21–30 of 109 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not to mention the insane sound volume range. I have great hearing and I hold the remote the entire time, turning it up for dialogue and down for everything else.
Do you have a center channel?
I remember back in 4:3 when it was far harder to find letterboxed VHS tapes, and when filmmakers often would make sure their scope movies also worked in 4:3 by filming in 4:3 and cropping to scope (with the exception of a few hundred accidentally revealed boom mics.) I have to believe that people would just get angry if they got home and realized that their tape wasn't going to utilize their entire television, so that's how the market shook out. The funny thing about movies from that period mentioned is that really both versions of a film were incomplete.
I also remember my grandparents watching DirectTV streams that were clearly stretched out horizontally on the screen, and how they didn't notice at all. They'd notice black bars.
Now that TVs are somewhere midway between 4:3 and scope, the problem has reversed itself. I've seen it solved by zoom, I've seen it solved by horizontal stretch, I've seen it solved by half-zoom and half-stretch, I've seen it solved by either half-zoom or half-stretch combined with half-black bars, even. Just showing it in 4:3 with black bars on both sides isn't significantly more popular than any of these options. And I have to believe that there's research, because, as this story shows, zooming can be expensive. You can do it automatically, and lose everyone's feet and the tops of their heads (or their whole heads in the right shots), or go over everything manually, moving individual shots that turn out badly up and down in a way that might depend on story. Also reducing the number of vertical scanlines makes old tv look like shit, so you might have to spend effort doing something about that. For that last, you can be saved if the series was shot on film and you have access to original materials...
All of this is good, because it is an impossible problem for industry to solve, therefore it will encourage piracy by purists, and piracy for things that aren't Seinfeld episodes will get a free userbase and attendant infrastructure. Also good for piracy are geoblocking and delayed broadcast times between countries. Here's hoping that the next Game of Thrones-type blockbuster series airs a day later in the UK:)
The funniest thing about 4:3 on 16:9 is that everyone's tv is the size of a bus now, and a black-barred 4:3 picture is certainly going to be a lot larger on those than the LP-sized screens families would have been watching the original broadcasts on.
I was under the impression the series will be digitally remastered and resolution upscaled, which doesn't seem to be the case?
The series was filmed in... film. There is no need for upscaling. They digitalised it from the film and it looks as if it was recorded yesterday.
It's times like this that I think that piracy is the only way to preserve pop culture.
It's times like this that I think that piracy is the only way to preserve pop culture.
Cropping is never the right choice for media presentation. Ever.
When I was a kid in the 90's I remember that it was not uncommon to have black-and-white movie recolored to make them look more contemporary. This is arguably an even bigger betrayal of the original artistic vision and I expect done for very much the same reasons.
It's times like this that I think that piracy is the only way to preserve pop culture.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The series was filmed in... film. There is no need for upscaling. They digitalised it from the film and it looks as if it was recorded yesterday.
It's pretty amazing the digital-equivalent resolution that actual film has (depends on the film size obviously but if you were to compare average film size to a average 10+ year digital camera it's a huge difference)
Based on some googling, various sources indicate that 35mm film has a usable resolution somewhere between 4K and 8K video, so we're arguably reaching the limits of what we can extract from it (without consideration for "AI upscaling" and such).
Cinema grade digital cameras, like the RED V-Raptor[0] (MKBHD behind the scenes[1]), can now shoot 8K footage at 120+ fps with 17+ stops of dynamic range. As far as I can tell, those specs are objectively more capable than what you can get with traditional 35mm film. It has taken quite awhile for digital to outclass film across the board, but I think we're at that point now, and the results from these cameras are spectacular[2].
At this point, it's probably a question of how much storage you want to use and whether you have enough light in each scene to shoot at high frame rates like that. (120 is an even multiple of both 24 and 30, so you can always produce 'cinematic' frame rates just by throwing away other frames, without any stuttering, but then you have the option to remaster into higher frame rates in the future if low frame rates fall out of fashion, and you can easily add slow motion effects in post, as long as the final frame rate is intended to be less than 120.)
I'm far from a videography expert, but it is something I find interesting.
[0]: https://www.red.com/v-raptor#section-vr-tech-specs
Cropping is never the right choice for media presentation. Ever.