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.
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?
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.
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.
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-...)
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
28 comments
[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 43.1 ms ] threadCan someone explain what was wrong with that _Friends_ screenshot? I can't tell.
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/
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.
I learned this from the older X-files DVDs, which have some unusually good special features.
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.
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
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
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...
If you have an old TV with an off format you will miss a portion of the intended frame.
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.
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.
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.