Stories like this regularly make the rounds when movies or shows that the original creators put a lot of love and thought into are "remastered" on the cheap. The last one I saw was the story about the garish colors in digital versions of old Pixar movies - amongst others, they intentionally exaggerated green hues in the digital original to compensate for the transfer process to analog film stock which was less sensitive to green. When Disney transferred the movies to digital formats and streaming, they took the digital original 1:1, so the colors now look off (https://animationobsessive.substack.com/p/the-toy-story-you-...)
The "Mad Men" in 4K on HBO Max Debacle
31–40 of 175 posts
Re: The "Mad Men" in 4K on HBO Max Debacle
#32It's weird that they'd have the crew in the frame anyway. Was it really not possible to have them out of frame? I guess being able to "do it in post" makes people lazy?
They were out of frame. Out of the 4:3 frame. Edit: I jumped the gun and thought we were talking about the Friends screenshot.
No the original was 16:9, you can see they have been digitally removed in the shots from the Blu-ray.
Re: The "Mad Men" in 4K on HBO Max Debacle
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's even weirder when you consider how big of a deal this was for Star Trek only a few years ago (well maybe more than a few...). You would have thought people in the business would know about this.
Everyone is underpaid and overworked. All things considered the companies probably think it’s worth the trade off, they’ll just fix it and republish. Might even end up with more viewers in the end! How many people have learned that Mad Men is on HBO Max as a result of this? Execs have less and less shame as the years go on. Pride in artistic endeavour? That’s not going to make the shareholders happy.
Also cuts down on QA costs, offloading the burden of finding and cataloguing issues to the user. Since this is a monopoly, as you can't have multiple vendors competing for the best 4k restoration, and you can't have multiple streaming services competing for quality, they don't consider brand impact with low quality products because that's meaningless in this case.
Re: The "Mad Men" in 4K on HBO Max Debacle
#34It's weird that they'd have the crew in the frame anyway. Was it really not possible to have them out of frame? I guess being able to "do it in post" makes people lazy?
If it can be fixed in post, what's the problem? The only flaw here is that they completely screwed up and forgot post for these scenes (in the remaster).
Apparently they didn't forget. Lionsgate did all the necessary work, then someone sent the "wrong file" to HBO Max, and it seems nobody checked it properly before uploading it!
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.
Re: The "Mad Men" in 4K on HBO Max Debacle
#35It's weird that they'd have the crew in the frame anyway. Was it really not possible to have them out of frame? I guess being able to "do it in post" makes people lazy?
Hypothesis:
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.
Re: The "Mad Men" in 4K on HBO Max Debacle
#36Stories like this regularly make the rounds when movies or shows that the original creators put a lot of love and thought into are "remastered" on the cheap. The last one I saw was the story about the garish colors in digital versions of old Pixar movies - amongst others, they intentionally exaggerated green hues in the digital original to compensate for the transfer process to analog film stock which was less sensit…
Through work I once got into conversation with the guy who did the re-mastering into 96kHz of the ABBA back catalogue. Up until that point CD re-releases of their material was apparently all converted from the cassette masters where they'd massively exaggerated the HF to compensate for the fact that cassette had a notoriously terrible HF response...
Re: The "Mad Men" in 4K on HBO Max Debacle
#37The did something similar to Buffy The Vampire Slayer when "upgrading" it to HD. It lost all/most of the color grading and was cropped to 16:9. 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.
Not just that, they seem to have also applied some weird auto-cropping that made “choices” no human doing the job would have, meaning that in some scenes characters who were meant to be in frame aren’t, then suddenly and surprisingly appear when there’s a cut to another angle (this is usually in group dialog scenes—like “oh that’s who they were talking to!”)
Re: The "Mad Men" in 4K on HBO Max Debacle
#38Prerelease about 4K remaster premiere will please shareholders and push the stock price up, while actually doing a good job will only hurt the bottom line.
Re: The "Mad Men" in 4K on HBO Max Debacle
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
If it can be fixed in post, what's the problem? The only flaw here is that they completely screwed up and forgot post for these scenes (in the remaster).
Apparently they didn't forget. Lionsgate did all the necessary work, then someone sent the "wrong file" to HBO Max, and it seems nobody checked it properly before uploading it! 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 b…
I’ve seen movies on Prime where the audio was very badly out of sync. I thought it was my setup at first, but I was able to isolate it to particular titles. Like watching a bad dub from another language.
Re: The "Mad Men" in 4K on HBO Max Debacle
#40Fun fact: The X-Files production team foresaw the coming of 16:9 home entertainment, so they made some effort (increasing with later seasons) to try and "protect" a 16:9 frame, which allowed for an unusually good 16:9 Blu-ray restoration. [ https://www.tweaktown.com/reviews/7499/look-inside-the-files... ] I learned this from the older X-files DVDs, which have some unusually good special features.
Not saying it had anything to do with X-files, but also when you shot something for TV but were not entirely sure if the capture would ever go to the movies, you protected the wide frame.
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.