To create a widescreen version you'd have to cut the top and bottom of the screen? Just use a computer and re-stich them together somehow.
The guy said he used a "reversed pan and scan" process. That's what he called it.
Star Trek in Widescreen on CBS Action (UK)
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To create a widescreen version you'd have to cut the top and bottom of the screen? Just use a computer and re-stich them together somehow.
The guy said he used a "reversed pan and scan" process. That's what he called it.
Somehow. Now that I've seen the example I know what you mean. A process that would be next to impossible to do in live action, and certainly cost prohibitive. He's simply remade the full panning background as a still or matte, and moved the animated portion across it. And what would he do with a static shot? Crop.
You could use this process only in a panning shot, and only if there was no moving objects or people in the frame other than the ones the action is following.
Couldn't you "clone" certain moving elements in live action shots? Yes, we're talking a lot of time and money but still.
For example, I scanned some family photos badly. They were very tilted to one side. I do not have access to the original photo any longer. To make them straight, a professional I work with had to clone aspects of the background and blend them in seamlessly to recreate the original straight image. Now, this is a still picture; but theoretically, if you went frame by frame with a moving picture, couldn't the same basic idea be applied?
Also, if you look close (to the left of the frame), he does having moving characters in the left side of the screen (see the little rabbits and such) in the Snow White clip.
You mean the ones that become frozen as soon as the original shot moves away from them?
What if you double framed it somehow?
I just cannot believe that with how "magical" movies are there is no possible way one could make 4:3 contact to 16:9. It might be nigh impossible, costly and massively time consuming, but there has to be some way.
You could probably digitally add stuff to the left or right areas; but it would still look strange as the original shot WAS composed for the given final ratio it would be broadcast in at the time it was filmed. I'll never understand why some people feel things shot in a particular way for a particular reason in a particular must be 'normalized' to conform to new technology.
Star Trek was filmed, and presented in a 4:3 ration because that was the standard TV format of the time. Somehow altering it to fit/fill a 16:9 (or 16:10) ration screen won't make the stories/scripts any better or worse.
Anything's possible in this day and age. The question is whether it's practical. The process of creating new sides you're proposing is essentially the same as the 3D post-conversion process, which paints in new background details behind foreground elements to simulate a second viewpoint, a painstaking, brain-numbing process requiring hundreds of artists and months of work. Some quick research says that at its peak, just twenty-five movies a year are post-converted, which would only cover about 2/3rds of the run of TOS alone if the entire Hollywood apparatus was devoted to it. It would actually be more work, since you'd be inventing two large continuous stretches of frame, rather than just filling in gaps around the edges, including all-new characters, so it would take years of full-time work from an entire industry.
And as @Noname Given points out, it'd just give you a weird, center-justified shot compositions for every episode. Though if you're already painting in so much extra material, why not just cut-and-paste the characters and recompose every shot for widescreen? We'll have all of Hollywood working on it anyway, let's make it a new five-year-mission. I actually don't mind, I think post-converted 3D is terrible, so it'd be nice to keep those companies busy on something else for a while.
Honestly, as suggested way back at the beginning of the thread, it probably would've been fine to just have a third seamless branching option with the widescreen effects shots. "The Dark Knight" is an example suggested with it's IMAX transitions on home video, but "Star Trek Into Darkness" is an even better example, and not because it's Trek. Aside from two or three complete action sequences filmed in IMAX (and so displayed full-frame 16x9 on the IMAX-ified Blu Ray), every pure-CG shot in the film was done at IMAX framing and resolution, so the framing is constantly switching back and forth with every space shot, sometimes alternating shot-by-shot in action sequences like the space battle and crash sequences near the end of the film. I'm sure that at the time the TOS-R Blu-Rays were released, it was conventional wisdom that switching aspect ratios would be distracting (and it probably still is, since those are the only two films I know that do it on home video, and then only on specialty releases.* The Force Awakens also had taller IMAX shots, and I don't believe that version has been released on home video. Maybe they're saving it for 4K), but I think it's fine, at least for exteriors and interiors. Maybe if the interior shots were switching back and forth, it wouldn't work for me.
*Not counting movies that change aspect ratios for artistic rather than technical reasons, like The Grand Budapest Hotel.
Off topic for a moment but I've been watching Mission Impossible on CBS Action and I know the two shows were shot next door to each other and the like but did they have to share the same music as well? 
JB
JB
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