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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

#91

Post by iso1631 »

globular-toast wrote: post #13
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.

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.

They spent a lot of money doing a decent remastering job of TOS and TNG.

The public did not spend a lot of money on buying these remasters - they lost a lot of money.

The DS9 documentary "What we left behind" had some HD reproduction. It was great, and I was lucky enough to see DS9 on a big screen at an semi-arty cinema in Hackney (not a chain, but did have popcorn), but doing this type of production is expensive.

Automating it is far cheaper, and although it comes out crap - people would prefer to watch stuff in 16:9 and either

1) Have stuff (like the hold in the Friends wall) which wasn't suppose to be there

2) Crop stuff out (see the first 20 years of Simpsons)

With the Simpsons there was enough outrage that they gave an option to fix it, but for those who remember 20 years ago it was very common for the average viewer to have their TV simply stretch 4:3 to fill the entire screen width. Nowadays a whopping 4 in 5 people in America are using their phone at the same time as watching TV, they simply aren't paying attention.

The number of people

1) Who notice

2) Who care

3) Who are watching older stuff

4) Who will pay for it

Is tiny.

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

#92

Post by thesuitonym »

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…

What happened to the early Pixar movies isn't at all the same, though. They weren't remastered, they were just transferred to a media that they were not originally mastered for.

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

#93

Post by cuvinny »

nayroclade wrote: post #34
the_af wrote: post #19

Earlier 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…

When I worked in the VOD industry we never almost never did a precheck of the files. The content provider (Lionsgate in this case) would upload the files that would then get ingested by the CMS system for normalization and transcoding. The most check the distributor did was add metadata marks for ad breaks and random checks for transcode quality.

I set up custom ingest workflows many cable companies around the world and they all worked the same. You just had to trust that the providers sent you good copies and get them to fix their shit if it was wrong. Most of the time it was bad metadata (episode description, ect).

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

#94

Post by barbazoo »

convenwis wrote: post #86
onionisafruit wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The “five card charlie” sign is part of the set that’s supposed to be on camera, but the hole in the sheetrock obviously isn’t.

I know you are right here but it is also true that many real New York apartments have crazy things like the hole in the sheetrock.

Who doesn’t want a permanently open serving window between their apartment and the public hallway

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

#95

Post by flobosg »

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

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

#96

Post by hovering_nox »

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.

Although Stargate SG-1 (1997) was filmed in 16:9 from the outset, earlier seasons were broadcast in 4:3.

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

#97

Post by drmpeg »

doctornoble wrote: post #84
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.

Not to dismiss the X-files team, but 16:9 was already around when they started. Just not in the states. Japan started getting 16:9 CRTs in the early 90s, Europe followed in the mid 90s. America lagged another half decade and effectively skipped 16:9 CRTs mostly going straight to plasma/lcd.

The first 16:9 content I ever saw was the trailer to "Batman Forever" (with Val Kilmer) in 1995 when I was working at C-Cube Microsystems. The studios use to send them test content all the time for video compression testing. It was on D1 tape, and looked beautiful for SD resolution. The professional Sony CRT 4:3 monitors back then had a 16:9 button to letterbox the image.

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

#100

Post by WorldMaker »

dmpk2k wrote: post #41
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.

Similar with Babylon 5, although the CG has not aged as well.

The Babylon 5 team had tried to prepare for that as well by keeping digital masters of all the effects. It would have meant recompositing, which isn't necessarily cheap, but in theory they could have run the exact same effects at a higher resolution.

Unfortunately, Warner Brothers lost those files. Rumor has it when they sent copies to Sierra (really Vivendi at the time, just before the Activision acquisition) for a Babylon 5 videogame the WB Archives team accidentally sent their only copy and that when the videogame project was shutdown they destroyed the copies per the IP license agreement.

There's a high probability that even if WB had had the digital masters of the effects, they probably still would have stuck to the 4:3 restoration over the 16:9 restoration to avoid recompositing costs, but it's still such a weird swing of bad luck that the production team thought ahead about HD technology well enough as well as anyone could at that time and yet the 4K copy we have in this timeline is in the wrong aspect ratio.

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