3rd Rock from the Sun (from 1996 to 2001) is being prepped for HD syndication and Blu-ray release by rescanning the 17 year old 35mm original camera negatives. also FYI even though they are not scifi but mentioned in that article: well it will be cropped like the Seinfeld remaster but is still cool. older 3rd Rock from the Sun thread
Cropping, yuck, I imagine we'll see a lot of this moving forward. Can't have "black bars" on mah Tee Vee... I'm curious if the coloring and whatever is really needed or if they are just going to try to change it to look more "modern" or whatever.
I was excited for a moment, then I read it will be in 16:9. So what will it be, cropped pictures or lots of empty space, cameras and missing walls like we see with Friends in 16:9.
I was just googling this story and I finally put it together that the kid from the show is the guy from Looper. I thought he looked familiar!
I am excited! ...Oh wait, no I'm not. 16x9 cropping, what a downer. They're remastering anyway, would it really be the end of the world to have both options available in HD? Why must the "Make it fit my TV!!" people win again and again? Thank goodness Trek has so far managed to avoid it.
Ignorance. People think they're being cheated if their screen isn't full. Also, they think if the screen is full, it's HD (even when it's not) and when it's "square", it's not HD (even when it is--like on my Blu-rays of classic movies). And the bulk of them don't know which sequence of buttons to push on the remote to make it full. So they complain to stores and online about the "small" picture and "ugly black bars". Since such consumers vastly outnumber those who understand OAR and how to use various functions on the TV beyond on/off, the studios cave in. It's the same reason CinemaScope films are cropped on HBO HD. We're actually quite lucky OAR was fought for on DVD and DVD/Blu-ray releases have not, for the most part, succumbed to the HBO cropping of CinemaScope. Sadly these TV releases are a step backwards. I won't be getting any of them.
^^ Yeah, I think a lot of people don't realize often times widescreen movies are getting the cropped treatment on broadcast.
It's OAR for me, all the way. I know someone who has his TV set up so that everything except 4:3 (which gets stretched to 16:9) gets letterboxed. 16:9 broadcasts letterboxed on a 16:9 screen. And the naturally letterboxed movie ratios get letterboxed even more until they're so vertically squished everyone looks like a frog. Apologies for overuse of the word "letterboxed".
^^ I remember when HDTV standards were getting locked down and Spielberg was pushing for sets to have a 2:35 ratio. That guy would've been in his glory.