, rather than auto zoom on detection of black bars which is what all the other tapes, and non-anamorphic signals would do. Can't find any reference though.
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Nov 3, 2015 16:09
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EL BROMANCE posted:Is it possible for a VHS tape to trigger the anamorphic mode on a TV? I swear I used to have a Pioneer anime (I was young and foolish) tape that would kick in to the proper WIDE mode on my Panasonic WS CRT, rather than auto zoom on detection of black bars which is what all the other tapes, and non-anamorphic signals would do. Can't find any reference though. I don't know about anything that could do that. There's no standard that I know about. Also, VHS doesn't have an anamorphic standard, which makes me wonder what you were seeing. Even on DVD, you had to set up the player to do that. Your TV is just getting a standard signal. But, I could be missing something. Cemetry Gator fucked around with this message at 18:00 on Nov 3, 2015 |
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Nov 3, 2015 17:53
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Cemetry Gator posted:I don't know about anything that could do that. There's no standard that I know about. Also, VHS doesn't have an anamorphic standard, which makes me wonder what you were seeing. Even on DVD, you had to set up the player to do that. Your TV is just getting a standard signal. But, I could be missing something. Pin 8 on SCART connectors can be used to signify a 16x9 or 4x3 source, that's as close as I can think of.
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Nov 3, 2015 18:42
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It would've been hooked up by a fully wired up SCART cable, yeah... I forgot about that pin.
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Nov 3, 2015 19:18
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This is the sort of thread I just love finding at random and finding stuff like this is why I still come to SA after all these years. Thank you, Egbert, this has been incredibly informative (and amusing)! Though to bring the discussion around to VIDEOGAMES, as is my wont, and thus to consumer displays in general: so eventually 1.85:1 and 2.35etc:1 won out as the real major cinematic ARs. And in the 90s and going further, there was a big push to present movies in their original AR, and thus a push for widescreen televisions and monitors. Which lead to!... ... 1.78:1 being established as the standard aspect ratio for 1280x720 and 1920x1080 resolutions. Wait, what? I'm really rather curious, why were widescreen televisions and monitors almost-but-not-quite expanded to 1.85, rather than just expanded out to 1.85? I can understand why 2.35:1 wouldn't have caught on, especially in the videogame side of things (that would be a crazily wide screen for most home use, even in big American homes, and also up until a few years ago 2540(ish)x1080 would've been an annoyingly big framebuffer to have to work on at 24 bits and would've heavily delayed adoption of that version of "1080p") but I don't quite see why 1920x1080 was chosen over, say, 2000x1080 or somesuch. I'm sure there are convoluted, perhaps political answers, but from the couch it seems like it'd make more sense just to go with the cinema AR so you could tout it as an easy-to-grasp "feature".
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Nov 4, 2015 22:47
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I'm gonna take a stab that the aspect ratio is down to the overscan correction needed when the standards were laid out during the CRT times.
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Nov 4, 2015 23:36
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SpaceDrake posted:I'm really rather curious, why were widescreen televisions and monitors almost-but-not-quite expanded to 1.85, rather than just expanded out to 1.85? It was a compromise between 1.33 and 2.35. The geometric mean between those two is 1.77 √(2.35 * 1.33) = 1.7701224063135671559978572950768 16/9 = 1.7777777777777777777777777777778 so it's a very close ratio. Also, I'm not sure but maybe they wanted "16:9" as some kind of marketing thing. 37:20 (1.85) might not have sounded as good. I'm interested to see how aspect ratios will be changed in the future or if things will remain steady and only the quality of film and TVs will improve. Zogo fucked around with this message at 00:12 on Nov 5, 2015 |
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Nov 5, 2015 00:07
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Zogo posted:I'm interested to see how aspect ratios will be changed in the future or if things will remain steady and only the quality of film and TVs will improve.
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Nov 5, 2015 01:45
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Thankyou so much for this thread. I've always wanted someone to do a video essay on Youtube explaining all this. This is a great alternative. Can't wait to read when I get home.
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Nov 5, 2015 02:59
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zf-IgoUqutA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_geFomhGuHU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NuaSbjhxcuk
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Nov 5, 2015 03:19
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My favourite encounter with pan and scan was during a high school class where we were watching Gallipoli (1981) and it had just the most god awful pan and scan job, it was so bad I spent the entire class laughing at it and saying it was practically unwatchable and I've been an aspect ratio evangelist basically ever since I became that guy that would rant at people being all "waaaah I don't like the black bars!!!" and I'm sure in practice I was mostly just obnoxious, but whatever this poo poo's important
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Nov 7, 2015 16:39
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I remember I taped Forbidden Planet off TV once a long time ago, and later I got the chance to see it on a big theater screen (the Englewood in Independence MO had a 50-foot curved screen and used to show old movies at the time, it transitioned to showing new movies and then to nothing at all.) After that I really couldn't watch the pan and scan version, it was too clumsy. (There are at least two shots where you've got fast action involving the entire scope of the screen- one where Robbie zaps a monkey trying to snatch some fruit, another where a big cat leaps at Leslie Nielsen and Anne Francis and Nielsen disintegrates it in midair- and so they had to pan really quickly to catch everything.) One of the worst cropping jobs I think I've seen was the VHS of the original Last House on the Left. This film was shot in 1.85:1, may have been open matte, maybe not, but if so the VHS distributor didn't have access to that material. Instead it was just really clumsily pan-and-scanned, for a film that is kinda crudely shot to begin with, and they had to pull the kind of tricks you normally see used for 2:35 films- making a shot of two characters side by side into a two shot, etc.)
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Nov 7, 2015 20:08
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One of the worst pan and scan jobs was M*A*S*H. Roger Altman really used the whole frame in that movie, and in pan and scan, it's unwatchable, since the entire frame is being used, so things just ping-pong back and forth and what would be controlled chaos would just become noise. A good example is when they're meeting everybody in the mess tent, and the camera just can't keep up with the action. Or there would be shots where whole information would be missing because once again, it's impossible to do the Painless's suicide without losing something, especially when it parodies the Last Supper. It's a shame for so long the only way to see that film was in that horrible way. The film had wonderful cinematography, but it was destroyed.
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Nov 7, 2015 21:04
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I tried to quickly find a Star Trek video on YT which was quite neat - it showed how they purposely shot wide so when it was processed for TV, they could do super smooth pans across the frame. I did spot this cool video though, showing the P&S version of Blade Runners opening scene overlaid over the 2.35:1 original. Really shows how much information is lost and how they decided which part of the frame needed to be kept. http://youtu.be/ETGfeSim1K4
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Nov 8, 2015 12:53
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I remember at university I would rent a video of Jaws 4 that was recorded from a to broadcast from the library and finding it absolutely hilarious that you could see the Sharks mechanical parts blatantly on-screen. It wasn't until I got the DVD that I found out that this would normally be cropped out.
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Nov 8, 2015 19:15
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EL BROMANCE posted:I tried to quickly find a Star Trek video on YT which was quite neat - it showed how they purposely shot wide so when it was processed for TV, they could do super smooth pans across the frame. That is some awkward loving framing.
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Nov 8, 2015 23:13
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