We already have Sins of the Father in 4:3
Yeah, I know it's a a brain-fart. Doesn't mean I can't make fun.
Season SEVEN OFFICIAL TNG Blu-Ray Discussion Thread
- Thread starter Mutai Sho-Rin
- Start date
Yeah, I know it's a a brain-fart. Doesn't mean I can't make fun.
Ugh. Don't remind me.
Which was cropped, compared to the SD 4:3 frame. A result of that ill-advised experiment it seems.
Bought it in the sampler and expected it fixed by the time the Season 3 set happened.
Which was cropped, compared to the SD 4:3 frame. A result of that ill-advised experiment it seems.
Bought it in the sampler and expected it fixed by the time the Season 3 set happened.
Here's a way for people to watch at TNG on widescreen: Use the zoom button. That's about as legitimate as it'll ever be. I personally don't get the interest in seeing it in widescreen. On youtube I saw a video of "Yesterday's Enterprise", where a fan attemped to make "more cinematic" by cropping it to 2:35!!!! Apparently for some folks, nothing before 1954 looked "cinematic".
By that standard, no one should ever want audio tracks that utilize newer audio systems. Straight stereo, bitches!!!
It's actually that kind of mentality there that got us the remixed 5.1 track for VERTIGO back in the 90s. That's why I won't get the blu-ray of SUPERMAN until they release it standalone with the original stereo mix (it's only available in the movie set, which I'm not interested in). Going for the original sound mixes, that's actually how I always try to watch older films, whenever that original track is available. When I pop in JAWS, I make sure to set it to the original mono mix (the one that won an Oscar for Best Sound, which ain't the DTS 5.1 remix).
[yt]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q81Ublj9k_A[/yt]
A 5.1 speaker set up is great, but I prefer to save that for films that were actually produced in that set up. I noticed that when I watch older films with a remixed soundtrack, they don't really use the speakers to great effect, but when I'm watching something like LORD OF THE RINGS I can hear all the difference.
[yt]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q81Ublj9k_A[/yt]
A 5.1 speaker set up is great, but I prefer to save that for films that were actually produced in that set up. I noticed that when I watch older films with a remixed soundtrack, they don't really use the speakers to great effect, but when I'm watching something like LORD OF THE RINGS I can hear all the difference.
People are never happy. Back in the day, people wanted to chop off the sides of movies to fit the TV screen. Now people want to chop off the top and bottom in order to fit a widescreen TV frame. I suspect it's the same people.
I don't really care, I just don't get the desire to force fit a picture into a frame it wasn't meant to fit.
I had only ever heard Jaws with the 5.1 mix until recently. I listened to the original mono mix and was floored. The music sounds dialed out in the 5.1 mix, and the foley effects suck. Why is it they can never get gunshots to sound right when they redo the sound mixes? Never again.
Listening to the original mixes of Superman, The Good the Bad and the Ugly, Star Wars trilogy, and The Terminator, among others, is the only way to go. And were it not for the fan community, many of those would never be available again.
Listening to the original mixes of Superman, The Good the Bad and the Ugly, Star Wars trilogy, and The Terminator, among others, is the only way to go. And were it not for the fan community, many of those would never be available again.
Appearances can be deceiving, especially since - from a videophile point of view - "Sins of the Father" has the correct 4:3 image framing for a display device with 1:1 pixel mapping (i.e. no overscan cropping).
The SD masters belong to an era where CRT tube TV sets performed the inevitable overscan crop. Television directors were aware that your tube TV would crop the borders of the image - and composed accordingly.
On a professionally calibrated display device with no overscan, "Sins of the Father" will show the image area it had on a 4:3 tube TV back then. If you are serious about the original presentation, you should find it rather difficult to find fault with "Sins of the Father" (of course, if your display device still performs overscan, you'll now see less - but that's the problem of your display device, then, and not of the video source
).@ the other posters
I'm pretty confident that the exlusive CBS executive widescreen presentation made use of the original negative areas left and right with additional information (something a rigid zoom into the 4:3 image area simply could never reveal or illustrate).
I'd like to see what it actually did look like, rather than listening to biased claims that it has to look crappy (the only eyewitness report up to this day was positive). It was part of the starting point of the TNG-R Project, so I think it would make an interesting addition to the the bonus materials.
Bob
No, that's still the fault of the source, since you would always have the choice of enabling overscan or choosing not to, which Sins of the Father no longer allows. Most HD televisions default to overscan mode in my experience.If you are serious about the original presentation, you should find it rather difficult to find fault with "Sins of the Father" (of course, if your display device still performs overscan, you'll now see less - but that's the problem of your display device, then, and not of the video source
This is also ignoring the fact that the VFX shots had the full overscan area and the live-action shots did not. So either way, it's not correct.
Choice? If it's about respecting the original composition / intention of the DP (i.e. what the DP's expected we should see and what we should not see) than the extra information outside the "safe action area" (e.g. microphone booms, floor cables) should have been trimmed in the TNG-R release, IMHO (although mostly it was CGI-erased).
But this would have been an issue for all owners of TV sets where you couldn't turn off the overscan, so depending on what kind of display device you are actually using, CBS' decision was either right or wrong (for all the other episodes).
@ jimbotron
No, it was never confirmed. However, any attempt to reformat TNG into widescreen by accessing the information left and right on the camera negative would require to trim the overscan areas on top and bottom outside the "safe action area".
Since "Sins of the Father" (in contrast to "Farpoint" and "The Inner Light") on the first BD sampler was the only episode where the overscan areas had been trimmed, I assume that was the one which was also readied for the widescreen presentation / experiment.
Bob
The episode had overscan applied to it evenly for the live action scenes (exception being the inserted scene that was later found). Had it been an experiment for widescreen, they would have needed to adjust the framing of each shot individually. Plus they would have need to crop a lot more. There couldn't have been THAT much more on the sides.
It's a shame CBS never went back to the sampler episodes, except for replacing the SD shot and fixing the credits. Encounter at Farpoint uses CGI shots to replace model shots that were later found, Sins of the Father is cropped, and The Inner Light uses a really bad CGI shot.
Watching Sins of the Father alongside the rest of season, that episode stands out. Glossier than the rest, brighter, less grain, and less fine texture.
It's a shame CBS never went back to the sampler episodes, except for replacing the SD shot and fixing the credits. Encounter at Farpoint uses CGI shots to replace model shots that were later found, Sins of the Father is cropped, and The Inner Light uses a really bad CGI shot.
Watching Sins of the Father alongside the rest of season, that episode stands out. Glossier than the rest, brighter, less grain, and less fine texture.
Spookily, CBS Action (here in the UK) are showing "Sins of the Father" right now. The Freesat channel in question is SD, although it's the exact same tight framing as the Blu ray. I guess that means it hasn't quietly been redone, and slipped to TV stations, Netflix, i-Tunes, Amazon Prime etc.
That argument doesn't really work, though, as on a professional CRT monitor, even back then, you could turn off the overscan -- so you might as well have said that they should have broadcast the show in 1987 in action safe just to cater to those at home who knew what their display could do -- or could afford one that could do it.
Ideally, the framing of the transfer from film should be the part of the process that should have the LEAST amount of problems associated with it, considering the VAST amount of work that was required for everything else. Cropping to action safe is too constraining for most displays out in the wild; cropping and opening up to 16:9 is fraught with too many compromises; transferring as they did is just right -- there's a more pleasing amount of headroom, it matches the original broadcast image area, and they've only had to erase a comparatively small number of objects at the very edges of the frame.
It likely would have looked just like "The Naked Now" 16:9 example on the S1 "ENERGIZED!" featurette. Unfortunately, there's very little they can open up on the right and only so much they can open up on the left before you start to reveal production equipment and lens vignetting. Also, the framing becomes unbalanced the more you open up to the left. They absolutely did the right thing by sticking to the original TV Trans area for all the other episodes. It's better aesthetically, and it cost them less time and less effort than if they did it any other way.
How many old shows get remastered to 16:9 anyway? It didn't happen with TOS for one, and many other great shows that were remastered in HD (MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE, TWIN PEAKS, ect) have retained their OAR. I can only think of certain shows like sitcoms that were very easy to reformat given the nature of how that genre is shot. Then there's dramas in the 90s that were shot with widescreen in mind, so both 4:3 and 16:9 are valid.
Live-action footage from TOS was cropped at the top and bottom, for some stations. The new SFX shots were composed in 16:9 and the reverse done, sides removed for 4:3 editions.
Some comparison screencaptures from "The Man Trap".
Remastered show on DVD versus CBS Action screenings.
It's occasionally true, that there is no one true aspect ratio. Several episodes at the start of Enterprise's production, contain more picture detail in 4:3 and had to be cropped for widescreen, once it became clear that was the uniform way TV was going. So the Pilot, "Broken Bow" was done with both in mind and Sky here in Britain, continued showing Trek full-frame until the end of its second season. As the first season goes on (about half a dozen episodes in maybe) you can see more and more beginning to be specifically composed for 16:9... as the shots stop being as tight and closer to the actors.
Travis is reduced to just a head in the widescreen version!
Many shots show a preference for taking the 16:9 matte higher in the frame.
Some scenes, like this effects shot, are equally pleasing to the eye in either ratio.
Others would appear clearly composed for 16:9. Here the open matte 4:3 version has just empty space to the top and bottom of the frame. Note that the credits have been created separately for both versions.
Interestingly, other shots have a much more pleasing composition at 4:3 with the widescreen version cutting into the top of Soval's head.
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Thanks for sharing that. I don't remember that being aired in my area (Southern California), while it definitely looks like they left that option available, it seems there's much more of a preference for 4:3, given that's what they went with on blu-ray and all the streaming sites.
Surprised to see an older show like Kung Fu got such treatment. As for the rest, it's not surprising as I mentioned such shows by the 90s were being shot with widescreen in mind and sitcoms are very easy to reformat. Are there other examples that go back further? It seems a lot more prior to the 90s have stuck to the OAR 4:3.
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