8 ms·

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

403 points by tosh 1y ago

h1fra 1y ago
Great article, I really thought it was a recropping like friends (and many others). So weird that they just forgot about CGI.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- globular-toast 1y ago
  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.
  - afavour 1y ago
    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.
    - gchamonlive 1y ago
      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.
  - embedding-shape 1y ago
    > You would have thought people in the business would know about this. People in the business world seems to only know business, and that's the limit of what they care about. Place these people into the arts, and you quickly see how important it is to have at least a single ounce of care when you work on projects where you want some level of quality. But I think HBO, Netflix and most TV/streaming services are run by business-people still, as they think it's a numbers game, not a arts game. Eventually someone will understand and take the world by storm, but seemingly not yet.
    - lotsofpulp 1y ago
      >But I think HBO, Netflix and most TV/streaming services are run by business-people still, as they think it's a numbers game, not a arts game. Eventually someone will understand and take the world by storm, but seemingly not yet. Because they are businesses? Just because something is art doesn't mean expenses can be more than revenue. There was an enormous increase in the supply of entertainment over the last 20 years, in the form of Youtube, TikTok, Instagram, Reddit, WhatsApp, HN, video games, etc. Demand stayed the same, maxed out at 24 hours per day. One should expect changes in quality and quantity and price in a market with drastically shifting supply and demand curves.
      - code_for_monkey 1y ago
        Dont criticize the billion dollar corporation >:(
        lotsofpulp 1y ago
        I am not criticizing anyone. Just explaining the dynamics that led to the dramatic reduction in value of the legacy businesses that produced professional video content, and the inevitable repercussions.
    - ryandrake 1y ago
      > People in the business world seems to only know business, and that's the limit of what they care about. You’d think these people would go off and be executives at a ball bearing manufacturing company or something and leave the arts alone, but it never happens that way.
  - iso1631 1y ago
    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.
    - globular-toast 11mo ago
      > 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. I thought it was a lot, but had no idea it was that high. Man, phones really are like crack to us. One of the main reasons I like having a projector setup at home and no "TV" is when I put a movie on it means a) it's worth dedicating hours to and b) we really actually watch it because the room is dark and it fills our field of view. All this time I've been wondering how people watch the mindless crap that's on TV. I can feel my brain rotting away as I look at that stuff. But now I realise the answer: they're not watching it. How depressing. Well I guess I'll have to make do with ~50 years of quality and if it ever changes I'll consider it a bonus.
- klustregrif 1y ago
  They didn’t just forget about CHI, they got all the way to releasing this to customers without ever watching it themselves. This is crazy levels of incompetence.
- meijer 1y ago
  Really surprisingly bad work by HBO.
- vessenes 1y ago
  https://www.vulture.com/article/mad-men-hbo-max-4k-rerelease-problems.html 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.
  - indigodaddy 1y ago
    So have they fixed everything? You'd think when it's this bad they'd just pull it for a day or however long it takes to fix.
walthamstow 1y ago
Damn, that's terrible. Reminds me of The Simpsons being cropped into 16:9 for Disney and obscuring the joke that all the Duff brews come from one pipe.
- haunter 1y ago
  You can switch to the original 4:3 though Edit: and I'm getting flagged lol The Simpsons > Details > Remastered aspect ratio > Off https://i.imgur.com/pQohgQp.jpeg https://i.imgur.com/pQohgQp.jpeg
  - crtasm 1y ago
    That option wasn't added until some time later.
    - conradfr 1y ago
      I wish Netflix did it for Seinfeld.
      - easterncalculus 1y ago
        The fact you can't see the pothole in the pothole episode still cracks me up. Ironically the kind of plotline you'd see in a Seinfeld episode. https://www.indiewire.com/features/general/seinfeld-netflix-aspect-ratio-pothole-cropped-1234668934/ https://www.indiewire.com/features/general/seinfeld-netflix-...
  - firmretention 1y ago
    And thank god for that, because the 4:3 remasters are quite good, and IMO the best way to watch the old episodes on big screens. They've just remastered enough to make them more crisp and less pixelated but not so much that they look like a flash cartoon like the previous 16:9 TV "remasters".
- maxerickson 1y ago
  I've had people make the Duff argument about real beers. Putting bad batches in a different can is a great way to do quality control on your main brand though.
thrdbndndn 1y ago
Great article. Can someone explain what was wrong with that _Friends_ screenshot? I can't tell.
- i_am_proteus 1y ago
  There's a window-hole in what should be an exterior apartment wall facing a hallway. Right side of the screen.
- swores 1y ago
  They never intended to show anything to the right of the doorframe on TV, so there's a random sign on the wall and a big hole in the wall (which makes sense if you are a camera crew wanting to film a sitcom in the apartment, that doesn't make so much sense in the fictional world that anyone would have a big rectangle cut out of the wall between their apartment and the hallway).
  - dboreham 1y ago
    The apartment was a bunch of 2x4s and plywood in the middle of a big sound stage building on the Warner lot in Burbank. It's still there afaik.
  - onionisafruit 1y ago
    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.
    - swores 1y ago
      I might be wrong but I don't remember the original framing ever showing the sign, so I assumed (perhaps incorrectly) that it was there ready for them to move in shot if they ever wanted it, but that as seen in this image it's not supposed to be on camera
      - joezydeco 1y ago
globular-toast 1y ago
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?
- fredoralive 1y ago
  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?
  - whycome 1y ago
    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.
- liampulles 1y ago
  Probably more a function of "shit happens" when doing something new (making and using a "vomit hose") in a big, multi-functional project (shooting a TV show).
- the_af 1y ago
  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).
  - nayroclade 1y ago
    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.
alexpotato 1y ago
A side story on the techniques for restoration: I'm guessing about 10-15 years ago I was watching a documentary on the re-release of Ken Burns Civil War. They were highlighting the digital tools they were using to restore and enhance the original film capture for new streaming services etc. They showed one of the restorers using a fascinating tool where one window was a video feed of the original film's "first pass" to digital. One of the landscape scenes had a small smudge in the upper right hand corner so the restorer pauses the feed, goes back frame by frame and then was able to drag and drop the frame into another window where he used Photoshop like tools to fix everything and then drag and drop it back into the "feed". Seemed VERY efficient and shows how good tools can really accelerate a workflow. I'm not sure if the above scene is in the below quick documentary but there are a lot of other cool "behind the scenes of restoration" moments: https://www.pbs.org/video/civil-war-restoring-civil-war/ https://www.pbs.org/video/civil-war-restoring-civil-war/
- ErroneousBosh 1y ago
  The documentary is no longer available (or, possibly, only available in the US), but the tool you're describing is pretty common in digital video editing. In DaVinci Resolve the dustbuster tool will look a few frames ahead and behind of the one where you want to paint out a mark, and make its best guess based on that. I've used it to paint out tape dropouts on VHS transfers with remarkable success.
  - stogot 1y ago
    Do you do VHS transfers professionally or your own personal VhS? Stacks of VHS sittin in a corner that I need to decide what to do with
    - ErroneousBosh 1y ago
      I got into it because my parents produced a video about the area I grew up in, back in the late 80s, and I only have VHS copies. The master tape is probably lost but the guy who shot it said there might be a copy made about 20 years ago on DVD that the editor made for archival purposes. Since then it's turned out that people want their old tapes copied over quite a bit. I don't do it "professionally" simply because I cannot afford to dedicate that sort of time to it, because people actually expect it to be done more quickly than "okay today I have a full day of Teams calls where I don't need to say much so I'll get on with something fun" ;-)
Dumblydorr 1y ago
Unrelated: does anyone else experience huge lag with HBO streaming app? It’s easily the slowest I regularly use on Samsung smart tv.
- etothet 1y ago
  On an Apple TV with first gen Homepods connected it is incredibly laggy. Specifically rewind and fast forward take sometimes up to 10 seconds to respond. And even then they never seem to get me to the correct location. It’s pretty maddening.
- 0cf8612b2e1e 1y ago
  If we are going to dog pile on streaming problems… HBO is the worst about remembering what episode I just watched. Finish episode 6? Next time you go to click next episode, it might play #5. Incredibly annoying, coupled with their interface which makes selecting episodes clunky. You just sent me how many GBs of data, how could you forget where I am?
mapontosevenths 1y ago
The 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.
- liampulles 1y ago
  I have the PAL DVD release, and I have to say the color grading has never been great, although it obviously at least has the correct effects applied.
  - binaryturtle 1y ago
    The PAL release is already the bad copy (starting with season 4 I think). You already had odd stuff in view that wasn't supposed to be visible. The only way to watch this show properly now is the 4:3 NTSC DVD release. I think the recent streaming releases also have the music altered in many places. The show just got <bleep>ed up basically. It's a real shame.
    - liampulles 1y ago
      Hmm, I didn't notice any "odd stuff in view" when I watched it, so at least it wasn't obvious. I'll have to keep an eye out next time I watch
- phantasmish 1y ago
  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!”)
liampulles 1y ago
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-hd-blu-ray/index.html 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.
- actionfromafar 1y ago
  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.
  - gwbas1c 1y ago
    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.)
    - dylan604 1y ago
      35mm film is more square than rectangle. When you shoot wider aspect ratios, the whole frame is exposed. The eyepiece on the camera has lines on them to allow the DP to see the framing for the desired aspect ratio vs the whole frame. So it wasn't just a Titanic as example, it was pretty much all film was shot like that. When digital cameras like the ones from Red came out, you can tell it the aspect ratio so it only saves the active pixels of the full sensor and ignore all of the out of aspect pixels. That's a brave operator doing that, and I've only seen it in the wild once.
    - turnsout 1y ago
      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."
rob74 1y ago
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-remember https://animationobsessive.substack.com/p/the-toy-story-you-...)
- parkersweb 1y ago
  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...
  - mapontosevenths 1y ago
    A few years back I had the sudden realization that I'd upgraded all my video equipment to HD and then 4k, but hadn't really done anything with my audio. So I went out and got nice equipment (Nice DAC, Headphones, Speakers, Etc). One of the first things I learned once I could hear music properly was that I had favorite "versions" of different albums. They truly are NOT created equally, but it's not something you can really appreciate on a crummy Bluetooth headset either. Once you can you really start to appreciate the work that folks like your friend do.
    - alexfoo 1y ago
      > Once you can you really start to appreciate the work that folks like your friend do. That can be a real double edged sword. When you realise how good things can be it means many of the everyday/average things can become intolerable. I'm happy that I've got slightly dodgy eyesight in that I don't really care whether something is in HD or 4K (I can still tell if my wife has selected the SD version of a TV channel, and I'm still way above the minimum standard to be able to drive). I'm also happy I didn't inherit my father's audiophile hearing. I can do blind listening tests of different bits of audio equipment and barely hear the difference between them whilst my father (even in his 80's) can provide a whole list of things that are wrong/better/different about each of them (and he's not just making stuff up). The biggest test is that I can also drink most supermarket instant coffee without complaint. I've got some friends that walk 25 minutes each way to their favourite coffee vendor multiple times a day as "everything closer is awful", but then that's more about them having a nice routine to get them away from their desk.
egorfine 1y ago
Prerelease 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.
- egorfine 11mo ago
  *Press release
colechristensen 1y ago
This could be an EXCELLENT marketing opportunity. Set up a site for fans to point out errors and vote on them. Then have HBO have just one editor interact with fans on the site, fix the most popular errors, and talk about them, maybe stream a little of the editing process.
- intrasight 1y ago
  True
- low_tech_love 1y ago
  Yes a bit like modern car companies do by pushing out whatever untested experimental feature they have and let the customers figure them out (or die).
  - esafak 1y ago
    Or just regular software companies. Microsoft's been beta testing on actual users since MS-DOS!
- bilekas 1y ago
  That would require HBO to actually care.. They've already been paid, I don't see them fixing any of this for the streaming service.
  - lotsofpulp 1y ago
    >Update: the season one episodes are being updated live on HBO Max to their correct positions and titles. The corrected title: >They've already been paid HBO sells a subscription. Presumably, their goal is to be paid again, and again, and again.
  - colechristensen 1y ago
    marketing for people to engage with HBO Max and Mad Men... they haven't "already been paid"
- 1y ago
Plankaluel 1y ago
I think this is just another case of "over-optimization to make shareholders happy in the end ruins everything". I.e., the normal enshittification problem. Pretty sure all of that does make financial sense: - Being able to write 4k will bring people in to re-watching/watching the show for the first time. - Redoing the CGI, etc., would have cost a lot of money. - Very few people will cancel their subscription or stop watching because of stuff like that - So in the end, no one cares I.e., it makes financial sense to do the minimum possible. Sure, if this were a project you care about, if it were your company that you are also emotionally invested in and maybe proud of, etc., things might look different. But your actual customers are shareholders, which in the end are predominantly giant ETF brokers and pension funds, that don't care about anything else but what your stock price looks like and whether you are in the S&P500. They probably don't even know what your company is doing. Sorry, rant over ;P
- Retric 1y ago
  Only if you’re optimizing for easily measured metrics alone. The value of a companies brand is not just some arbitrary number on a balance sheet it does influence the easily measured metrics like the number of customers you have across multiple segments in a noisy way. Which then influences your profits, which those institutional investors do care about. That said, the general public is more price conscious than most people on HN. Walmart is generously rewarded for finding a good price:quality match for a huge segment of the population.
  - forgetfulness 1y ago
    Reputation will only become more important as AI generated content permeates society, the name behind what you’ll read, watch or listen will be a bigger factor in whether anyone would commit minutes to hours to consuming what could be slop. I think this erosion of trust will have far reaching consequences and people will become less open to ideas and experiences front strangers. Running your brand into the ground in the early days will be costly.
- venturecruelty 1y ago
  You're absolutely right, and I don't know why more people aren't talking about that instead of just pointing out aspect ratio issues in their favorite movies and TV shows... This is the end goal of a system that doesn't think beyond next quarter, that wants to accumulate vast sums of money above all else, and that treats customers as an annoying side effect of the line going up. They'd take our money and give us nothing, if they could get away with it. Based on what passes for products these days (seriously? A toilet with a camera?) we're very nearly there.
runamuck 1y ago
100% chance I would have never noticed the "puke hose" tech in the background. I never saw the Gorilla in that classic "basketball video".
- SoftTalker 1y ago
  Exactly what I was going to say. I didn't even see it in the still photo until I looked carefully. The eye focuses on the main action, and that area is relatively small. The brain "fills in" the detail around your center of vision. Illusionists exploit this regularly. There was a post here maybe a month ago that exposes how small the actual "high definition" center of vision (fovea centralis) is. You can really see detail only in a small area at the center of your vision. Outside of that, the brain fills in what it thinks should be there. https://www.shadertoy.com/view/4dsXzM https://www.shadertoy.com/view/4dsXzM
- nilslindemann 1y ago
  You mean the moonwalking bear? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7hgJpfn3zXw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7hgJpfn3zXw
fusslo 1y ago
personally, I started re-watching Mad Men JUST because of these errors! I love audio commentary, behind the scenes, and other looks behind the veil. I would love the ability to see more of unedited, 'raw', or 'mistakes' in older tv shows. Hell, I would even pay for it. Whats really interesting to me is that no one 'decided' what's worthy of inclusion like they do with behind the scenes stuff
- sandspar 11mo ago
  You might want to look into workprints! They're versions of movies that are shown to test audiences, executives, or internal screeners. They're often pre-sound mixing, pre-editing, pre-VFX. So you get stuff like clip art explosions where later VFX will go, or bare production dialogue where you can hear the room echo and crew footsteps. They're super neat!
PyWoody 1y ago
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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Bamboo#Casting
deleted 1y ago
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dbg31415 1y ago
I don't get why they bother changing the aspect ratio in the first place. What audience is saying, "I want a weird one-off version of the show in HD, please"? Most of these shows were shot for 4:3. Directors framed for 4:3, lit for 4:3, blocked scenes for 4:3, and even built their special effects around 4:3. Stretching that work into widescreen feels a bit like deciding to colorize Citizen Kane, Dr. Strangelove, or The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. It solves a problem no one actually has. Viewers are already used to black bars, and we watch lower-resolution content constantly. Vertical phone clips shot by amateurs on TikTok, grainy GIFs, and IMAX footage down-scaled to fit our phone (and connection). Content that wasn't designed to fill the entire screen isn't the issue. From what I've seen, most of these old shows end up on free or bargain streaming services packed with ads. I watched an episode of Highway to Heaven with my dad where they sped up the dialogue and trimmed pauses, squeezed the credits into a tiny picture-in-picture box, and still lopped off another minute so the episode ended mid-sentence. All of that was just to make room for extra commercial slots the original show was never designed to accommodate. Disgusting, really... though I suppose you get what you pay for. Sticking with the original 4:3 and simply adding pillarbox bars is cleaner, simpler, and far more respectful -- and ultimately more enjoyable for the audience. Relevant : * "That Was A Mistake": Steven Spielberg Admits He Regrets Removing Guns From E.T. // https://screenrant.com/et-guns-removed-steven-spielberg-regret-response/ https://screenrant.com/et-guns-removed-steven-spielberg-regr... * 5 Worst Changes Star Wars Made From The Original Cuts // https://screenrant.com/worst-changes-star-wars-special-editions/ https://screenrant.com/worst-changes-star-wars-special-editi... * 'Casablanca' gets colorized, but don't play it again, Ted | Interviews | Roger Ebert // https://www.rogerebert.com/interviews/casablanca-gets-colorized-but-dont-play-it-again-ted https://www.rogerebert.com/interviews/casablanca-gets-colori...
- op00to 1y ago
  > Viewers are already used to black bars, and we watch lower-resolution content constantly. This is actually not as common as you think. It is common for "normies" to see 4:3 and think "This is not HD". People really, really hate black bars. What's more surprising to me is that content providers don't keep stuff in 4:3 and just shove ads on the side.
- mjg59 1y ago
MaoSYJ 1y ago
I remember seeing how TV had to take into account numerous formats, specially in the transition from tube to flat screens. Shame that no one takes that into account any more. If you have an old TV with an off format you will miss a portion of the intended frame.
tonymet 1y ago
Seems to have been a deliberate incident, just look at all of the free PR on social media from this “accident” . Has HBOMax ever been on Hackernews except for bad naming ? Their app isn’t otherwise noteworthy
- barbazoo 1y ago
  Not working for me. This makes me think they're lazy and greedy, doesn't make me want to go and consume their slop.
  - tonymet 11mo ago
    i have to admit it worked for me. I recently rewatched madmen, but replayed the HBO distribution to see the 4k improvements. it's much more vibrant
Teever 1y ago
> Reframing old shows to fit a new aspect ratio is antithetical to the spirit of media restoration, and cheapens the future of our shared culture. The folks at the studios who insist on hobbling their most classic television shows are really bad at their jobs. I disgree with this. I'm fine with companies putting out new versions of something that are experimental like this, but I tihnk that they need to both acknowledge that they're experimental and put out versions that are true to the original intent.
knorker 1y ago
Relatedly, if anyone has a copy of Battle Royale before they ruined literally every effects shot with the digital special edition, please make yourself known to a member of staff. It's not even that it aged poorly. The effects they added are so bad that it's hard to see what happened. Like a guy's getting shot, and then they've spliced in a red dodgeball exploding, as if his head completely exploded. But one second later he's still alive. Huh? There's even behind the scenes of them being completely happy with these grade school MS Paint BS.
butlike 1y ago
I'd pay a separate subscription if I got to watch all these workprints. Fascinating stuff.
csours 1y ago
Very slightly related: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fb07MT5fcEE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fb07MT5fcEE A grab bag of edits by 'Craven in Outer Space' on Star Trek TNG Season 1 - some of which are related to the restoration/re-release showing things that were not easily seen on old TVs.
sandspar 11mo ago
In a way I actually prefer these versions. I love seeing how the sausage gets made. It turns the show into a quasi making-of documentary and that's a neat opportunity.

403 points by tosh 1y ago

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

deleted 1y ago
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globular-toast 1y ago
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.
- afavour 1y ago
  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.
  - gchamonlive 1y ago
    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.
- embedding-shape 1y ago
  > You would have thought people in the business would know about this. People in the business world seems to only know business, and that's the limit of what they care about. Place these people into the arts, and you quickly see how important it is to have at least a single ounce of care when you work on projects where you want some level of quality. But I think HBO, Netflix and most TV/streaming services are run by business-people still, as they think it's a numbers game, not a arts game. Eventually someone will understand and take the world by storm, but seemingly not yet.
  - lotsofpulp 1y ago
    >But I think HBO, Netflix and most TV/streaming services are run by business-people still, as they think it's a numbers game, not a arts game. Eventually someone will understand and take the world by storm, but seemingly not yet. Because they are businesses? Just because something is art doesn't mean expenses can be more than revenue. There was an enormous increase in the supply of entertainment over the last 20 years, in the form of Youtube, TikTok, Instagram, Reddit, WhatsApp, HN, video games, etc. Demand stayed the same, maxed out at 24 hours per day. One should expect changes in quality and quantity and price in a market with drastically shifting supply and demand curves.
    - code_for_monkey 1y ago
      Dont criticize the billion dollar corporation >:(
      - lotsofpulp 1y ago
        I am not criticizing anyone. Just explaining the dynamics that led to the dramatic reduction in value of the legacy businesses that produced professional video content, and the inevitable repercussions.
  - ryandrake 1y ago
    > People in the business world seems to only know business, and that's the limit of what they care about. You’d think these people would go off and be executives at a ball bearing manufacturing company or something and leave the arts alone, but it never happens that way.
- iso1631 1y ago
  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.
  - globular-toast 11mo ago
    > 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. I thought it was a lot, but had no idea it was that high. Man, phones really are like crack to us. One of the main reasons I like having a projector setup at home and no "TV" is when I put a movie on it means a) it's worth dedicating hours to and b) we really actually watch it because the room is dark and it fills our field of view. All this time I've been wondering how people watch the mindless crap that's on TV. I can feel my brain rotting away as I look at that stuff. But now I realise the answer: they're not watching it. How depressing. Well I guess I'll have to make do with ~50 years of quality and if it ever changes I'll consider it a bonus.
klustregrif 1y ago
They didn’t just forget about CHI, they got all the way to releasing this to customers without ever watching it themselves. This is crazy levels of incompetence.
meijer 1y ago
Really surprisingly bad work by HBO.
vessenes 1y ago
https://www.vulture.com/article/mad-men-hbo-max-4k-rerelease-problems.html 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.
- indigodaddy 1y ago
  So have they fixed everything? You'd think when it's this bad they'd just pull it for a day or however long it takes to fix.

walthamstow 1y ago

Damn, that's terrible. Reminds me of The Simpsons being cropped into 16:9 for Disney and obscuring the joke that all the Duff brews come from one pipe.

haunter 1y ago
You can switch to the original 4:3 though Edit: and I'm getting flagged lol The Simpsons > Details > Remastered aspect ratio > Off https://i.imgur.com/pQohgQp.jpeg https://i.imgur.com/pQohgQp.jpeg
- crtasm 1y ago
  That option wasn't added until some time later.
  - conradfr 1y ago
    I wish Netflix did it for Seinfeld.
    - easterncalculus 1y ago
      The fact you can't see the pothole in the pothole episode still cracks me up. Ironically the kind of plotline you'd see in a Seinfeld episode. https://www.indiewire.com/features/general/seinfeld-netflix-aspect-ratio-pothole-cropped-1234668934/ https://www.indiewire.com/features/general/seinfeld-netflix-...
- firmretention 1y ago
  And thank god for that, because the 4:3 remasters are quite good, and IMO the best way to watch the old episodes on big screens. They've just remastered enough to make them more crisp and less pixelated but not so much that they look like a flash cartoon like the previous 16:9 TV "remasters".
maxerickson 1y ago
I've had people make the Duff argument about real beers. Putting bad batches in a different can is a great way to do quality control on your main brand though.

thrdbndndn 1y ago

Great article. Can someone explain what was wrong with that _Friends_ screenshot? I can't tell.

i_am_proteus 1y ago
There's a window-hole in what should be an exterior apartment wall facing a hallway. Right side of the screen.
swores 1y ago
They never intended to show anything to the right of the doorframe on TV, so there's a random sign on the wall and a big hole in the wall (which makes sense if you are a camera crew wanting to film a sitcom in the apartment, that doesn't make so much sense in the fictional world that anyone would have a big rectangle cut out of the wall between their apartment and the hallway).
- dboreham 1y ago
  The apartment was a bunch of 2x4s and plywood in the middle of a big sound stage building on the Warner lot in Burbank. It's still there afaik.
- onionisafruit 1y ago
  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.
  - swores 1y ago
    I might be wrong but I don't remember the original framing ever showing the sign, so I assumed (perhaps incorrectly) that it was there ready for them to move in shot if they ever wanted it, but that as seen in this image it's not supposed to be on camera
    - joezydeco 1y ago

globular-toast 1y ago

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?

fredoralive 1y ago
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?
- whycome 1y ago
  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.
liampulles 1y ago
Probably more a function of "shit happens" when doing something new (making and using a "vomit hose") in a big, multi-functional project (shooting a TV show).
the_af 1y ago
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).
- nayroclade 1y ago
  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.

alexpotato 1y ago

A side story on the techniques for restoration: I'm guessing about 10-15 years ago I was watching a documentary on the re-release of Ken Burns Civil War. They were highlighting the digital tools they were using to restore and enhance the original film capture for new streaming services etc. They showed one of the restorers using a fascinating tool where one window was a video feed of the original film's "first pass" to digital. One of the landscape scenes had a small smudge in the upper right hand corner so the restorer pauses the feed, goes back frame by frame and then was able to drag and drop the frame into another window where he used Photoshop like tools to fix everything and then drag and drop it back into the "feed". Seemed VERY efficient and shows how good tools can really accelerate a workflow. I'm not sure if the above scene is in the below quick documentary but there are a lot of other cool "behind the scenes of restoration" moments: https://www.pbs.org/video/civil-war-restoring-civil-war/ https://www.pbs.org/video/civil-war-restoring-civil-war/

ErroneousBosh 1y ago
The documentary is no longer available (or, possibly, only available in the US), but the tool you're describing is pretty common in digital video editing. In DaVinci Resolve the dustbuster tool will look a few frames ahead and behind of the one where you want to paint out a mark, and make its best guess based on that. I've used it to paint out tape dropouts on VHS transfers with remarkable success.
- stogot 1y ago
  Do you do VHS transfers professionally or your own personal VhS? Stacks of VHS sittin in a corner that I need to decide what to do with
  - ErroneousBosh 1y ago
    I got into it because my parents produced a video about the area I grew up in, back in the late 80s, and I only have VHS copies. The master tape is probably lost but the guy who shot it said there might be a copy made about 20 years ago on DVD that the editor made for archival purposes. Since then it's turned out that people want their old tapes copied over quite a bit. I don't do it "professionally" simply because I cannot afford to dedicate that sort of time to it, because people actually expect it to be done more quickly than "okay today I have a full day of Teams calls where I don't need to say much so I'll get on with something fun" ;-)

Dumblydorr 1y ago

Unrelated: does anyone else experience huge lag with HBO streaming app? It’s easily the slowest I regularly use on Samsung smart tv.

etothet 1y ago
On an Apple TV with first gen Homepods connected it is incredibly laggy. Specifically rewind and fast forward take sometimes up to 10 seconds to respond. And even then they never seem to get me to the correct location. It’s pretty maddening.
0cf8612b2e1e 1y ago
If we are going to dog pile on streaming problems… HBO is the worst about remembering what episode I just watched. Finish episode 6? Next time you go to click next episode, it might play #5. Incredibly annoying, coupled with their interface which makes selecting episodes clunky. You just sent me how many GBs of data, how could you forget where I am?

mapontosevenths 1y ago

The 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.

liampulles 1y ago
I have the PAL DVD release, and I have to say the color grading has never been great, although it obviously at least has the correct effects applied.
- binaryturtle 1y ago
  The PAL release is already the bad copy (starting with season 4 I think). You already had odd stuff in view that wasn't supposed to be visible. The only way to watch this show properly now is the 4:3 NTSC DVD release. I think the recent streaming releases also have the music altered in many places. The show just got <bleep>ed up basically. It's a real shame.
  - liampulles 1y ago
    Hmm, I didn't notice any "odd stuff in view" when I watched it, so at least it wasn't obvious. I'll have to keep an eye out next time I watch
phantasmish 1y ago
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!”)

liampulles 1y ago

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-hd-blu-ray/index.html 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.

actionfromafar 1y ago
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.
- gwbas1c 1y ago
  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.)
  - dylan604 1y ago
    35mm film is more square than rectangle. When you shoot wider aspect ratios, the whole frame is exposed. The eyepiece on the camera has lines on them to allow the DP to see the framing for the desired aspect ratio vs the whole frame. So it wasn't just a Titanic as example, it was pretty much all film was shot like that. When digital cameras like the ones from Red came out, you can tell it the aspect ratio so it only saves the active pixels of the full sensor and ignore all of the out of aspect pixels. That's a brave operator doing that, and I've only seen it in the wild once.
  - turnsout 1y ago
    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."

rob74 1y ago

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-remember https://animationobsessive.substack.com/p/the-toy-story-you-...)

parkersweb 1y ago
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...
- mapontosevenths 1y ago
  A few years back I had the sudden realization that I'd upgraded all my video equipment to HD and then 4k, but hadn't really done anything with my audio. So I went out and got nice equipment (Nice DAC, Headphones, Speakers, Etc). One of the first things I learned once I could hear music properly was that I had favorite "versions" of different albums. They truly are NOT created equally, but it's not something you can really appreciate on a crummy Bluetooth headset either. Once you can you really start to appreciate the work that folks like your friend do.
  - alexfoo 1y ago
    > Once you can you really start to appreciate the work that folks like your friend do. That can be a real double edged sword. When you realise how good things can be it means many of the everyday/average things can become intolerable. I'm happy that I've got slightly dodgy eyesight in that I don't really care whether something is in HD or 4K (I can still tell if my wife has selected the SD version of a TV channel, and I'm still way above the minimum standard to be able to drive). I'm also happy I didn't inherit my father's audiophile hearing. I can do blind listening tests of different bits of audio equipment and barely hear the difference between them whilst my father (even in his 80's) can provide a whole list of things that are wrong/better/different about each of them (and he's not just making stuff up). The biggest test is that I can also drink most supermarket instant coffee without complaint. I've got some friends that walk 25 minutes each way to their favourite coffee vendor multiple times a day as "everything closer is awful", but then that's more about them having a nice routine to get them away from their desk.

egorfine 1y ago

Prerelease 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.

egorfine 11mo ago
*Press release

colechristensen 1y ago

This could be an EXCELLENT marketing opportunity. Set up a site for fans to point out errors and vote on them. Then have HBO have just one editor interact with fans on the site, fix the most popular errors, and talk about them, maybe stream a little of the editing process.

intrasight 1y ago
True
low_tech_love 1y ago
Yes a bit like modern car companies do by pushing out whatever untested experimental feature they have and let the customers figure them out (or die).
- esafak 1y ago
  Or just regular software companies. Microsoft's been beta testing on actual users since MS-DOS!
bilekas 1y ago
That would require HBO to actually care.. They've already been paid, I don't see them fixing any of this for the streaming service.
- lotsofpulp 1y ago
  >Update: the season one episodes are being updated live on HBO Max to their correct positions and titles. The corrected title: >They've already been paid HBO sells a subscription. Presumably, their goal is to be paid again, and again, and again.
- colechristensen 1y ago
  marketing for people to engage with HBO Max and Mad Men... they haven't "already been paid"
1y ago

Plankaluel 1y ago

I think this is just another case of "over-optimization to make shareholders happy in the end ruins everything". I.e., the normal enshittification problem. Pretty sure all of that does make financial sense: - Being able to write 4k will bring people in to re-watching/watching the show for the first time. - Redoing the CGI, etc., would have cost a lot of money. - Very few people will cancel their subscription or stop watching because of stuff like that - So in the end, no one cares I.e., it makes financial sense to do the minimum possible. Sure, if this were a project you care about, if it were your company that you are also emotionally invested in and maybe proud of, etc., things might look different. But your actual customers are shareholders, which in the end are predominantly giant ETF brokers and pension funds, that don't care about anything else but what your stock price looks like and whether you are in the S&P500. They probably don't even know what your company is doing. Sorry, rant over ;P

Retric 1y ago
Only if you’re optimizing for easily measured metrics alone. The value of a companies brand is not just some arbitrary number on a balance sheet it does influence the easily measured metrics like the number of customers you have across multiple segments in a noisy way. Which then influences your profits, which those institutional investors do care about. That said, the general public is more price conscious than most people on HN. Walmart is generously rewarded for finding a good price:quality match for a huge segment of the population.
- forgetfulness 1y ago
  Reputation will only become more important as AI generated content permeates society, the name behind what you’ll read, watch or listen will be a bigger factor in whether anyone would commit minutes to hours to consuming what could be slop. I think this erosion of trust will have far reaching consequences and people will become less open to ideas and experiences front strangers. Running your brand into the ground in the early days will be costly.
venturecruelty 1y ago
You're absolutely right, and I don't know why more people aren't talking about that instead of just pointing out aspect ratio issues in their favorite movies and TV shows... This is the end goal of a system that doesn't think beyond next quarter, that wants to accumulate vast sums of money above all else, and that treats customers as an annoying side effect of the line going up. They'd take our money and give us nothing, if they could get away with it. Based on what passes for products these days (seriously? A toilet with a camera?) we're very nearly there.

runamuck 1y ago

100% chance I would have never noticed the "puke hose" tech in the background. I never saw the Gorilla in that classic "basketball video".

SoftTalker 1y ago
Exactly what I was going to say. I didn't even see it in the still photo until I looked carefully. The eye focuses on the main action, and that area is relatively small. The brain "fills in" the detail around your center of vision. Illusionists exploit this regularly. There was a post here maybe a month ago that exposes how small the actual "high definition" center of vision (fovea centralis) is. You can really see detail only in a small area at the center of your vision. Outside of that, the brain fills in what it thinks should be there. https://www.shadertoy.com/view/4dsXzM https://www.shadertoy.com/view/4dsXzM
nilslindemann 1y ago
You mean the moonwalking bear? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7hgJpfn3zXw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7hgJpfn3zXw

fusslo 1y ago

personally, I started re-watching Mad Men JUST because of these errors! I love audio commentary, behind the scenes, and other looks behind the veil. I would love the ability to see more of unedited, 'raw', or 'mistakes' in older tv shows. Hell, I would even pay for it. Whats really interesting to me is that no one 'decided' what's worthy of inclusion like they do with behind the scenes stuff

sandspar 11mo ago
You might want to look into workprints! They're versions of movies that are shown to test audiences, executives, or internal screeners. They're often pre-sound mixing, pre-editing, pre-VFX. So you get stuff like clip art explosions where later VFX will go, or bare production dialogue where you can hear the room echo and crew footsteps. They're super neat!

PyWoody 1y ago

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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Bamboo#Casting

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

dbg31415 1y ago

I don't get why they bother changing the aspect ratio in the first place. What audience is saying, "I want a weird one-off version of the show in HD, please"? Most of these shows were shot for 4:3. Directors framed for 4:3, lit for 4:3, blocked scenes for 4:3, and even built their special effects around 4:3. Stretching that work into widescreen feels a bit like deciding to colorize Citizen Kane, Dr. Strangelove, or The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. It solves a problem no one actually has. Viewers are already used to black bars, and we watch lower-resolution content constantly. Vertical phone clips shot by amateurs on TikTok, grainy GIFs, and IMAX footage down-scaled to fit our phone (and connection). Content that wasn't designed to fill the entire screen isn't the issue. From what I've seen, most of these old shows end up on free or bargain streaming services packed with ads. I watched an episode of Highway to Heaven with my dad where they sped up the dialogue and trimmed pauses, squeezed the credits into a tiny picture-in-picture box, and still lopped off another minute so the episode ended mid-sentence. All of that was just to make room for extra commercial slots the original show was never designed to accommodate. Disgusting, really... though I suppose you get what you pay for. Sticking with the original 4:3 and simply adding pillarbox bars is cleaner, simpler, and far more respectful -- and ultimately more enjoyable for the audience. Relevant : * "That Was A Mistake": Steven Spielberg Admits He Regrets Removing Guns From E.T. // https://screenrant.com/et-guns-removed-steven-spielberg-regret-response/ https://screenrant.com/et-guns-removed-steven-spielberg-regr... * 5 Worst Changes Star Wars Made From The Original Cuts // https://screenrant.com/worst-changes-star-wars-special-editions/ https://screenrant.com/worst-changes-star-wars-special-editi... * 'Casablanca' gets colorized, but don't play it again, Ted | Interviews | Roger Ebert // https://www.rogerebert.com/interviews/casablanca-gets-colorized-but-dont-play-it-again-ted https://www.rogerebert.com/interviews/casablanca-gets-colori...

op00to 1y ago
> Viewers are already used to black bars, and we watch lower-resolution content constantly. This is actually not as common as you think. It is common for "normies" to see 4:3 and think "This is not HD". People really, really hate black bars. What's more surprising to me is that content providers don't keep stuff in 4:3 and just shove ads on the side.
mjg59 1y ago

MaoSYJ 1y ago

I remember seeing how TV had to take into account numerous formats, specially in the transition from tube to flat screens. Shame that no one takes that into account any more. If you have an old TV with an off format you will miss a portion of the intended frame.

tonymet 1y ago

Seems to have been a deliberate incident, just look at all of the free PR on social media from this “accident” . Has HBOMax ever been on Hackernews except for bad naming ? Their app isn’t otherwise noteworthy

barbazoo 1y ago
Not working for me. This makes me think they're lazy and greedy, doesn't make me want to go and consume their slop.
- tonymet 11mo ago
  i have to admit it worked for me. I recently rewatched madmen, but replayed the HBO distribution to see the 4k improvements. it's much more vibrant

Teever 1y ago

> Reframing old shows to fit a new aspect ratio is antithetical to the spirit of media restoration, and cheapens the future of our shared culture. The folks at the studios who insist on hobbling their most classic television shows are really bad at their jobs. I disgree with this. I'm fine with companies putting out new versions of something that are experimental like this, but I tihnk that they need to both acknowledge that they're experimental and put out versions that are true to the original intent.

knorker 1y ago

Relatedly, if anyone has a copy of Battle Royale before they ruined literally every effects shot with the digital special edition, please make yourself known to a member of staff. It's not even that it aged poorly. The effects they added are so bad that it's hard to see what happened. Like a guy's getting shot, and then they've spliced in a red dodgeball exploding, as if his head completely exploded. But one second later he's still alive. Huh? There's even behind the scenes of them being completely happy with these grade school MS Paint BS.

butlike 1y ago

I'd pay a separate subscription if I got to watch all these workprints. Fascinating stuff.

csours 1y ago

Very slightly related: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fb07MT5fcEE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fb07MT5fcEE A grab bag of edits by 'Craven in Outer Space' on Star Trek TNG Season 1 - some of which are related to the restoration/re-release showing things that were not easily seen on old TVs.

sandspar 11mo ago

In a way I actually prefer these versions. I love seeing how the sausage gets made. It turns the show into a quasi making-of documentary and that's a neat opportunity.