‘Seinfeld’ fans upset that Netflix’s aspect ratio cuts out jokes
rollingstone.com
rollingstone.com
If I remember the details correctly HBO wanted to do a cut similar to the Netflix one and Simon (and maybe others?) Went back through the entire series and meticulously edited the shots to still have the same meaning / context.
The result by the way is incredible. The Wire is one of my favorite shows of all time anyway, but the fact that you can watch it today in such high quality is a real delight.
You can see this in many other early 2000’s shows like TWW.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZWNGq70Oyo
(edit: already posted in this thread, oops: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28737063)
Ignoring random fire alarms and watching the actors on stage is kind of natural to me, it wouldn't bother me watching Buffy.
There's now an option to show the original aspect ratio, I didn't discover it for a long time though.
Amazon prime on my phone blows up 16:9 material too, chopping off the top and bottom to fit the wider aspect ratio, unless you're careful to 'zoom out'
Interesting. I've just checked on my iPhone, and 4:3 video stays 4:3, with black bars on the side.
I only have an older iPhone with a 16:9 ratio, so I can't test what happens with 16:9 material.
But if I do the double-tap you describe on 4:3 material, it will zoom-in and crop the top and bottom.
But that's not the default behaviour in my case. I actually didn't even know about the double-tap thing.
You can now watch the entire Dragon Ball and DBZ in half the time it should take, missing nothing from the original, saving on frustration.
There are gigabytes of content, it's crazy to me some people spend years on those and just give them away as torrents, doing a better job that the right holders swimming in money.
Most of my friends laugh at me for still buying physical media, but the reality is I don't trust streaming services, or IP owners in general really. There is no way my kids are growing up thinking that Han didn't shot first.
Only passionate fans or enthusiasts care enough to make sure things are preserved to an acceptable quality. Companies will always do dumb things like change aspect ratio, remove scenes, ship low quality video, audio or subtitles.
When I was a kid in the 90's I remember that it was not uncommon to have black-and-white movie recolored to make them look more contemporary. This is arguably an even bigger betrayal of the original artistic vision and I expect done for very much the same reasons.
There is no good argument. Cropping out huge amounts of the actual material is not justifiable. End of story.
It's still good.
Even in cases where nothing too important goes missing, cropped video just looks really off. Oftentimes you'll see the tops of heads cut off at the top of the frame, or small details just on the verge of being visible. If something is framed just off center, the cropped version will show it very off center.
Just look at this shot, for example: https://imgur.com/KKiMbWP - nothing is missing, but the right character's bottom half is completely out of frame and it just looks incredibly weird. The floor also is totally invisible so you lose your sense of grounding.
It's just a complete lack of respect for the hard work that went into creating these shows.
Really, I don't even care about Seinfeld in particular. I've never watched it and I never will, because it's not my type of show.
But this isn't about Seinfeld, and I'm not personally inconvenienced by this or angry about it. I'm saying this because it's just universally a bad idea to cut 4:3 content into 16:9, regardless of what it is. It could the lowest tier commercial garbage or Twin Peaks or anything in between. You will always make things look awkward, and the viewer will subconsciously notice. This goes even for shows that had poor framing to begin. And of course that's not even touching on the fact that, in this case, it actually just ruined a scene by making the most important part invisible.
And personally, I think it's not up to any individual to say "I consider this work to be unworthy of respect" and start messing around with it and diminishing the experience for the people that do care. Someone else might be deeply invested in something you consider completely unremarkable.
What's more, you'd have to expect that some TV shows will end up getting remastered, then cropped, and then the masters get lost before a proper release is ever done. Again, not talking about Seinfeld in particular, but you'd be amazed at how many modern works become lost media even today, and this sort of thing isn't helping.
Secondly, I love cinematography. I also love Seinfeld. But I don't think cinematography is one of the main reasons people love the show.
More seriously I've watched the show multiple times in 16:9 and it's mostly fine but I've always thought the 4:3 scenes on YouTube looked better, so I had some hope we would have the option on Netflix.
Also some people say the new transfer is too dark but I did not notice.
I didn't expect anybody to get the joke. Congratulations ;-)
(Not advocating for cropping, though)
They were making decisions based on a certain set of constraints that they didn't choose. They aren't going to have a problem with making different decisions when those constraints change.
Taking what was originally broadcast and cropping that is always a travesty, though.
Think of the screen like a wall in your house. You hang a painting on the wall. "Why do they make paintings in all these random sizes instead of filling this wall edge egde? Why? Grrr."
Based on some googling, various sources indicate that 35mm film has a usable resolution somewhere between 4K and 8K video, so we're arguably reaching the limits of what we can extract from it (without consideration for "AI upscaling" and such).
Cinema grade digital cameras, like the RED V-Raptor[0] (MKBHD behind the scenes[1]), can now shoot 8K footage at 120+ fps with 17+ stops of dynamic range. As far as I can tell, those specs are objectively more capable than what you can get with traditional 35mm film. It has taken quite awhile for digital to outclass film across the board, but I think we're at that point now, and the results from these cameras are spectacular[2].
At this point, it's probably a question of how much storage you want to use and whether you have enough light in each scene to shoot at high frame rates like that. (120 is an even multiple of both 24 and 30, so you can always produce 'cinematic' frame rates just by throwing away other frames, without any stuttering, but then you have the option to remaster into higher frame rates in the future if low frame rates fall out of fashion, and you can easily add slow motion effects in post, as long as the final frame rate is intended to be less than 120.)
I'm far from a videography expert, but it is something I find interesting.
[0]: https://www.red.com/v-raptor#section-vr-tech-specs
Under optimal conditions, maybe you’re right… but I would personally lump the desire for tons of motion blur in with the nostalgia that causes people to use 24 fps in the first place.
It’s not like people originally wanted to shoot at a noticeably low frame rates… it’s just what they had to do. Then it became a standard that resisted change. Now people artificially restrict themselves to be bug-for-bug compatible with old technology. In fact, a lot of silent films were shot at 16 fps. Why does no one clamor for the return of 16 fps? Arguably, 16 fps is 33% more cinematic!
There are plenty of reasons that I’m not a professional cinematographer… but for the same reason that no one would prefer to watch a film captured in 10 fps, it follows logically that 24 fps is not actually “better” than higher frame rates. It’s just what people have been taught to see as better through experience when they contrast traditional, high budget films shot at 24 fps with low budget TV shows that were broadcast at 60 fps. It’s probably going to be decades before people unlearn this low frame rate preference, but I predict people a hundred years from now will be far less impressed with 24 fps footage than some people today.
I have plenty of other unpopular opinions available too. :P
Regardless, it doesn’t seem beyond belief to imagine that someone could combine the 5 frames of 120fps -> 24fps into individual “long exposure” shots that produce a similar motion blur effect as a single frame taken with a slower shutter. The necessary data is (mostly) all there, if someone took advantage of it. A well-proven technique similar to this is used in astrophotography to create artificially longer exposures, but it is combined with an alignment step to avoid the motion blur of the Earth spinning relative to the stars, which is why astrophotographers don't just extend the length of the exposure, and why they bother with combining multiple exposures. Obviously, applying this technique to create motion blur would mean skipping the alignment step, at a minimum, but this is probably one of those things that would be relatively simple for a properly trained neural network to do a good job with smoothing out, to avoid the gaps of motion blur between the frames that are available... each of which would likely be individually shot with a shutter speed faster than 1/120 anyways.
Film grains will always set a limit for how much resolution we extract from old film but it's really high. Current methods yield 4K to 8K from 35mm film but odds are with better interpolation technology that understands the interaction of light with the random spacing of the film grains, we could probably get something on the verge of 16K. No one has 16K TVs though, so it's a rather pointless exercise right now.
Still makes me curious, how much information is actually lost versus just computationally/physically obscured..
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/seinfeld/comments/17xn28/original_v...
Now I do: The producers filmed the show using equipment that would allow remastering for HDTV.
I remember back in 4:3 when it was far harder to find letterboxed VHS tapes, and when filmmakers often would make sure their scope movies also worked in 4:3 by filming in 4:3 and cropping to scope (with the exception of a few hundred accidentally revealed boom mics.) I have to believe that people would just get angry if they got home and realized that their tape wasn't going to utilize their entire television, so that's how the market shook out. The funny thing about movies from that period mentioned is that really both versions of a film were incomplete.
I also remember my grandparents watching DirectTV streams that were clearly stretched out horizontally on the screen, and how they didn't notice at all. They'd notice black bars.
Now that TVs are somewhere midway between 4:3 and scope, the problem has reversed itself. I've seen it solved by zoom, I've seen it solved by horizontal stretch, I've seen it solved by half-zoom and half-stretch, I've seen it solved by either half-zoom or half-stretch combined with half-black bars, even. Just showing it in 4:3 with black bars on both sides isn't significantly more popular than any of these options. And I have to believe that there's research, because, as this story shows, zooming can be expensive. You can do it automatically, and lose everyone's feet and the tops of their heads (or their whole heads in the right shots), or go over everything manually, moving individual shots that turn out badly up and down in a way that might depend on story. Also reducing the number of vertical scanlines makes old tv look like shit, so you might have to spend effort doing something about that. For that last, you can be saved if the series was shot on film and you have access to original materials...
All of this is good, because it is an impossible problem for industry to solve, therefore it will encourage piracy by purists, and piracy for things that aren't Seinfeld episodes will get a free userbase and attendant infrastructure. Also good for piracy are geoblocking and delayed broadcast times between countries. Here's hoping that the next Game of Thrones-type blockbuster series airs a day later in the UK:)
The funniest thing about 4:3 on 16:9 is that everyone's tv is the size of a bus now, and a black-barred 4:3 picture is certainly going to be a lot larger on those than the LP-sized screens families would have been watching the original broadcasts on.
Maybe the problem is a tv looks like a frame, and frames are made custom to fit the painting, and so any discrepency looks bad.
But now that tv's are both huge, and are featureless panels with little to no interesting frame let alone actual furniture quality cabinetry, maybe only now they can start to be seen as mini walls where it would actually be kind of pathological to require that every pixel always be lit just because they exist.
Just yesterday some folks have been bragging about how Netfilx proactively matches compensation of their emps - great - maybe that's a mistake. Because given how stupid such a decision is, how bad their recommendations are, plus their home grown productions getting worse with every week passing by, I wonder if it isn't time to weed out a little. Seems like this company is a cesspool of ignorance and incompetence...