The show was shot too beautifully to be crammed between little black bars :/
Is there any way to have widescreen versions of TOS?
- Thread starter Commander Kielbasa
- Start date
TOS wasn't shot in widescreen, so the answer is no.
Just go ahead and live with the black bars. It's better than stretching the image.
Just go ahead and live with the black bars. It's better than stretching the image.
Those "little black bars" mean you're seeing the show in the 1.33:1 aspect ratio as it was filmed and originally broadcast. Why would you want to mess with the shot composition, and possibly cut off actors' heads, just to make the picture fill today's HDTV screens?
My fear is that one day, likely within my lifetime, aspect ratios will widen such to an extent that classic shows and films will be unwatchable - reduced to tiny screens amidst a giant black canvas :/
I wish they designed a TV which could be switch ed between a widescreen, and 4:3 view. Surely that's not impossible technology?
But why would you want that? If a show was designed to be in a 4:3 aspect ratio, then there are only two ways to show it in widescreen: either cut off the top and bottom of the image, in which case you lose some of the content, or stretch the image out sideways, in which case it looks distorted and bizarre. Either way, you're degrading the quality of the image, and it makes no sense to do that just to fit some arbitrary frame shape. It's like buying a tall and narrow painting and hacking pieces off of it to fit a squat and wide frame you already have. It's vandalism. If the painting -- or the show -- was meant to fit a certain shape of frame, then it should be displayed in its original shape, period.
And in fact, I think most widescreen TVs already do what you're suggesting -- you can adjust the aspect ratio settings to zoom in on the picture or stretch it out to fit -- and that's something I hate about them. I've seen so many widescreen TVs in airports and bus stations and hotels and such which have been set to display 4:3 pictures stretched out to widescreen by default, which means everything is flattened and distorted and it looks terrible, and I never understood why anyone would find that desirable. Although I guess it's less of an issue now that nobody seems to be broadcasting in 4:3 anymore.
^ I think @Commander Kielbasa meant a TV that could physically change shape according to what kind of image it's showing.
Not sure how that would work, really, but it's an interesting concept...
Not sure how that would work, really, but it's an interesting concept...
Yes! Good word for it.
We have a wide screen TV in each upper corner of the cafeteria at work. they're usually tuned to CNN, and it's rarely in the correct aspect ratio. I guess it depends on who turns them on in the morning. Then when we have an assembly, they show the powerpoint slides normally on a big projector screen, and repeated on the flatscreen TVs - squashed and stretched to fit the screens. It makes me want to scream.
The bars aren't a problem. They don't remove anything from the image. They're just a way of fitting the complete, properly formatted image into a frame of a different shape. Just think of them as part of the frame.
The problem is the lack of bars -- cutting off pieces of an image to force it to fit the screen. This was how widescreen movies were shown on 4:3 televisions for decades -- a "pan-and-scan" presentation with the sides of the image lopped off and only the center, or whatever the main focus of the image was, being shown. For really widescreen Cinemascope films, this entailed losing nearly half the picture and ruining the composition. "Letterbox" format -- using bars on top and bottom of the screen -- was invented as a way of getting the whole picture in the frame, and it was pretty much universally considered a vast improvement by film buffs. It meant a smaller, lower-resolution image as the tradeoff for getting the whole picture, but at least it let you see the whole picture, and the resolution is no longer an issue with modern HDTV.
Most HDTVs (or Sattelite/Cable Boxes have a setting that will fill the screen without 'zooming'. But, everything looks a bit wider as a result.
TOS was filmed for the 4:3 screen ratio. Without re-filming from scratch with new sets/actors, etc. that's the way it was made to be seen.
Right. What's so bad about having different aspect ratios for different works? Nobody would want Guernica reformatted to fit the Mona Lisa's frame, or vice versa. Both artworks are designed to have the shapes they have. Their composition is meant to fit a particular frame, and it's good that they don't all have to have the same composition.
Modern screens have no trouble accommodating 4:3, 16:9, theatrical widescreen, etc., just by having black bars as necessary to fill the unused parts of the standard screen, either on the sides for 4:3 or on top and bottom for theatrical. I don't get why people have an issue with the black bars -- it's not like they're covering up any of the actual picture. And you forget they're there quickly enough.
There are techniques. For example, certain shots could have sides digitally added, others could be cropped if the shot is wide enough and doesnt take away from anything, but you're messing with some really beautiful photography when you do that.
I tried for widescreen with one of my videos.
Spockboy
Once we have holographic projection TVs, there won't be a TV frame to worry about!
You just have to ignore the black bars the way you ignore the walls and furniture surrounding your TV.
Again, my worry is the black bars will get wider, and wider, and wider as aspect ratios get larger, and larger, until 4:3 shows and movies are rendered into utter irrelevance, having been made unwatchable (because they'd be tiny images in a vast pillarboxed screen). As sad as it is, every 4:3 film and show is not future-proof, and are essentially living on borrowed time. Hopefully, the time when an aspect ratio wider than 16:9 is the norm doesn't come until after I'm long gone. Losing my treasured movies and shows to time would be truly saddening.
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