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‘Seinfeld’ Fans Upset That Netflix’s Aspect Ratio Cuts Out Jokes, Literally
- 74d-fe6-2c6 5y agoFor me as a huge Seinfeld fan this is practically painful to watch. Just yesterday some folks have been bragging about how Netfilx proactively matches compensation of their emps - great - maybe that's a mistake. Because given how stupid such a decision is, how bad their recommendations are, plus their home grown productions getting worse with every week passing by, I wonder if it isn't time to weed out a little. Seems like this company is a cesspool of ignorance and incompetence...
- Grakel 5y agoNot 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.
- gomox 5y agoDo you have a center channel?
- Grakel 5y agoNo, stereo speakers. Is it not feeding center into both or something?
- gomox 5y agoProbably not, or the mix might be off. It's worth checking. Your experience seems consistent with a missing center track (which contains most of the dialogue sound).
- navjack27 5y agoWhich really isn't the person you're replying tos problem. Stereo should just work you shouldn't need to get a center channel.
- gomox 5y agoIt might very well be his setup that's causing the problem.
- Grakel 5y agoChanging my setup might fix it but people watch a LOT of Netflix on stereo setups. Respectfully, this is their problem.
- gomox 5y agoIt depends on what you mean by "stereo setup". In the extremely common scenario of you having a 5.1 amp with just 2 speakers plugged in, it's your amp that's doing the downmix for you.
- jrootabega 5y agoJust remember you are probably part of a relatively small and relatively enlightened portion of the population. Netflix will gladly piss you off if it means they get more profit out of the bulk of their customer base, who are just interested in consuming more.
- iso1210 5y agoThis was the case with Simpsons when it came onto Disney Plus - they took the 4:3 and didn't just blow it to 14:9, but 16:9 -- throwing away a quarter of the original image. There's now an option to show the original aspect ratio, I didn't discover it for a long time though. Amazon prime on my phone blows up 16:9 material too, chopping off the top and bottom to fit the wider aspect ratio, unless you're careful to 'zoom out'
- mhb 5y agoSimilar issues with Buffy: https://www.avclub.com/fox-is-making-buffy-widescreen-and-joss-whedon-isn-t-ha-1798274895 https://www.avclub.com/fox-is-making-buffy-widescreen-and-jo...
- Andrex 5y agoThere are way more issues with Buffy on top of that too, and my Disney ire will forever be stoked until they rectify the situation (as the current owners of 20th Century Television.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F28XcxHxH6k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F28XcxHxH6k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZWNGq70Oyo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZWNGq70Oyo
- spiffage 5y agoThanks for telling us about the option to use the original aspect ratio! I'd basically given up and might never have found out.
- d3nj4l 5y agoIt's still not "fixed" because Indian Disney+, which is run by a Disney subsidiary, still doesn't allow you to watch the Simpsons in 4:3.
- fortran77 5y agoThe "Simpsons" on FXX is unwatchable. It's cropped/blown up to 16:9 and it looks like they took a scan meant for HD resolution and blew that up, so everything looks jaggy and blurry.
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- I-M-S 5y agoI was under the impression the series will be digitally remastered and resolution upscaled, which doesn't seem to be the case?
- vadfa 5y agoThe 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.
- weird-eye-issue 5y agoIt'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)
- coder543 5y agoIt is pretty amazing how well those sources have held up as other technology advanced. 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 https://www.red.com/v-raptor#section-vr-tech-specs [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RP3BT6kRJck https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RP3BT6kRJck [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPO6sVAMjOA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPO6sVAMjOA
- whitehouse3 5y agoThis isn’t unique to Netflix. The replays in syndication are also 16:9. As are the blu-ray releases. I finally bought the full series on DVD as I’d rather the original aspect ratio.
- vadfa 5y agoI watched this in 16:9 on Amazon Video (it's been available for years) and I disagree it's a problem. I think they did a great job. Yes, some things were cut out, but you could count them on one hand. Having said that they should've offered a 4:3 version. I would have watched that one version had they offered it.
- conradfr 5y ago"Having said that" ... https://youtu.be/RS49gJ2eKrY?t=37 https://youtu.be/RS49gJ2eKrY?t=37 More seriously I've watched the show multiple times in 16:9 and it's mostly fine but I've always thought the 4:3 scenes on YouTube looked better, so I had some hope we would have the option on Netflix. Also some people say the new transfer is too dark but I did not notice.
- vadfa 5y ago>"Having said that" ... https://youtu.be/RS49gJ2eKrY?t=37 https://youtu.be/RS49gJ2eKrY?t=37 I didn't expect anybody to get the joke. Congratulations ;-)
- tofukid 5y agoAlmost all TVs have an option to zoom to fit 4:3, so there’s no need to stream a cropped version. At least they should provide an option to view the original.
- jefftk 5y agoDone well, aspect ratio conversion involves editorial decisions: what part of the frame is most important to preserve? This isn't something TVs can automate. (Not advocating for cropping, though)
- conradfr 5y agoYes, watching Seinfeld on Netflix, the zoom-ins, the framing. I was enchanted.
- mkr-hn 5y agoI imagine the situation will improve in the future with TVs that have one or two on-board cores for handling trained models (like Apple's newer chips) that can run models trained on editorial pan-and-scans and try to apply it as an alternative to scaling.
- whywhywhywhy 5y agoJust another reason not to do it. The only person who has the right to make those decisions is the original creator and they’d more likely just say ship it as intended.
- TheCoelacanth 5y agoI don't think most of them are going to object in cases like this where they have access to the original film and can include footage that was cut off in the original broadcast, assuming the re-framing is done with the same care that the original framing was. They were making decisions based on a certain set of constraints that they didn't choose. They aren't going to have a problem with making different decisions when those constraints change. Taking what was originally broadcast and cropping that is always a travesty, though.
- foob 5y agoThere's a great blog post by David Simon on the conversion of The Wire from 4:3 to 16:9 [1]. It goes into a lot of depth about some of the trade-offs and considerations as well as the lack of communication from HBO. Unfortunately, the video examples don't seem to work anymore. I can't help but wonder if HBO sent YouTube a DMCA takedown for David Simon's clips from the post (or they got taken down automatically). It's pretty sad if the creator of a show can't even post short clips from it to illustrate some of the design decisions behind them. [1] - http://davidsimon.com/the-wire-hd-with-videos/ http://davidsimon.com/the-wire-hd-with-videos/
- f0e4c2f7 5y agoI remember reading that blog post at the time and being flabbergasted. If I remember the details correctly HBO wanted to do a cut similar to the Netflix one and Simon (and maybe others?) Went back through the entire series and meticulously edited the shots to still have the same meaning / context. The result by the way is incredible. The Wire is one of my favorite shows of all time anyway, but the fact that you can watch it today in such high quality is a real delight.
- kristofferR 5y agoIt's not really the same issue though, with The Wire they had access to original master footage that had a wider view, so the 16:9 versions didn't crop into the 4:3 footage, it just added footage on the sides of the image. https://i.imgur.com/SK1sPD9.jpg https://i.imgur.com/SK1sPD9.jpg
- dogma1138 5y agoIn some shots yes but not in all, in others the extra wide shot could not be used because production elements could be seen or it drastically changed the framing of the scene so cropping was also extensively used. You can see this in many other early 2000’s shows like TWW.
- remram 5y agoAlso the Buffy remaster, where interestingly they uncropped the footage, showing some of the filming crew, microphones, etc. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZWNGq70Oyo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZWNGq70Oyo (edit: already posted in this thread, oops: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28737063 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28737063)
- NelsonMinar 5y agoCropping is never the right choice for media presentation. Ever.
- simias 5y agoI think that it's much better for marketing it to a newer generation. I suspect that for somebody in their early 20s starting to watch Seinfield these days a 4:3 ratio would immediately make the show look dated. I mean surely they ran the numbers and figured out it was worth it? Otherwise it wouldn't be so common with so many TV shows. 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.
- Bud 5y ago"Make it look dated" is just not a good argument. There is no good argument. Cropping out huge amounts of the actual material is not justifiable. End of story.
- simias 5y agoI'm not voicing an opinion, I'm just trying to explain the trend, personally I also prefer the original version. Clearly for the right holders and broadcasters the cropping is perfectly justifiable and actually preferred.
- throwawayboise 5y agoThe show is dated. Nobody has a mobile phone. Very few computers (I think Jerry has a Mac Classic in his living room). The cars and street scenes are all from the 1990s. It's still good.
- goldenkey 5y agoMainstream media disagrees. In fact, cropping context is their main technique :-)
- krispyfi 5y agoIt's times like this that I think that piracy is the only way to preserve pop culture.
- draw_down 5y agoYes, another example is the 90s show Beavis & Butthead. A big part of the show was the two characters watching music videos and making fun of them. It’s a licensing nightmare so a lot of them got cut out in subsequent releases of the show.
- willcipriano 5y agoAnything with musical guests also suffers from this issue. There is no legal and complete copy of SNL that you can buy, no matter what you are willing to pay. A great deal of MTV's content isn't able to be sold, and MTV was probably the most important television station from a cultural perspective during it's heyday.
- einpoklum 5y agoArrgh, matey! Conservation ahoy.
- willcipriano 5y agoI maintain a cultural archive of about 60 terabytes for this purpose. I have both the original and upscaled Simpsons and Seinfeld, but I mostly focus on stuff that people never think about (ever hear of Jon Benjamin Has a Van, that sort of thing). As storage mediums and formats change I carry it forward, last year I started adding YouTube creators. Eventually I'll hand that task off to my daughter if she also sees that work as important.
- mkr-hn 5y agoYou can always ship it to the Internet Archive if she doesn't and you can't find a way to maintain an independent copy. Maybe by then you can set up some kind of organization like IA for the replication value.
- pessimizer 5y agoI have to believe that this has been rigorously tested, and that a lot of viewers are lost when they see black bars on their television. 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.
- navjack27 5y agoThe whole concept of black bars has always confused me. I know what they are I know what people generally accept the concept of what they are. but they aren't actually what they are. There are no black bars. The content is the size that it is and it's just stretching undistorted to your screen. It's not adding black bars. You're just not using parts of your screen because you shouldn't be using those parts of your screen. Maybe if content like that had a old console TV bezel on the side that had channel dials and the power button and a speaker on one side and half of a bezel and a blurry living room background with a picture of a family on the other that would make people feel more comfortable?
- gandalfian 5y agoFirst world irritation - when I finally got a 16:9 television they started making TV shows even wider so still letterboxed! Why? Grrr.
- Brian_K_White 5y agoWhy do you even care that there are letterboxes? Why must every pixel be lit just because they exist? Think of the screen like a wall in your house. You hang a painting on the wall. "Why do they make paintings in all these random sizes instead of filling this wall edge egde? Why? Grrr."
- gandalfian 5y agoHmm well you can rationalize these things either way but in the end I find it nicer to have the tv filled edge to edge. I just do.
- bananamerica 5y agoIt doesn't look as pleasant, that's all.
- bananamerica 5y agoLongtime fan since the 90s. Have rewatched in 16:9 many times. I don't care. Seinfeld is just not this kind of show.
- Brian_K_White 5y agoIt's a show about nothing, watched by people who choose to watch a show about nothing. Such people indeed would not care.
- bananamerica 5y agoI believe that you're joking, but let me cease this opportunity to address a common misconception. Seinfeld is obviously not about nothing, it's about the minutiae of culture and social interactions that was often ignored on shows from that era. The other reason why it's "about nothing" is that, unlike Cheers from example, the characters don't have real arcs, they don't become better human beings on any level. They never learn, never transcend, remaining pretty much the same selfish assholes they started as. There are no moral lessons. From that perspective, Seinfeld is about "nothing", but a nothing that is actually full of fun little obsessions of no consequence.
- ericpauley 5y ago16:9 reframes of Seinfeld have been around a long time. Did Netflix reframe anything or are they using these existing versions? For what it's worth the reframed version is not a simple crop, and in fact sometimes previously-unused parts of the film are used[1]. It's not just a crop/upscale of the original broadcasts, though perhaps the same effort didn't go into this reframing as The Wire, which as others have noted is excellent. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/seinfeld/comments/17xn28/original_vs_todays_broadcast/ https://www.reddit.com/r/seinfeld/comments/17xn28/original_v...
- gwbas1c 5y agoYeah, I used to see it in bars all the time 10 years ago. Full 16x9, full HD. It was clear that they went back to the original film to make an HD version.
- flotzam 5y agoJust to put a bit of competitive pressure on the butchers at Netflix, for Seinfeld S01-S04 there are 1080p torrents with the correct 4:3 aspect ratio: https://thepiratebay.org/search.php?q=seinfeld+aspect https://thepiratebay.org/search.php?q=seinfeld+aspect
- 0xdeadb00f 5y agoAt this point Netflix is practically begging us to use TPB :)
- gwbas1c 5y agoBack when the show broadcast for the first time, I didn't understand the big "Filmed in Panavision" logo at the end of the credits. Now I do: The producers filmed the show using equipment that would allow remastering for HDTV.
- baobabKoodaa 5y agoThis serves as another reminder that you get the high-quality product by pirating content, not by paying for it.
- dada78641 5y agoIf I had done directing or camera work during the 4:3 era and saw my work cropped to 16:9, I'd probably be furious. A lot of thought goes into framing a shot just right, making sure it has the right balance and composition. Even in cases where nothing too important goes missing, cropped video just looks really off. Oftentimes you'll see the tops of heads cut off at the top of the frame, or small details just on the verge of being visible. If something is framed just off center, the cropped version will show it very off center. Just look at this shot, for example: https://imgur.com/KKiMbWP https://imgur.com/KKiMbWP - nothing is missing, but the right character's bottom half is completely out of frame and it just looks incredibly weird. The floor also is totally invisible so you lose your sense of grounding. It's just a complete lack of respect for the hard work that went into creating these shows.
- bananamerica 5y agoAs a film major, you give 90s live audience sitcom cinematography too much credit. From a cinematography standpoint directing something like Seinfeld is quite standard. They don't even move the cameras and lights between episodes. The operators are instructed to keep whoever is speaking in the frame. I love Seinfeld to death, but this is no Citizen Kane. We're here for the performances, not for the camera work. Settle down a bit.
- dada78641 5y agoIt sounds to me like you just personally don't care about cinematography. Which is fine, but that makes it surprising to me you open with "I'm a film major", as if that means your view is the "correct" one and everyone else just doesn't know what they're talking about. I'd figure someone who studied film would care about things like this even if we're talking about an ostensibly "bad" TV show. Really, I don't even care about Seinfeld in particular. I've never watched it and I never will, because it's not my type of show. But this isn't about Seinfeld, and I'm not personally inconvenienced by this or angry about it. I'm saying this because it's just universally a bad idea to cut 4:3 content into 16:9, regardless of what it is. It could the lowest tier commercial garbage or Twin Peaks or anything in between. You will always make things look awkward, and the viewer will subconsciously notice. This goes even for shows that had poor framing to begin. And of course that's not even touching on the fact that, in this case, it actually just ruined a scene by making the most important part invisible. And personally, I think it's not up to any individual to say "I consider this work to be unworthy of respect" and start messing around with it and diminishing the experience for the people that do care. Someone else might be deeply invested in something you consider completely unremarkable. What's more, you'd have to expect that some TV shows will end up getting remastered, then cropped, and then the masters get lost before a proper release is ever done. Again, not talking about Seinfeld in particular, but you'd be amazed at how many modern works become lost media even today, and this sort of thing isn't helping.