8 ms·

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 "protec

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 10mo 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 10mo 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 10mo 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 10mo 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."
  - jjmarr 10mo ago
    The term is "open matte" and is the ideal way of watching movies on folding phones. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_matte https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_matte
    - actionfromafar 10mo ago
      Open matte is a filming technique. The second half of your sentence is misguided.
dmpk2k 10mo ago
Similar with Babylon 5, although the CG has not aged as well.
- sgt 10mo ago
  I don't know, currently watching Babylon 5 Season 3 and I think the CG is pretty impressive. It's not high resolution or sharp, but the ray tracing is excellent. A lot of moving parts flying around everywhere with lighting and planets in the background.
  - zehaeva 10mo ago
    What he's talking about is that the CGI in B5 was filmed in 4:3 and not in 16:9 like the rest of the show. When they did the "high res" releases they had to make the choice of doing everything in 16:9 or in 4:3. In 4:3 it looks good and like the original airing show, in 16:9 any non-digital/composite shot looks freaking fantastic. But once you get to any digital or composite shot it takes a nose dive in quality.
    - b112 10mo ago
      There was recent (last few years) work done to fix all of this. https://www.modeemi.fi/~leopold/Babylon5/DVD/DVDTransfer.html#210211hd https://www.modeemi.fi/~leopold/Babylon5/DVD/DVDTransfer.htm... I have these versions, and it's world better than everything beforehand. It's also a good opportunity for a re-watch!
      - sgt 10mo ago
        A very well written show. It's crazy to think a lot of people don't even get to watch this, because it's so hard to find. I couldn't find it anywhere (except for DVD's) so I had to resort to torrents.
        WorldMaker 10mo ago
        There's a 4K 4:3 remaster streaming on HBO Max. It wasn't exactly well advertised (certainly not to the extent that it has been hard to miss this Mad Men advertising), but it exists and is a good way to watch the show. Feels a bit less cinematic not being in 16:9, but it looks good other than that because the show was shot to be 4:3 safe (as that was still the most common TV at the time).
petee 10mo ago
The first season or two you can definitely see the crew in the safety margins, sometimes the camera crane too
aomix 10mo ago
I never watched the widescreen version of The Wire they put out years ago but now I'm curious again. That show was a bone deep 4:3 product and the show plays with it constantly. Here is an interesting breakdown that made me really appreciate how clever they got while trying to be pretty subdued with the cinematography on The Wire https://vimeo.com/39768998 https://vimeo.com/39768998
- lloeki 10mo ago
  I watched both; both are good, in different ways. Some scenes that I remember being beautifully composed in 4:3 lost to the transition, while others have improved markedly. They made a ton of effort on it, recognising it's a different version altogether: > The new version of The Wire, then, will differ both creatively and technically. In certain cases, such as a scene in season two where longshoreman gather around a body, Simon said he believed the added space would add a vulnerability to the scene that wasn’t possible in 4:3. But he describes other scenes where the added space distracts the eye, and the remaster zooms in on the characters to retain that intimacy. https://www.techhive.com/article/599415/hbo-remastered-the-wire-in-169-hd-and-it-was-a-lot-harder-than-youd-think.html https://www.techhive.com/article/599415/hbo-remastered-the-w...
- michaelbuckbee 10mo ago
  David Simon's earlier work, "Homicide" had a lot of interesting switching between film + video and aspect ratios as well. I think it's something that he's been interested in for a long time.
  - liampulles 10mo ago
    David Simon wrote the source material for Homicide but did not "make" the show, he cut his teeth in TV writing on Homicide. I have Homicide on DVD, it also has some good extras.
  - echelon_musk 10mo ago
    It was recently remastered. I watched in the original 4:3 but I'm happy that some love has been put into restoring the show, albeit in unintended 16:9.
anal_reactor 10mo ago
When you have an OLED screen then 4:3 aspect ratio is fine because the black bars aren't backlit, so it's not a problem.
- liampulles 10mo ago
  I mean I personally would prefer a 4:3 restoration anyway, because composition and its relation to mise en scene are important to me, but c'est la vie.
- layer8 10mo ago
  Except when you do it too much, the 4:3 area will remain brighter due to the higher usage.
doctornoble 10mo ago
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.
- drmpeg 10mo ago
  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.
- liampulles 10mo ago
  Japan has been ahead of the curve on a lot of home media related technology, not least because they manufactured a lot of it.
dylan604 10mo ago
I saw a movie in a theater years ago where the projectionist did not change the lens and/or mattes when switching from previews to the main feature. The projected image was much taller like a 1.85 or a 1.78, but the feature was shot wider 2.35/2.40. However, the image wasn't protected for the taller aspect, so all of the on set gak could be seen as it was never meant to be shown at the taller aspect ratio. I've also sat in transfer sessions where the Pan&Scan decisions were being made to transfer wide screen down to 4:3 vs just doing a center crop extract. It makes you appreciate just how much effort is needed when done as best it could be rather than just the fast/lazy way.
hovering_nox 10mo ago
Although Stargate SG-1 (1997) was filmed in 16:9 from the outset, earlier seasons were broadcast in 4:3.
- deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
rendaw 10mo ago
The article mentions that Mad Men was already in 16:9 so the issues are unrelated to re-framing.
- ascagnel_ 10mo ago
  Agreed. Mad Men premiered in 2007, well into the HD era, and was already composed for 16:9. The issue here is that the 4K "remaster" seemingly wasn't mastered at all, just a re-scan of the original negatives at a higher resolution. That said, I think letterboxing is a better choice than trying to recompose a shot for a different aspect ratio if it wasn't accounted for initially (eg: The X-Files). And even then, the shot selection and composition would have been different had the aspect ratio been initially different (like TXF's 16:9 versions leaving the edges of the frame largely unused).
russdill 10mo ago
Friends....did not.
timonofathens 10mo ago
[dead]

actionfromafar 10mo 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 10mo 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 10mo 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 10mo 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."
- jjmarr 10mo ago
  The term is "open matte" and is the ideal way of watching movies on folding phones. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_matte https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_matte
  - actionfromafar 10mo ago
    Open matte is a filming technique. The second half of your sentence is misguided.

dmpk2k 10mo ago

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

sgt 10mo ago
I don't know, currently watching Babylon 5 Season 3 and I think the CG is pretty impressive. It's not high resolution or sharp, but the ray tracing is excellent. A lot of moving parts flying around everywhere with lighting and planets in the background.
- zehaeva 10mo ago
  What he's talking about is that the CGI in B5 was filmed in 4:3 and not in 16:9 like the rest of the show. When they did the "high res" releases they had to make the choice of doing everything in 16:9 or in 4:3. In 4:3 it looks good and like the original airing show, in 16:9 any non-digital/composite shot looks freaking fantastic. But once you get to any digital or composite shot it takes a nose dive in quality.
  - b112 10mo ago
    There was recent (last few years) work done to fix all of this. https://www.modeemi.fi/~leopold/Babylon5/DVD/DVDTransfer.html#210211hd https://www.modeemi.fi/~leopold/Babylon5/DVD/DVDTransfer.htm... I have these versions, and it's world better than everything beforehand. It's also a good opportunity for a re-watch!
    - sgt 10mo ago
      A very well written show. It's crazy to think a lot of people don't even get to watch this, because it's so hard to find. I couldn't find it anywhere (except for DVD's) so I had to resort to torrents.
      - WorldMaker 10mo ago
        There's a 4K 4:3 remaster streaming on HBO Max. It wasn't exactly well advertised (certainly not to the extent that it has been hard to miss this Mad Men advertising), but it exists and is a good way to watch the show. Feels a bit less cinematic not being in 16:9, but it looks good other than that because the show was shot to be 4:3 safe (as that was still the most common TV at the time).

petee 10mo ago

The first season or two you can definitely see the crew in the safety margins, sometimes the camera crane too

aomix 10mo ago

I never watched the widescreen version of The Wire they put out years ago but now I'm curious again. That show was a bone deep 4:3 product and the show plays with it constantly. Here is an interesting breakdown that made me really appreciate how clever they got while trying to be pretty subdued with the cinematography on The Wire https://vimeo.com/39768998 https://vimeo.com/39768998

lloeki 10mo ago
I watched both; both are good, in different ways. Some scenes that I remember being beautifully composed in 4:3 lost to the transition, while others have improved markedly. They made a ton of effort on it, recognising it's a different version altogether: > The new version of The Wire, then, will differ both creatively and technically. In certain cases, such as a scene in season two where longshoreman gather around a body, Simon said he believed the added space would add a vulnerability to the scene that wasn’t possible in 4:3. But he describes other scenes where the added space distracts the eye, and the remaster zooms in on the characters to retain that intimacy. https://www.techhive.com/article/599415/hbo-remastered-the-wire-in-169-hd-and-it-was-a-lot-harder-than-youd-think.html https://www.techhive.com/article/599415/hbo-remastered-the-w...
michaelbuckbee 10mo ago
David Simon's earlier work, "Homicide" had a lot of interesting switching between film + video and aspect ratios as well. I think it's something that he's been interested in for a long time.
- liampulles 10mo ago
  David Simon wrote the source material for Homicide but did not "make" the show, he cut his teeth in TV writing on Homicide. I have Homicide on DVD, it also has some good extras.
- echelon_musk 10mo ago
  It was recently remastered. I watched in the original 4:3 but I'm happy that some love has been put into restoring the show, albeit in unintended 16:9.

anal_reactor 10mo ago

When you have an OLED screen then 4:3 aspect ratio is fine because the black bars aren't backlit, so it's not a problem.

liampulles 10mo ago
I mean I personally would prefer a 4:3 restoration anyway, because composition and its relation to mise en scene are important to me, but c'est la vie.
layer8 10mo ago
Except when you do it too much, the 4:3 area will remain brighter due to the higher usage.

doctornoble 10mo ago

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.

drmpeg 10mo ago
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.
liampulles 10mo ago
Japan has been ahead of the curve on a lot of home media related technology, not least because they manufactured a lot of it.

dylan604 10mo ago

I saw a movie in a theater years ago where the projectionist did not change the lens and/or mattes when switching from previews to the main feature. The projected image was much taller like a 1.85 or a 1.78, but the feature was shot wider 2.35/2.40. However, the image wasn't protected for the taller aspect, so all of the on set gak could be seen as it was never meant to be shown at the taller aspect ratio. I've also sat in transfer sessions where the Pan&Scan decisions were being made to transfer wide screen down to 4:3 vs just doing a center crop extract. It makes you appreciate just how much effort is needed when done as best it could be rather than just the fast/lazy way.

hovering_nox 10mo ago

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

deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]

rendaw 10mo ago

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

ascagnel_ 10mo ago
Agreed. Mad Men premiered in 2007, well into the HD era, and was already composed for 16:9. The issue here is that the 4K "remaster" seemingly wasn't mastered at all, just a re-scan of the original negatives at a higher resolution. That said, I think letterboxing is a better choice than trying to recompose a shot for a different aspect ratio if it wasn't accounted for initially (eg: The X-Files). And even then, the shot selection and composition would have been different had the aspect ratio been initially different (like TXF's 16:9 versions leaving the edges of the frame largely unused).

russdill 10mo ago

Friends....did not.

timonofathens 10mo ago

[dead]