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The "Mad Men" in 4K on HBO Max Debacle

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Re: The "Mad Men" in 4K on HBO Max Debacle

#101

Post by PyWoody »

That reminds me of House of Bamboo, which kind of had the opposite problem[0]:

    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.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Bamboo#Casting

Re: The "Mad Men" in 4K on HBO Max Debacle

#102

Post by vessenes »

h1fra wrote: post #8

Great article, I really thought it was a recropping like friends (and many others). So weird that they just forgot about CGI.

https://www.vulture.com/article/mad-men-hbo-max-4k-rerelease... has more. Some finger-pointing going on here right now - HBO claims they got 'incorrect files' from Lionsgate. Either way we had clankers doing most of the work, clearly.

Re: The "Mad Men" in 4K on HBO Max Debacle

#104

Post by WorldMaker »

sgt wrote: post #90
b112 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was recent (last few years) work done to fix all of this. 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!

A very well written show. It's crazy to think a lot of people don't even get to watch this, because it's so hard to find. I couldn't find it anywhere (except for DVD's) so I had to resort to torrents.

There's a 4K 4:3 remaster streaming on HBO Max. It wasn't exactly well advertised (certainly not to the extent that it has been hard to miss this Mad Men advertising), but it exists and is a good way to watch the show. Feels a bit less cinematic not being in 16:9, but it looks good other than that because the show was shot to be 4:3 safe (as that was still the most common TV at the time).

Re: The "Mad Men" in 4K on HBO Max Debacle

#105

Post by rendaw »

liampulles wrote: post #29

Fun 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.

The article mentions that Mad Men was already in 16:9 so the issues are unrelated to re-framing.

Re: The "Mad Men" in 4K on HBO Max Debacle

#106

Post by whycome »

fredoralive wrote: post #17
globular-toast wrote: post #11

It'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?

Possibly some issues with the hose length and the ability control the flow? Or perhaps it’s just an off the shelf up chuck chucker that doesn’t have a longer hose?

I think we are also forgetting that the crew member IS a part of the scene. They have to see the actor and respond to their actions to make sure the flow aligns. It’s much harder to control the flow as it pertains to the actor if you have the latency of a long pipe.

And having the real product on set allows the other actors to give realistic reactions.

Re: The "Mad Men" in 4K on HBO Max Debacle

#107

Post by rendaw »

flobosg wrote: post #95
rob74 wrote: post #31

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 sensit…

Discussed here a few weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45883788

And notably, there's some dissent there that the modern Disney/Pixar versions are wrong (there's an arbitrariness to scanners, plus no particularly objective recordings of what you'd actually see at theaters back then) IIUC.

Re: The "Mad Men" in 4K on HBO Max Debacle

#108

Post by turnsout »

gwbas1c wrote: post #82
actionfromafar wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Some movies were shot in 4:3 (ish) and cropped in the theater. Titanic is an example. (For the pedantic, yes there is a name for this technique, and yes the ratios aren't exactly 4:3.)

Not quite but close. Titanic, like a lot of movies of the 90s and 2000s, was shot in Super 35. In Super 35, the image is ~4:3, but it requires optical printing or scanning to produce a release print, since the image is both not the correct aspect ratio and also occupies the area used for optical sound.

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."

Re: The "Mad Men" in 4K on HBO Max Debacle

#109

Post by WorldMaker »

the_af wrote: post #53
nayroclade wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Given the volume of material these streamers are handling, I expect QA is minimal 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)

HBO Max was advertising this as a big new exciting release. They probably paid a bunch of money for exclusive streaming rights and expected to capture a new audience that missed the show the first time.
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