January 28, 2005

• pan-and-scan with the top and bottom cut off Geez, this is the ultimate fusion of laziness and stinginess. What I can't believe is they thought they'd get away with it. I'm no film connoisseur but I think even I'd notice such a bad transfer.
• Um, are you sure about that? The "real" widescreen versions of many, many films is actually a cropped version of the original 35mm negative -- and then the full 35mm negative is used for the fullscreen versions. See any James Cameron film, for instance. Wading through the actual settlement, it appears they're actually catching flack for their "helpful" diagram MGM always includes, which has a frame from the movie in question with a red box showing how the "fullscreen" image is just a cropped version of the widescreen image. Of course, that's usually not the case, so I'm guessing that's why they were sued.
• there's a five page list of DVDs that are part of the suit, including a lot of the James Bond films. it looks like the settlement is for a new DVD from some list or $7.10 per DVD.
• Um, are you sure about that? Actually, I have no idea. I am not a movie technophile, and attempting to research this further has produced mostly lean rumour and confusion. After reading these sites, my muddled and unsure comprehension is that MGM was engaging in a sort of reverse false advertising. I think they were claiming that the widescreen release DVDs had more info than the standard format DVDs already released, when they were really about equal because the standard format weren't pan and scan, and neither were the widescreen, although the ws was closer to the original cinema projection. They were lying about the paucity of one of their products in order to promote another. I think. Any cinemaphiles care to weigh in and clear this up?
• what difference does it make? looks the same to me.
• According to the folks at slashdot (who are never wrong!!!!!) it is indeed more about deceptive labling than putting out films in altered formats. Apparently it is an issue that many widescreen films are shot full frame and have the top and bottom cut off and thus in these specific cases the full screen is not chopping off the sides but is showing the top and bottom of the shot which were never meant to be shown in the first place. The advertizing made it look like you were getting more of the picture with widescreen, but technically you weren't (although you WERE getting the shot as the creators intended it to be!). Clear as mud? What I am unclear about is if they are giving people $7.50 back on the films or if you have to give them the film in order to get $7.50. I don't have many films on that list, but I have a couple and free money is free money!
• I have seven of the movies on the list, but I don't know that I would turn them in, though. They don't give you a list of "replacement" DVDs until you turn your movies in and they don't pay the postage required to turn the movies in. What if I turn in my seven movies, and the replacement list is all ... I don't know... Barney movies or something equally craptacular? Has anyone found a list of their replacement discs online?
• If you own a widescreen edition of "Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure," then I want to shake your hand. You, sir or madam (probably sir), have taken geekery to the next level.
• Reminds me of those "Superbit" cheap DVDs. The leaflet explaining how they used a 'higher quality' encoding, so the movie ended up taking more space on the disc. Which, of course, was why there was no supplemental footage, or anything else.
• Eep. I have Bill and Ted in widescreen, sir... Such a great movie, though! And of course we'd buy the widescreen rather than the fullscreen, who buys fullscreen? I shall have to discover what I can do for remedies. Er, without turning in my copy of the movie. What? Don't look at me like that!
• Hmm, more reading confirms that these DVDs aren't "broken", just that MGM did a shitty job of marketing them and such. I think you have it right now, Nal, but I'm sleepy so I won't attempt any more detail.
• Actually, those Superbit DVDs really are encoded with a higher bitrate, which means they take up more space. They also fiddle with other settings to make the picture look a little better. Here is a comparison between the various editions of Lawrence of Arbia (SFW, despite the site name), including region 1 and 2 Superbits. The difference is subtle, but if you have a kickass home theater system and really like the movie, it's probably worth it to buy the Superbit version and rent the regular version if you really want to see the extras.
• Sometimes you don't want that "extra" information, is that is how the full screen is being made. What you want for a film (and what I expect if I ever purchase a film in any format) is to see what the director intended you to see in optimal circumstances. If the director and cinematographers composed the shots to fit a cinema ratio, that's what I want on my DVD. It's a cropping issue. You never add noise to the sound track of a film, nor do your subtrack sounds - why do we do this to the visual? I'm surprised by this idea that films are made in a squarer ratio than they are shown in the theatres. Whenever I have seen people watching rushes or raw footage (on documentaries, etc), that footage is in the wider aspect ratio. How does the director/cinematographer compose the shot if it is a different aspect ratio than the final?
• This site does a good job of explaining the different ways studios do widescreen and fullscreen formats.
• Okay, folks: here's how this works. Old movies were square. The film that they were filmed with used square frames. Later, it occured to some folks that the way human vision works, we see more side-to-side than we do up-and-down. So a wide format was invented. How do you get a wide frame? Well, you could make film that has wide frames and then, also, get all new film equipment that is designed to work with this aspect ratio. That's a pain in the ass. And expensive. Another thing you could do is get a special lens that squashes the image side-to-side in the camera, and then is expanded to a wide image when printed. This is "anamorphic". Note the use of, um, "square" film. Yet another possibility is use a bigger size of film but mask the top and bottom at the camera. The print is automatically wide. And still another possibility is to film the entire square frame and rely upon masking at the theater to remove the top and bottom. That's easiest for the filmmaker and producer, not so easy for the theater. About thirty years ago, when a broadcast TV company (or a local station showing a movie, for that matter) wanted to show a film, they had to deal with the fact that either a) the image was too wide to fit on the TV (or, rather, the transfer to video); or b) the whole square image contained junk at the top and bottom, like boom mikes and the like. TVs were small, no one wanted to see a shrunken wide image with black bars on the top and bottom. The only solution was to "pan-and-scan". That means that when they transferred the image to video, the technician would choose, on a frame by frame basis, what part of the whole (wide) image he wanted the square video image to show. "Pan" is meant to refer to panning back and forth between two characters in a dialog in a "two-shot": they don't fit in the cideo frame, so the video tech virtually moves the camera back and forth. This is widely hated by everyone who cares about such things, because there's a world of difference between a static two-shot and a pan back and forth. Different tone, different pace, everything. (cont)
• (cont) But by the very early eighties, as video rentals were on the rise, there was an even greater demand for TV aspect ratio versions of movies. And the aftermarket for videos was burgeoning, there was good reason to cater to these demands. So directors and photographers began to consciously keep the full frame clear; some even quite deliberately shooting, somehow, both for the full frame and the cropped (wide) frame. From the get-go, so to speak, those films in a full-frame version look as the director intended. He/she almost certainly prefers the wide format, but he/she kept the full frame clean. Full-frame prints of such films transferred to video are not pan and scan. There's no panning. (There's scanning, but there's always scanning, if scanning means what I think it means.) As a matter of fact, true "pan and scan" versions are much less common these days than they used to be. Laserdisc folks never tolerated anything other than the wide frame versions of films. As the transition was made to DVD and DVDs became a consumer product, DVD makers discovered that, somehow, consumers had become aware that the "right" way to watch a film on their TV was letterboxed. Sure, some people brought DVDs back saying they were "broken", but the demand for widescreen version far outstripped what the industry expected and now they are the norm, not the exception. I only see full-frame DVDs at places like Walmart. Also, however, some filmakers right up to the present prefer a square aspect ratio. As well as there being a considerable number of films (the majority) that were not widescreen prior to the sixties. Many consumers actually complain when they see non-widescreen versions of these films! Finally, a lot of films are still masked at the theater and are not filmed with the whole frame in mind. When you see a boom mike in the frame when you're watching a movie at the local theater, it's almost certainly the projectionist's fault, not the filmaker.
• Thank you, kmellis, for such a thorough explanation in non-technical terms. I was wading througha more technical piece and it was making my head hurt! ))) for you!
• The widescreen.org site has some explanations - aspect ratios, faq (for site or widescreen), examples of panning and scanning mangling frames (I've realised that I've never really seen some of my favorite films - like the Neverending Story - I never knew there was a rainbow). This page seems to say that there are many different ways that films are made, only a couple of which (such as the Super 35) actually involve making it with a full frame.
• Is there a difference between 'letterbox' and 'widescreen'? They answer "no". Which isn't correct. It's sorta correct. It's sorta correct in the sense that the terms are used, unfortunately, interchangably, by DVD packagers and many people. But the actual image can be letterboxed into a full-screen image that's on the DVD. In other words, the black bars are really there on the disc. On the other hand, a widescreen format has the full DVD standard widescreen image on the DVD. Most TVs can't show that image. Your DVD player, however, might letterbox it for you. Anyone who actually has a widescreen TV is well aware of the existence of DVDs that have letterboxed films placed into a TV aspect ratio image. That's really damn annoying. As for how many films are made full frame? I don't know, I don't keep up with this stuff. But why go to the trouble of masking the image on the camera when you can do it elsewhere with less trouble? That's not to say that filmmakers are keeping the full frame clean—I first learned about this stuff back in 99 when the DVD revolution was just getting hot. Then, more people rented VHS and had been for a long time. I think there was a much stronger impetus to make things easier and better looking for TV aspect ratio versions of films than there are now. Which is a good thing.
• Anybody read the entire notice? Especially this part: "The law firms representing the Plaintiffs and the Settlement Class intend to apply to the Court for an award of attorneys' fees and for approval of reimbursement of out-of-pocket litigation costs not to exceed $2,700,000." Man, that $7 looks like a really sweet deal.
• (this is not the first time I've had the privilege of kmellis' rich instruction! thanks!)