Comment by babypuncher | Hacker News Reader

Comment by babypuncher | Hacker News Reader

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I would argue that pan-and-scan solved a practical problem, and while it wasn't ideal, it was also just flat out necessary for a while. Your average TV in the '80s would have been around 20", and VHS only gave you 240 lines of vertical resolution. Letterboxing a 2.39:1 movie meant cutting both of those metrics in half. Preserving the original framing doesn't mean much when a sizable portion of your audience is stuck squinting at the screen.

Some filmmakers kept this in mind when making their movies in the '80s and '90s. Films like Terminator 2 were shot open matte, allowing each shot to be framed for 4:3 and the target theatrical widescreen aspect ratio simultaneously.

I think these facts got lost on a lot of people who were die-hard widescreen LaserDisc fans. LaserDisc had twice the vertical resolution of VHS. And if you were a big enough moviebuff to have a LaserDisc collection, you probably also had a bigger than average TV.

The rest of these techniques, like colorization, seem more about making older content more palatable to newer viewers, and don't really do anything to solve a technical problem.

It may have begun as a practical problem, but the fact that the opposite now happens (zoomed 4:3 content on widescreens which are all at least 720p and where letterboxing doesn't lose anything) tells me that there is enough of a population that doesn't like "the black lines" to warrant publishing those.

I wish they would just split the difference and zoom to 14:9. That minimizes the worst of the cropping with less intrusive bars.

David Simon went into great detail in his blog about why they had to completely re-edit The Wire scene-by-scene from source material to suit the HD format. There were scenes where the meaning was changed and details lost if they simply cropped without discretion.

https://davidsimon.com/the-wire-hd-with-videos/

By 2002 widescreen HD was clearly on its way. The video cameras weren't ubiquitous for shows shot on tape, but for film shoots, it's on them for not framing with awareness of a future HD release in syndication. The only excuse for composing shots in full frame 4:3 in the 00s would be retro-themed programs like That 70s Show.

I think you mean it's a technical problem. Language translation and screen size translation are both solving for the practical problem of reaching a wider audience and on more devices.

Subtitles and dubs already solve the practical problem of making content produced in one language accessible in another, and in a non-destructive manner.

This AI lipsyncing nonsense is more like the rash of colorized black and white movies that came out in the '80s, or the modern day scourge of 4:3 shows getting pan-and-scanned to 16:9. The "problems" these solve are viewers being closed-minded about watching movies and shows that don't have color or "look old". The final product is generally going to be inferior to the original.

My pedantry—like most pedantry—was focused on the problem, not the solution. Ergo, you could accurately say "AI lipsyncing nonsense" is a highly-technical solution to a practical problem, and subtitles a pragmatic low-tech solution.

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