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Comment by tomjakubowski | Hacker News Reader

Seinfeld was actually filmed on 16:9 and then cropped to 4:3 for broadcasts in the 90s. So the 16:9 Seinfeld is showing you more, not less.

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.

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> Seinfeld was actually filmed on 16:9 and then cropped to 4:3 for broadcasts in the 90s. So the 16:9 Seinfeld is showing you more, not less.

According to this tweet they cropped out the pothole from the episode The Pothole.

https://twitter.com/Thatoneguy64/status/1443961536079450117

But you see more of the car. How?

Edit: never mind, there is a slight difference there.

Twitter also annoyingly crops image previews.

Car appears to be the same if you click.

I don't know if this is the case for Seinfeld, but TV productions filmed in 16:9 but for 4:3 broadcast didn't always take care that the full 16:9 frame would have adequate content, i.e. no mike booms or non-stage items visible, and therefore later 16:9 versions had to be zoomed in by some factor; still wider than the 4:3, but reduced in the vertical.

I want to say it was either 24 or Heroes that had some scenes where you could see things like this in the widescreen release

Definitely remember this being the case for Buffy on DVD.

For Buffy that's only on the R2/R4 DVDs I believe, the R1 DVDs are luckily fully 4:3. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Buffy_the_Vampire_Slay...

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").

Interesting - but, are you saying netflix is using those original 16:9 scans? From all the screenshots I can see it looks like they took a 4:3 source and cropped to 16:9.

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.

That doesn't seem to be the case: https://www.theverge.com/2021/10/1/22704399/seinfeld-aspect-...

>>That doesn't seem to be the case

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:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PFIrsitJW5M

Thanks, I was misinformed and the truth is way more interesting.

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