Well, online platforms do not care a lot about the content.
For example, on disney+, the simpsons are cropped to 16/9, which removes a lot of the image. Hopefully, I found an original version on torrent, but that's really a bad move from disney.
For example, on disney+, the simpsons are cropped to 16/9, which removes a lot of the image. Hopefully, I found an original version on torrent, but that's really a bad move from disney.
Seinfeld on Netflix on the other hand only has the cropped aspect ratio (booooooooo).
The good seasons of the Simpsons are so full of sight gags. The crop (or worse, when the crop consciously pans and scans) totally spoils them.
According to this tweet they cropped out the pothole from the episode The Pothole.
Unfortunately the streaming HD "remaster" is fully 16:9 and badly adapted, not only regarding cropping, but also colors and editing (just google for "buffy hd").
Twitter also annoyingly crops image previews.
Car appears to be the same if you click.
Makes me think as well that If netflix had rescanned all the film to preserve the original 16:9, I'm sure they would be have done it in 4K.
edit: it is in 4k, I was wrong.
Correct, Seinfeld is cropped to make way for the 16:9 aspect ratio. However it was one of the few sitcoms at the time shot with 35mm film (but with 4:3 aspect ratio.) The resolution was high enough that later, editors were able to crop to 16:9 and maintain acceptable picture quality.
They had to make some interesting framing decisions along the way.
This is how Seinfeld would look if it wasn't cropped.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qC9LcyglcXE
This video explains the cropping process:
So many 4:3 shows are rendered unwatchable by these companies, most of which fancy themselves as having a cutting-edge tech stack.
You’re telling me no one at Netflix can build a toggle option allowing the user to select the aspect ratio?
It is still very bad that the default ratio is wrong, I see zero reason to watch it in this cropped ratio.
Anyway, thanks for pointing that up.