Fun fact: The X-Files production team foresaw the coming of 16:9 home entertainment, so they made some effort (increasing with later seasons) to try and "protect" a 16:9 frame, which allowed for an unusually good 16:9 Blu-ray restoration. [https://www.tweaktown.com/reviews/7499/look-inside-the-files...]
I learned this from the older X-files DVDs, which have some unusually good special features.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
The Babylon 5 team had tried to prepare for that as well by keeping digital masters of all the effects. It would have meant recompositing, which isn't necessarily cheap, but in theory they could have run the exact same effects at a higher resolution.
Unfortunately, Warner Brothers lost those files. Rumor has it when they sent copies to Sierra (really Vivendi at the time, just before the Activision acquisition) for a Babylon 5 videogame the WB Archives team accidentally sent their only copy and that when the videogame project was shutdown they destroyed the copies per the IP license agreement.
There's a high probability that even if WB had had the digital masters of the effects, they probably still would have stuck to the 4:3 restoration over the 16:9 restoration to avoid recompositing costs, but it's still such a weird swing of bad luck that the production team thought ahead about HD technology well enough as well as anyone could at that time and yet the 4K copy we have in this timeline is in the wrong aspect ratio.
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.
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.
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.
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).
I loved B5's story, but no remaster is going to fix the cheeseball acting of the show. It felt 200 years old even when it was airing. (Sigh, I'm probably still going to rewatch it...)
Not to dismiss the X-files team, but 16:9 was already around when they started. Just not in the states. Japan started getting 16:9 CRTs in the early 90s, Europe followed in the mid 90s. America lagged another half decade and effectively skipped 16:9 CRTs mostly going straight to plasma/lcd.
The first 16:9 content I ever saw was the trailer to "Batman Forever" (with Val Kilmer) in 1995 when I was working at C-Cube Microsystems. The studios use to send them test content all the time for video compression testing. It was on D1 tape, and looked beautiful for SD resolution. The professional Sony CRT 4:3 monitors back then had a 16:9 button to letterbox the image.
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).
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.
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-...)
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...
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.
> 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.
> The biggest test is that I can also drink most supermarket instant coffee without complaint.
I was the same way for years and appreciated it but unfortunately I did start to treat myself more and it's hard to go back, but my financial situation is also much better. I think it's valuable to stick with the lowest sufferable quality of something until you have the ability to meaningfully upgrade or improve upon it.
I also spent quite a bit of time with some quite well known mastering engineers in a former career - many of them talked about the pressure to produce "loud" masters for CD, but how they were given much more creative freedom for vinyl releases.
Hearing the two masters side by side on some incredible speakers really gave me an appreciation for how different 'versions' of an album can transform the experience of the music.
Tangent as you mentioned boosted high frequencies on tapes...
It's possible (likely) that those prerecorded cassettes had boosted high frequencies because they were intended to be played on a deck that supports Dolby B noise reduction, and will do the reverse operation to get the level back to where it's supposed to be.
Dolby B noise reduction didn't actually reduce noise at the source. Instead:
- During recording: Boost the volume of high frequencies (where tape hiss is most audible)
- During playback: Apply the inverse.
When you reduce the treble during playback, you're reducing the hiss along with it, but the original signal (which was boosted before) ends up at the intended level. This improves the signal-to-noise ratio in the high frequencies.
This is similar to the RIAA equalization curve used for vinyl records.
- During mastering: Reduce bass, boost treble.
- During playback:The RIAA phono preamp applies the inverse curve—boosting bass and reducing treble.
IIRC the reasons for the RIAA curve aren't just about improving signal-to-noise ratio, but something about the physical limits of vinyl.
Part of the reason this one is news is that there's really zero excuse for it being done "on the cheap": HBO can afford the very best, and their reputation kiiiind of depends on it.
What happened to the early Pixar movies isn't at all the same, though. They weren't remastered, they were just transferred to a media that they were not originally mastered for.
I think you're ill-informed. The Pixar movies were re-rendered completely. They did not take a 35mm negative, or an old file, to transfer it. Pixar has the ability to load the Toy Story project files, and use the current version of RenderMan to make a new final version. It's completely unique among the industry.
But IIRC there was some color grading gaffe because the original colors were precompensated for film ( they originally filmed the renders ) - but this lead to oversaturation and color changes in the digital renders. So in some way they did meet a similar fate.
Absolutely, but OP was thinking of colours being messed up because of a format transfer.
They would have needed to look at the 35mm negative of Toy Story from '95, picked up the colours from there to then put an intermediate colour correction step. They didn't do it, which is a shame. We lost artistic intent.
That's not at all what I'm talking about. I know it's confusing because I used the word "transferred," but if you don't put your own misunderstanding into my statement, you'll notice that I didn't say from a 35mm negative. It's just a complete transfer of the frames as they were meant for film but crucially, not from film, into a digital file.
And notably, there's some dissent there that the modern Disney/Pixar versions are wrong (there's an arbitrariness to scanners, plus no particularly objective recordings of what you'd actually see at theaters back then) IIUC.
So odd that they didn't slap a film emulation on top of that. Although maybe not any existing software emulates exactly the film stock they used, any film emulation would look more true than a 1:1.
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.
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.
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" ;-)
My advice is to pay someone else to do the transfer, but get someone good. Most services online don't bother with a real TBC because a professional TBC is expensive, and not worth investing in for the average consumer. However, it is an absolute necessity if you want any kind of quality.
Failing that, you can get a retrotink 4k and any old HDMI capture card to do a "good enough" job for most folks. It has a sort of poor-mans TBC that will work as long as the tapes aren't too bad. You're still looking at a grand for the retrotink, but you can then use it for retro video games if you're into that.
I am fortunate that the Panasonic AG7650 I use for playback has a built-in TBC that emits stable enough video to go straight into my BMD Intensity Pro.
Restoration tools are very cool. One tool I liked allows you to draw a marquee around an area you'd like to fix. It then allows you to shift the frames forward/back in just the highlighted area to find a frame without the blemish. Obviously a more static shot gave better results, but it was fast and easy to use. Much easier than trying to use a blemish/clone tool. Doing the same fix with rotoscoping techniques would take much more time/effort.
I used to work at a film restoration studio about 10 years ago, and back then PF Clean from PixelFarm was more or less the industry standard. That might have been the software you saw.
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.
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!”)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
The wheels would fall off of modern society if ball bearings had quality issues like this.
I know that you are joking, but well-made BBs are incredibly important to just about any modern machine that moves, and indirectly, all the non-moving ones too.
Hell, Albert Speer, Nazi in charge of BBs and other manufacturing, said that the US bombing offensive would have had a huge impact on the war if they had just kept at it with bombing the BB factories instead of giving up.
>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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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
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!
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.
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).
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
In that case your memory (or perhaps just attention to detail when watching) is better than mine, and I withdraw my previous belief! Thanks for the correction
This post explains it nicely, by showing the noticeboard they normally use to cover that camera hole (which looks like an unfinished window frame, missing its architrave): https://x.com/MattBaume/status/1661785600050233344
I think it is the open hole in the wall next to the door -- which no real apartment would have. I think that part was meant be cropped in the final frame, maybe?
> 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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
It's the fact that shooting is enormously expensive per-minute, and time-constrained. Think of the sheer number of crew involved. And then think of the sheer number of shots you have to get per day, to stay on schedule and on budget.
If there was a mixup and it's going to take half an hour to get and set up a longer hose, it's much cheaper to have 1 person do it in post if it takes a day, versus delay the shot for half an hour while 50 people wait around. (And no, you often can't just shoot a different shot in the meantime, because that involves rearranging the lighting and set which takes just as long.)
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?
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.
If it can be fixed in post, what's the problem? The only flaw here is that they completely screwed up and forgot post for these scenes (in the remaster).
Apparently they didn't forget. Lionsgate did all the necessary work, then someone sent the "wrong file" to HBO Max, and it seems nobody checked it properly before uploading it!
Given the volume of material these streamers are handling, I expect QA is minimal. I remember when I was watching Frasier on Amazon Prime, a bunch of the episodes had been configured to play in the wrong aspect ratio. Clearly nobody had ever bothered to check them.
When I worked in the VOD industry we never almost never did a precheck of the files. The content provider (Lionsgate in this case) would upload the files that would then get ingested by the CMS system for normalization and transcoding. The most check the distributor did was add metadata marks for ad breaks and random checks for transcode quality.
I set up custom ingest workflows many cable companies around the world and they all worked the same. You just had to trust that the providers sent you good copies and get them to fix their shit if it was wrong. Most of the time it was bad metadata (episode description, ect).
Friends on Netflix one day years ago had the extended versions of the episodes. They fixed it quickly, but it's kind of a shame since it'd be nice if we had the choice to select which version we wanted to see.
I’ve seen movies on Prime where the audio was very badly out of sync. I thought it was my setup at first, but I was able to isolate it to particular titles. Like watching a bad dub from another language.
> Given the volume of material these streamers are handling, I expect QA is minimal
Yeah, I expect QA is minimal for these shows that are past their prime. Only fans will really watch them again, it's probably not worth it to spend the extra time to review every single episode. (But of course, fans will care! I'm just saying it's probably not worthwhile for HBO to check)
HBO Max was advertising this as a big new exciting release. They probably paid a bunch of money for exclusive streaming rights and expected to capture a new audience that missed the show the first time.
I guess the crew has to stay pretty close to the end of the hose or it becomes hard to time the... flow... correctly. Likely, they still had to process the frames anyway to make the... flow... look like it comes out of Sterling's mouth, not from the side of his face, so it was basically no extra cost.
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).
They were set up to shoot that scene that day and they were on a tight schedule. They started to set up and they realized they only had 12 feet of hose, or that the pressure dropped too much with a longer length of hose. They discussed all the options, and fixing it physically would take too long or be too expensive. Thus another "we'll fix it in post!" moment was born.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
HBO became an incredibly valuable brand because of a well deserved reputation for quality. Any one great show or highly visible screwup will only move that needle so much, but they do compound over time. I still remember the leaked audio from some years ago when the new HBO ownership explicitly said they wanted to take a more quantity over quality approach. This latest case certainly reinforces my mental model that HBO isn't what it used to be and probably isn't worth combing back to any time soon, given that there are better streaming options out there.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Fun fact: The X-Files production team foresaw the coming of 16:9 home entertainment, so they made some effort (increasing with later seasons) to try and "protect" a 16:9 frame, which allowed for an unusually good 16:9 Blu-ray restoration. [https://www.tweaktown.com/reviews/7499/look-inside-the-files...]
I learned this from the older X-files DVDs, which have some unusually good special features.
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
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-w...
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.
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.
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.
https://vimeo.com/39768998
> This video is not rated. Join vimeo to watch
No thanks. Here's a YouTube mirror: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ufs0Rwx8sOk
See https://davidsimon.com/the-wire-hd-with-videos/
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.
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.
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.)
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."
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.
The term is "open matte" and is the ideal way of watching movies on folding phones.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_matte
Open matte is a filming technique.
The second half of your sentence is misguided.
Similar with Babylon 5, although the CG has not aged as well.
The Babylon 5 team had tried to prepare for that as well by keeping digital masters of all the effects. It would have meant recompositing, which isn't necessarily cheap, but in theory they could have run the exact same effects at a higher resolution.
Unfortunately, Warner Brothers lost those files. Rumor has it when they sent copies to Sierra (really Vivendi at the time, just before the Activision acquisition) for a Babylon 5 videogame the WB Archives team accidentally sent their only copy and that when the videogame project was shutdown they destroyed the copies per the IP license agreement.
There's a high probability that even if WB had had the digital masters of the effects, they probably still would have stuck to the 4:3 restoration over the 16:9 restoration to avoid recompositing costs, but it's still such a weird swing of bad luck that the production team thought ahead about HD technology well enough as well as anyone could at that time and yet the 4K copy we have in this timeline is in the wrong aspect ratio.
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.
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.
There was recent (last few years) work done to fix all of this.
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!
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.
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).
Also a US only thing. Torrents keeping the rest of us alive.
I loved B5's story, but no remaster is going to fix the cheeseball acting of the show. It felt 200 years old even when it was airing. (Sigh, I'm probably still going to rewatch it...)
I think Garibaldi was actually quite good.
Sheridan was maybe a bit cheesy at times but definitely gave off that vibe of a leader one could follow into battle.
It's streaming, for free, on Tubi
Not available outside the US, I think. Torrents are then just more convenient.
Not to dismiss the X-files team, but 16:9 was already around when they started. Just not in the states. Japan started getting 16:9 CRTs in the early 90s, Europe followed in the mid 90s. America lagged another half decade and effectively skipped 16:9 CRTs mostly going straight to plasma/lcd.
The first 16:9 content I ever saw was the trailer to "Batman Forever" (with Val Kilmer) in 1995 when I was working at C-Cube Microsystems. The studios use to send them test content all the time for video compression testing. It was on D1 tape, and looked beautiful for SD resolution. The professional Sony CRT 4:3 monitors back then had a 16:9 button to letterbox the image.
Japan has been ahead of the curve on a lot of home media related technology, not least because they manufactured a lot of it.
Although Stargate SG-1 (1997) was filmed in 16:9 from the outset, earlier seasons were broadcast in 4:3.
The first season or two you can definitely see the crew in the safety margins, sometimes the camera crane too
The article mentions that Mad Men was already in 16:9 so the issues are unrelated to re-framing.
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).
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.
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.
Except when you do it too much, the 4:3 area will remain brighter due to the higher usage.
Friends....did not.
[dead]
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-...)
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...
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.
> 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.
> The biggest test is that I can also drink most supermarket instant coffee without complaint.
I was the same way for years and appreciated it but unfortunately I did start to treat myself more and it's hard to go back, but my financial situation is also much better. I think it's valuable to stick with the lowest sufferable quality of something until you have the ability to meaningfully upgrade or improve upon it.
I also spent quite a bit of time with some quite well known mastering engineers in a former career - many of them talked about the pressure to produce "loud" masters for CD, but how they were given much more creative freedom for vinyl releases.
Hearing the two masters side by side on some incredible speakers really gave me an appreciation for how different 'versions' of an album can transform the experience of the music.
Tangent as you mentioned boosted high frequencies on tapes...
It's possible (likely) that those prerecorded cassettes had boosted high frequencies because they were intended to be played on a deck that supports Dolby B noise reduction, and will do the reverse operation to get the level back to where it's supposed to be.
Dolby B noise reduction didn't actually reduce noise at the source. Instead:
- During recording: Boost the volume of high frequencies (where tape hiss is most audible)
- During playback: Apply the inverse.
When you reduce the treble during playback, you're reducing the hiss along with it, but the original signal (which was boosted before) ends up at the intended level. This improves the signal-to-noise ratio in the high frequencies.
This is similar to the RIAA equalization curve used for vinyl records.
- During mastering: Reduce bass, boost treble.
- During playback:The RIAA phono preamp applies the inverse curve—boosting bass and reducing treble.
IIRC the reasons for the RIAA curve aren't just about improving signal-to-noise ratio, but something about the physical limits of vinyl.
Part of the reason this one is news is that there's really zero excuse for it being done "on the cheap": HBO can afford the very best, and their reputation kiiiind of depends on it.
What happened to the early Pixar movies isn't at all the same, though. They weren't remastered, they were just transferred to a media that they were not originally mastered for.
I think you're ill-informed. The Pixar movies were re-rendered completely. They did not take a 35mm negative, or an old file, to transfer it. Pixar has the ability to load the Toy Story project files, and use the current version of RenderMan to make a new final version. It's completely unique among the industry.
But IIRC there was some color grading gaffe because the original colors were precompensated for film ( they originally filmed the renders ) - but this lead to oversaturation and color changes in the digital renders. So in some way they did meet a similar fate.
Absolutely, but OP was thinking of colours being messed up because of a format transfer.
They would have needed to look at the 35mm negative of Toy Story from '95, picked up the colours from there to then put an intermediate colour correction step. They didn't do it, which is a shame. We lost artistic intent.
That's not at all what I'm talking about. I know it's confusing because I used the word "transferred," but if you don't put your own misunderstanding into my statement, you'll notice that I didn't say from a 35mm negative. It's just a complete transfer of the frames as they were meant for film but crucially, not from film, into a digital file.
Discussed here a few weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45883788
And notably, there's some dissent there that the modern Disney/Pixar versions are wrong (there's an arbitrariness to scanners, plus no particularly objective recordings of what you'd actually see at theaters back then) IIUC.
So odd that they didn't slap a film emulation on top of that. Although maybe not any existing software emulates exactly the film stock they used, any film emulation would look more true than a 1:1.
Disneys old animated shows get remastered by cropping the 4:3 source to 16:9. It shows more often than not that something is missing from the picture.
See also the "remaster" of Buffy the Vampire Slayer not having proper colour grading done https://horrorbuzz.com/buffy-hd-issues-original-teams-reacti...
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/
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.
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
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" ;-)
My advice is to pay someone else to do the transfer, but get someone good. Most services online don't bother with a real TBC because a professional TBC is expensive, and not worth investing in for the average consumer. However, it is an absolute necessity if you want any kind of quality.
Failing that, you can get a retrotink 4k and any old HDMI capture card to do a "good enough" job for most folks. It has a sort of poor-mans TBC that will work as long as the tapes aren't too bad. You're still looking at a grand for the retrotink, but you can then use it for retro video games if you're into that.
Disambiguation to save anyone looking it up: TBC == timebase correction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_base_correction
I am fortunate that the Panasonic AG7650 I use for playback has a built-in TBC that emits stable enough video to go straight into my BMD Intensity Pro.
Here's that short documentary if you're interested: https://archive.org/details/restoring-the-civil-war
Restoration tools are very cool. One tool I liked allows you to draw a marquee around an area you'd like to fix. It then allows you to shift the frames forward/back in just the highlighted area to find a frame without the blemish. Obviously a more static shot gave better results, but it was fast and easy to use. Much easier than trying to use a blemish/clone tool. Doing the same fix with rotoscoping techniques would take much more time/effort.
I used to work at a film restoration studio about 10 years ago, and back then PF Clean from PixelFarm was more or less the industry standard. That might have been the software you saw.
I wonder if it was Cinepaint, one of the earlier Linux success stories
That reminds me of House of Bamboo, which kind of had the opposite problem[0]:
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Bamboo#CastingThe 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.
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!”)
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.
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.
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
100% chance I would have never noticed the "puke hose" tech in the background. I never saw the Gorilla in that classic "basketball video".
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
You mean the moonwalking bear?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7hgJpfn3zXw
Great article, I really thought it was a recropping like friends (and many others). So weird that they just forgot about CGI.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
Why do business without glamor when you can do business with glamor?
The wheels would fall off of modern society if ball bearings had quality issues like this.
I know that you are joking, but well-made BBs are incredibly important to just about any modern machine that moves, and indirectly, all the non-moving ones too.
Hell, Albert Speer, Nazi in charge of BBs and other manufacturing, said that the US bombing offensive would have had a huge impact on the war if they had just kept at it with bombing the BB factories instead of giving up.
It's all about prestige, which in my opinion is the #1 driver of human motivation.
>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.
Dont criticize the billion dollar corporation >:(
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.
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.
> 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.
Really surprisingly bad work by HBO.
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
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!
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.
*Press release
Great article.
Can someone explain what was wrong with that _Friends_ screenshot? I can't tell.
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).
The “five card charlie” sign is part of the set that’s supposed to be on camera, but the hole in the sheetrock obviously isn’t.
I know you are right here but it is also true that many real New York apartments have crazy things like the hole in the sheetrock.
Who doesn’t want a permanently open serving window between their apartment and the public hallway
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
I distinctly remember the "5 card Charlie" sign from the original SDTV broadcast back in the day.
In that case your memory (or perhaps just attention to detail when watching) is better than mine, and I withdraw my previous belief! Thanks for the correction
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.
This post explains it nicely, by showing the noticeboard they normally use to cover that camera hole (which looks like an unfinished window frame, missing its architrave): https://x.com/MattBaume/status/1661785600050233344
There's a window-hole in what should be an exterior apartment wall facing a hallway. Right side of the screen.
New York apartments rarely have holes in their walls opening to the hallway.
haha. Take a look at the massive unfinished window into the hallway =).
There's a cut out on the wall for cameras on a different angle.
I think it is the open hole in the wall next to the door -- which no real apartment would have. I think that part was meant be cropped in the final frame, maybe?
> 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.
Very slightly related: 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.
I'd pay a separate subscription if I got to watch all these workprints. Fascinating stuff.
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.
Unrelated: does anyone else experience huge lag with HBO streaming app? It’s easily the slowest I regularly use on Samsung smart tv.
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?
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.
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.
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).
Or just regular software companies. Microsoft's been beta testing on actual users since MS-DOS!
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.
>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.
marketing for people to engage with HBO Max and Mad Men... they haven't "already been paid"
It honestly seemed like pretty sharp marketing to me already when I read about it on AV Club.
True
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?
It's not laziness!
It's the fact that shooting is enormously expensive per-minute, and time-constrained. Think of the sheer number of crew involved. And then think of the sheer number of shots you have to get per day, to stay on schedule and on budget.
If there was a mixup and it's going to take half an hour to get and set up a longer hose, it's much cheaper to have 1 person do it in post if it takes a day, versus delay the shot for half an hour while 50 people wait around. (And no, you often can't just shoot a different shot in the meantime, because that involves rearranging the lighting and set which takes just as long.)
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?
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.
They were already gonna edit it in post to remove the hose anyway.. Might as well remove the crew too in that case.
If it can be fixed in post, what's the problem? The only flaw here is that they completely screwed up and forgot post for these scenes (in the remaster).
Apparently they didn't forget. Lionsgate did all the necessary work, then someone sent the "wrong file" to HBO Max, and it seems nobody checked it properly before uploading it!
Given the volume of material these streamers are handling, I expect QA is minimal. I remember when I was watching Frasier on Amazon Prime, a bunch of the episodes had been configured to play in the wrong aspect ratio. Clearly nobody had ever bothered to check them.
When I worked in the VOD industry we never almost never did a precheck of the files. The content provider (Lionsgate in this case) would upload the files that would then get ingested by the CMS system for normalization and transcoding. The most check the distributor did was add metadata marks for ad breaks and random checks for transcode quality.
I set up custom ingest workflows many cable companies around the world and they all worked the same. You just had to trust that the providers sent you good copies and get them to fix their shit if it was wrong. Most of the time it was bad metadata (episode description, ect).
Friends on Netflix one day years ago had the extended versions of the episodes. They fixed it quickly, but it's kind of a shame since it'd be nice if we had the choice to select which version we wanted to see.
I’ve seen movies on Prime where the audio was very badly out of sync. I thought it was my setup at first, but I was able to isolate it to particular titles. Like watching a bad dub from another language.
> Given the volume of material these streamers are handling, I expect QA is minimal
Yeah, I expect QA is minimal for these shows that are past their prime. Only fans will really watch them again, it's probably not worth it to spend the extra time to review every single episode. (But of course, fans will care! I'm just saying it's probably not worthwhile for HBO to check)
HBO Max was advertising this as a big new exciting release. They probably paid a bunch of money for exclusive streaming rights and expected to capture a new audience that missed the show the first time.
I guess the crew has to stay pretty close to the end of the hose or it becomes hard to time the... flow... correctly. Likely, they still had to process the frames anyway to make the... flow... look like it comes out of Sterling's mouth, not from the side of his face, so it was basically no extra cost.
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).
Hypothesis:
They were set up to shoot that scene that day and they were on a tight schedule. They started to set up and they realized they only had 12 feet of hose, or that the pressure dropped too much with a longer length of hose. They discussed all the options, and fixing it physically would take too long or be too expensive. Thus another "we'll fix it in post!" moment was born.
Likely harder to get the timing and pressure right with a longer hose.
They didn’t buy the XL model
They were out of frame. Out of the 4:3 frame.
Edit: I jumped the gun and thought we were talking about the Friends screenshot.
But it was never intended for 4:3. They were always in frame, just digitally removed.
No the original was 16:9, you can see they have been digitally removed in the shots from the Blu-ray.
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.
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
That option wasn't added until some time later.
I wish Netflix did it for Seinfeld.
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-...
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".
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.
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
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.
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.
HBO became an incredibly valuable brand because of a well deserved reputation for quality. Any one great show or highly visible screwup will only move that needle so much, but they do compound over time. I still remember the leaked audio from some years ago when the new HBO ownership explicitly said they wanted to take a more quantity over quality approach. This latest case certainly reinforces my mental model that HBO isn't what it used to be and probably isn't worth combing back to any time soon, given that there are better streaming options out there.
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.
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.
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.
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-regr...
* 5 Worst Changes Star Wars Made From The Original Cuts // 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-colori...
You're not wrong, it's just not relevant to this case - Mad Men was originally broadcast in 16:9
> 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.
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
Not working for me. This makes me think they're lazy and greedy, doesn't make me want to go and consume their slop.
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