The Wire in HD

> the new HD release is already on Amazon Prime Instant Video

I'm having a hard time finding this... any chance you can link?

There's also an interesting discussion on how these things are converted from SD to HD in that reddit thread you listed first. I found an article that expands on it a little more (though talking about the X-Files and referencing an image made for Star Trek) http://observationdeck.io9.com/x-files-remastered-in-hd-but-...

The Amazon Prime 16:9 versions are not the same as this Simon sanctioned re-release. They predate it by several years.

Edit: found a link for this claim. directv did them http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?s=42c992...

I watched The Wire about 3 years ago and I nearly stopped after the first few episodes because it did look 'cheap' or 'old' to me. I'm glad I persisted, it really is brilliant. Definitely watch it in HD if you can.

If I read it right, I think it's the idea of switching the sides of a conversation, keeping one person on the left(or at least facing right) and the other on the right(facing left). If you cross to the other side it's a bit jarring.

I could be wrong, however.

I believe he's referring to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/180-degree_rule

In the early days of film, scenes would be staged in a theatrical sort of tableau, with the camera stuck in one spot and characters moving around the frame. This is called a master shot - it includes all the geography of the scene. And while that's still a good way to stage things for many purposes, filmmakers quickly discovered that cutting between different perspectives - eg moving from a wide shot to successively more intimate closeups, that mirror the intensity of the characters' emotions. This is called coverage. Watch any film with the sound turned off and you'll be struck by how many scenes just consist of someone's face looking off the left or right of the frame.

But that means a whole bunch of extra decisions about where to put the camera - which are the director's job to decide. If you mess those up, viewers will get confused about the interior geography of the scene, who's looking at whom etc.; you see me looking like this: (o < o), then I show something else, then you see me looking like this: (o > o) - you naturally assuming I'm looking at a third thing that's off to my left. Why?

In any scene there's a primary character and the object of his/her attention - usually another character, but maybe an object or even an imaginary point in space. The line between the main character's eyes and the object of their gaze is called 'the line of interest'. So when you're placing the camera, you need to pick one side of this line for the master shot and stay on it for all the coverage. It's also called the 180 degree rule, because that line would split an imaginary circle into two halves of 180 degrees each. That way when you cut between different actors, they're always facing in more-or-less the same direction and the viewer intuitively knows where everyone is. There's also a 30-degree rule which says that successive cuts should involve a change of at least 30 degrees (relative to the midpoint of the line of interest) so as to avoid the sensation of a 'jump' - a movement so minimal that the brain is more inclined to scribe it to a missing bit of footage than a real change in perspective. Of course that can be (ab)used for artistic effect.

If there are more than 2 people in a scene then there can be multiple lines of interest, but there is only ever one at once. If you want to move to a different one, you need to establish the new line. You could pan the camera, follow one of the characters as they walk into or out of the frame, pivot by showing three characters and then cutting across a secondary line when the third person talks, and so on.

Camera angle choices are the biggest part of the director's job during production, and probably the most stressful, because a) every new camera angle requires, on average, at least an hour of additional work for the whole crew, and b) they define the style of a film, from amateurish to visionary - and while audiences can be tricked with the magic of editing, the actors and crew can generally read the director's level of skill during shooting and will respond accordingly.

I found the description here (football game) to be pretty informative: https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080823052742A...

I agree. I've watched a bunch of 4:3 aspect stuff over the holidays on my 40" HD telly (old war movies, The Invaders etc). Once you settle into a film/programme you barely notice those black bars down the sides of the screen.

In fact I remember watching The Wire on the same TV on DVD back around 2007'ish and hadn't noticed it wasn't widescreen/HD.

ps: "couldn't care less" ;)

But that wouldn't satisfy the people Simon is (obliquely) talking about, the "OHMYGAWD WHY DOESN'T IT FILL UP MY ENTIRE SCREEN" knuckle-draggers. The point of the new widescreen transfer is to take away the thing that's keeping those people from watching The Wire.

Ironically, these are the same people who used to scream about widescreen transfers back when 4:3 sets were the norm. The only difference is that the black bars they were complaining about back then were on the top and bottom rather than the sides.

And if the Surface 3 ever gets some market share, too!

Hey, IMAX is a "tall" format, also... will that be the argument to sell us new screens, if or once the 4K television game is over? :~)

Nope. He's saying it outright.

> almost like I could see the scan lines

I noticed this too, I think that the streaming version must have been prepared from a source that was first interlaced for broadcast, then deinterlaced poorly for internet distribution. There are a variety of algorithms for deinterlacing that can eliminate artifacts like that with varying effectiveness: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deinterlacing#Deinterlacing_met...

It's too bad because the 4:3 and fuzzy quality was definitely a distraction, especially in the beginning when the show is slow to get into. I think many people probably drop off early. I'm excited to watch the show through again in HD.

As you can see in the second example in the article, there are changes. There's a 4:3 original, followed by the naive widescreen version, followed by a widescreen version that has been edited to try to preserve more of the original intent. Cropping back to 4:3 will no longer get you the original scene.

Read the article, it's good. The problem is that the series was designed to look good and "work" in 4:3 ratio. This means that many of the decisions on how to direct a scene were made with the aspect ratio in mind. An example from the article is the use of mid-sized shots where wide shots would have made the actors too small on screen, and close-ups would have been too cramped.

Moving the material to 16:9 ratio creates situations where the original shot composition or camera movement doesn't make sense anymore. Additionally the new aspect ratio can reveal something that was never meant to be on screen in the first place. The problem is that you need to go through each scene and assess if the cinematography and editing still makes sense from the story's point of view.