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Why Is Netflix Secretly Cropping Movies?
- bgruber 13y agothis is usually the case when watching a movie on the HD feed of HBO/Showtime/what have you as well. They're probably getting the same source as netflix. It seems that some directors have the clout to demand that their movies are distributed in the original aspect ratio. Or perhaps they're willing to trade some cash for control of that aspect of distribution.
- JulianWasTaken 13y agoOT: site is unreadable on my Android device with Chrome (latest). It disables zoom but is too wide for the screen and doesn't reflow the text (I should just turn off allowing sites to disable zoom...).
- justincormack 13y agoI have disable zoom turned off but it didn't help it only turns off ability to restrict zoom in not out. Apparently its for the hard if sight... Rotating the screen was OK though here.
- ultimoo 13y ago" and Milos Forman made a decision when he chose to show both Jim Carrey and Jerry Lawler." I'm amazed that Netflix edits the frame to a degree that may actually change the meaning of a scene or a dialog. I know that cropping even a few mm off the edges is bad, but 'cropping' one entire guy from a scene involving two people is outrageous.
- atwebb 13y agoNow, I'm not a fancy big city video-editor but I think it has more to do with the characters placement in the original shot than the editing. Begin Speculation You can probably be pretty specific with your cropping placement but whoever did the editing, likely didn't understand the meaning of both in the shot (I would've missed it initially) and had a directive of, make this look good and full screen, so they chopped it that way. End Speculation
- devindotcom 13y agoYes, in pan and scan when there's a wide shot with two characters, it is generally preferred to show one person in full at a time and cut between them if you can. Directors generally don't film with this in mind, so it can be rough on certain styles and completely ruins some shots. Has for decades, nothing you can really do if people won't watch letterboxed.
- devindotcom 13y agoyes, pan and scan is generally pretty destructive, which is why directors are all so happy everyone is getting at least 16:9 TVs in their homes. Imagine how it was cutting down Lawrence of Arabia to 4x3.
- jordanthoms 13y agoUgh. Now I need to look up each Netflix movie to see if they have messed with it before playing? Shouldn't be difficult to give us an option, Netflix is already encoding in many different formats.
- kmfrk 13y agoReminds me of the good old DVD days where I had to always check for two things: region restrictions and "anamorphic" format. I somehow still have to deal with region restrictions today, because technology.
- jfb 13y agoI somehow still have to deal with region restrictions today, because technology. Actually, it's because licensing.
- lostlogin 13y agoIt's awful. I'd get Netflix in a heartbeat if I could do so easily, but I need to get a VPN and fart about to make it work. And in the evening, the last thing I want to do is fix stuff, after a day of all sorts of format/file/network battles (radiology department job). Fix the licensing stuff and I'll pay.
- jfb 13y agoNo argument here. It's changing, but keep in mind that many of these licensing deals were multi-year, and that therefore the technical decisions necessary to support these deals have been baked into standards since day one. Thankfully, Blu-Ray is the last physical format we'll have to grapple with.
- lostlogin 13y agoYeah, a reasonable attitude like yours is what I need. I skipped blu-ray and went straight to digital. Discs in the bin etc. I think I jumped too soon. Meta data accuracy, library software, media servers etc have all changes vastly in the time I've been purely digital and every change is awful. My last change over was so awful that I said never again. I'll see if that holds, but having a third part sort it for me seems ideal.
- atwebb 13y agoIsn't it just the content providers sending altered movies?
- bhouston 13y agoIt most likely the content providers sending Netflix these alterned movies is as it is way too much work for Netflix to do this cropping themselves. I think it is customary for every film to have a "pan and scan" version created by the studios/content providers: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan-and-scan http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan-and-scan Now, Netflix may be at fault for purposely not requesting letterboxed formats, and opting for the cropped 16:9 versions.
- baddox 13y agoTo nitpick, Netflix wouldn't want to request letterboxed formats. They should want the native format, because I'm confident that every video player they support will do the letterboxing for them.
- kevinpet 13y agoThey definitely do not do a good job of checking what formats they're getting. If you watch Star Trek or The Twilight Zone on a 16x9 TV, you'll actually see bars on left and right because it's encoded for 16x9 even though the source is 4x3.
- devindotcom 13y agoThey opted for maximum compatibility. Start licensing one for every screen AR and the fees start piling up.
- etler 13y agoUnfortunately the majority of their users probably don't want the letterbox format because they don't understand what the black bars are for. If they requested both formats to give users the choice it would probably cost them more in licensing.
- shaggyfrog 13y agoI'm not sure if it's intentional irony or not, but the site is too wide on my iPhone and doesn't allow me to pinch/zoom. If the author intended that to inspire frustration with mobile readers... then well played, sir/madam, well played!
- crgt 13y agoIs fine in landscape on iPhone 5.
- mullingitover 13y agoCall me crazy, but I doubt Netflix has permission to modify the films in this way. Something tells me the studios are providing them to Netflix pre-cropped.
- etler 13y agoLook at the Man on the Moon crop. It's clearly not just cropping off the sides. It's anchored to the right. I also doubt Netflix either has a smart algorithm that can figure out the focus of the scene, or hires a bunch of people to choose the right focal point for every movie. They probably ask for movies from their providers in 16:9 format and they show whatever they get. They could ask for both formats and give users the choice, but I'm guessing there might be extra licensing costs to get both, and the majority of their users aren't cinephiles, and they just want their movies to fill the screen.
- mikeryan 13y agoLook at the Man on the Moon crop. It's clearly not just cropping off the sides. It's anchored to the right. That's what pan-and-scan is. Its done by the studio so they have some "artistic" control of how the cropping is done. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan_and_scan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan_and_scan
- aspensmonster 13y agoI thought etler was saying that the Man on the Moon crop wasn't pan-and-scan at all. It was just a complete lopping off of the entire left portion of the film that didn't fit the aspect ratio.
- devindotcom 13y agoNetflix almost certainly just licenses the pan-and-scan versions of movies for maximum compatibility. I really don't know why this is blowing up all of a sudden. We've had pan and scan versions of films on TV and streaming for decades. The only really troubling thing is that there's no "The film you're about to see may have bee modified from the original version" warning at the beginning of some, and it should definitely be clear that is the case.
- ricardobeat 13y agoBecause now there is no technical reason to not have it as an option instead of forced upon us.
- aa0 13y agoThe technical reason is that Netflix is "cutting corners" for cash. I'm sure someone in the media licensing industry can elaborate on the true price of what you crave.
- pfraze 13y ago> what you crave Electrolytes? But in all seriousness: are there any numbers we can refer to for the economics of this? It sounds like it could be similar to the issues around royalties paid by music streaming services.
- jfb 13y agoWhat, you're a plant? I was going to say that this looks a lot more like expedience ("hey, we've got this version of Some Terrible Straight To DVD Movie stored in 4:3 SD 8Mb/s MPEG-2, let's send 'em that!") but both examples are a) relatively high profile and b) not 4:3 pan/scan crops. They look to be cropped to 16:9, which is weird, and makes me think that it's happening inside Netflix's video pipeline. Hmm.
- 616c 13y ago
- nwhitehead 13y agoMy guess is that this cropping is being done by video editing service companies at the request of the studios. Netflix and a studio come to a distribution agreement. Netflix tells the studio the technical requirements for the digital files to send over. The studio realizes they don't have exactly the right format on hand, so they contract out to some firm to encode their content. The studio may not realize that there is an aspect difference, and the service company might automatically adjust the cropping to make it fill the screen to fulfill their contract and meet the technical specifications.
- icodestuff 13y agoI just noticed this a couple weeks ago with "Serenity" - I mostly watch TV on Netflix, rather than movies - but they absolutely should be giving us the whole picture. TV's have anti-letterboxing modes, and the people who don't know any better than "the picture isn't taking up my whole TV" should use them. And of course there's no reason whatsoever for them to provide anything but the original version on the website.
- rogerbinns 13y agoWhen I look for the majority of the movies in the article and linked site, they come up as unavailable (US netflix). Kind of makes it all moot.
- wilg 13y agoWhat a misleading title! It's really not Netflix's doing, and it's definitely not some kind of evil conspiracy. The studio isn't going to pay for a new transfer just for Netflix, or maybe they have a better one but are only realizing it on Blu-Ray. Netflix just gets whatever version of the movie the studio happens to already have on hand, which is likely the HDTV version, which is sometimes pan-and-scan. But that doesn't make a very sensational headline.
- smacktoward 13y agoEvery transfer for home video I've ever seen has been anamorphic widescreen since the earliest days of the DVD. There were a few releases among the very earliest DVDs that were pan-and-scan, because the studios were afraid people would freak out if they saw black bars on their TV. They didn't, so pan-and-scan vanished. And that was back when 4:3 SDTVs were the norm, now almost everyone has 16:9 sets, so widescreen transfers if anything would be more easily welcomed now. Considering how much of their libraries they have now mastered for DVD, it would seem like it would take more work to go back and do a pan-and-scan transfer than it would to just reuse the one they made for widescreen DVD.
- toast0 13y agoI only have about 10 dvds, and I've got one that they encoded the black bars on instead of doing anamorphic (first region 1 release of Dune), and at least one 4:3 that was released in 2004 (Grind... I only have this as a result of a disturbing practice of giving horrible birthday gifts in my circle of friends)
- josteink 13y ago> Every transfer for home video I've ever seen has been anamorphic widescreen since the earliest days of the DVD. That's interesting because one of the things which disappointed me most with DVDs was how immensely hard it was to get DVDs with actual anamorphic widescreen. Most movies was actually fullscreen or letterboxed, and for 2.35:1 films that meant effectively 200 lines for film content. This was after DVDs had been on the market for 5+ years mind you. TLDR: An anecdote does not make facts nor data.
- gcb0 13y agosummary: the article does not answer why.
- hoodoof 13y agoThe NSA wants the cropped out bit.
- ancarda 13y agoPersonally I've never understood the 2.39:1 aspect ratio. My TV, computer monitors, laptop and phone are all 16:9. TV shows I watch are 16:9 as well. Other than 4:3, it seems like the universal ratio. So why are movies shot at 2.39:1, a ratio that causes black bars on any device you watch it on?
- zwily 13y agoMovies are shot for theaters, not your devices.
- jfb 13y agoBecause some directors or DPs want to present in widescreen?
- protomyth 13y agoBecause 16:9 wouldn't exist except for the existing theater ratio of 2.39:1. 16:9 is a compromise between existing movies and academy ratio[1]. 21:9 would have been a better ratio, but we got the compromise just like the resolution is 1920 x 1080 instead of something that jived better with computers. If you shoot a movie in 16:9 it will look cropped when viewed in a theater. 1) there is a YouTube video that explains it. I think it made HN a while ago.
- jccalhoun 13y agoNext you'll tell me that their movies are compressed and not at the same quality as blurays!
- area51org 13y agoThere's an outside chance that Netflix only has a license for the pan-and-scan versions, and the studios want more $$$ for the widescreen versions.
- joelmichael 13y agoI saw this interesting overview of the history of aspect ratios the other day. There's a lot more variety than you'd think. http://vimeo.com/68830569 http://vimeo.com/68830569
- awongh 13y agowow, that was well made and informative. I had no idea that that's where the 16:9 aspect ratio came from (the mean ratio of the two most disparate ratios in film)
- fernly 13y agoDoes anyone know if Amazon streaming does the same?
- kijin 13y agoWhenever I watch a movie with some of my extended family, there's always someone who asks why the movie doesn't fill the entire screen. They want either the black bars removed and the area filled with images (like Photoshop Content-Aware Fill?), or the whole movie zoomed in (cropped) so that the sides are lost. I, along with some of the other serious movie-watchers in the family, have to convince these individuals every time that no, that's not how you watch a movie. (My favorite argument: "That area is reserved for subtitles.") But I don't think most of the general public cares about the aspect ratio, only about utilizing the maximum square footage of their overpriced TV. Netflix is just catering to this demographic, just like DVD vendors who came up with 4:3 versions of 2.39:1 movies. The number of customers who complain about the wrong aspect ratio is probably much smaller than the number of customers who complain about the black bars.
- deelowe 13y agoYou should put a fake bezel at the top and bottom of the tv, then remove it 1/2 way through and see if they notice.
- clicks 13y ago> My favorite argument: "That area is reserved for subtitles." I guess you're joking here, but I really wish subtitle presentated was more formally systematized. And, your idea actually seems like a good one, it's just too bad video players don't behave like that. E.g., I'd love if VLC player shifted the visible screen as up as it can, and reserve the one big bar at the bottom to showing subtitles.
- nitrogen 13y agoVLC most likely has some filters (look for one called "expand" maybe) that will do this.
- kijin 13y agoI was only half joking. I'm not sure if VLC has the same feature, but KMPlayer (freeware but closed-source) has all sorts of options to tweak the way subtitles are displayed, and even allows you to edit the subtitles on the fly. I suppose these features are largely due to the fact that subtitles are absolutely essential in Korea (where KMPlayer come from).
- jordanthoms 13y agoI contacted Netflix support about this, and they claimed that this isn't the case generally, but it might happen with some devices. Has anyone been able to reproduce this?
- gcb0 13y agoi would if they had any movie worth watching. why people subscribe to a service that is 95% tv shows, and then complain about the few movie image quality?
- chiph 13y agoWhat are the chances that this person had the DVD flipped to play the 4:3 version of the film? (Studios sometimes release pan & scan and the widescreen on the same disc, but on opposite sides).
- joshschreuder 13y agoDoes Netflix source their content from DVDs? I would have thought the studio would send over some sort of lossless master file of the video which is then scaled on Netflix's side.
- chiph 13y agoUhh, I was actually thinking about the DVD-by-mail service. But yeah, an employee at Netflix could have flipped it when encoding it. But your explanation with the studio sending a master is the most likely.
- timfrietas 13y agoAh, this is close to my heart, and I have worked in video and streaming video for ten years, for many companies. Which is why I am so surprised the author does not realize that Netflix is not making this decision--video is supplied by third parties and sometimes this is out of control of Netflix or other streaming video vendors. Sometimes the pan and scan version is all that exists as a digital encode. Generally Hollywood studios are resistant to spending any extra money or labor to put our widescreen versions that customers can't generally discern from the pan and scan versions (and re-encoding costs are often absorbed by the streaming video service, in this case Netflix). Netflix is generally making a smart business decision here--expanding selection and using a product that appears identical to 98% of viewers--and I say that as one of the 2% who can tell and do care. In short, the author should know this, and have said it themselves, citing their video clerk experience--customers, if anything, think widescreen is the inferior product.
- jotux 13y agoWhy is it a change without some giant announcement is suddenly some sort of secret conspiracy?
- ChuckMcM 13y agoWell if you believe in conspiracy theories, Netflix subtly alters the film so that if it shows up on Bittorrent they know where it came from :-) But I suspect that Netflix isn't doing the altering, rather their source material comes that way. Either because the distribution channel gets it that way or because the content providers want it that way. Like the author I suspect that if it wasn't being done by the media companies there would be a big stink about it.
- grbalaffa 13y agoHBO and the other "premium" cable channels also do this. Not every single time, but much of the time. Try watching any of the Lord of the Rings movies on HBO or Cinemax for example. They're all 16:9, even though they were 2.39:1 "scope" in the theater.[1] Forcing everything to be 16:9 has become the new "pan and scan", and it's actually been around for a while. [1] Some of the time a movie has been filmed in a format which contained extra space on the negative, such as "Super 35", and in some cases the 16:9 might actually be showing more of the image rather than less, but it's very hit-and-miss and requires a custom transfer and master of the movie (which HBO has been known to do in at least some cases).
- shurcooL 13y agoThe iPad app used to let you watch the movies in both portrait and landscape modes. I found portrait mode worked better for me when watching a movie in bed. As of a month or two ago, they took away the ability to watch in portrait. Why. It just made the app worse.
- jbinney 13y agoIronically, you can't resize the article to read the full lines on mobile safari.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- wazoox 13y agoIt's crazy; almost all forms of broadcasting are made without any consideration of proper display. 4:3 TV shows from the 80s and 90s are cropped to 16:9 (which kills the resolution to abysmal levels); films on VOD services and TV are cut down from cinemascope to 16:9; black and white sources are colorized and made weird and ridiculous. why on earth would I ever want to pay for any of these services? Well, I don't. I don't watch TV anymore; I buy a couple of DVDs here and there, and that's about it.
- TazeTSchnitzel 13y agoIf only we could make resizeable screens.
- circa 13y agoThat first paragraph had me rolling. I worked for Transworld from 99-2002ish and had to explain the exact same thing to people. Got the same result. Glad I can laugh at it now. At the time it pissed me off more than anything.
- rmrfrmrf 13y agoI've actually noticed this (because, technically speaking, widescreen films should still have black bars on them even with "normal" widescreen televisions). I always assumed it was Netflix just accommodating the average user who would get pissed that they bought a widescreen TV and the picture is still showing up with bars on it. Also consider that the average user usually watches television with their TV that auto-crops and/or zooms and stretches pictures, not to mention interpolates 120Hz viewing for a delicious soap opera effect. I have to say, though, that cinemaphiles complaining about Netflix quality is a bit like the audiophiles that buy $10k sound systems to listen to their MP3 collection.
- circa 13y agoThis also reminds me of how they take TV originals, like Seinfeld, for example and originally shot for 4:3. They enhance them for 16:9. I would like to see a comparison of that too. However, I will admit I think the Seinfeld enhancements do look pretty good from what they used to.
- lo_fye 13y agoI contacted Netflix about this on twitter. They say it ain't so. https://twitter.com/lo_fye/statuses/357851185140596736 https://twitter.com/lo_fye/statuses/357851185140596736