I recently purchased “Raising Arizona” on DVD from Amazon, and it’s “window-boxed” (dammit). I HATE that.
Does anyone have the Blu-ray version of this disc and is it also “window-boxed”?
As I’m sure most know, “window-box” is technically 16:9 aspect ratio, but there are black bars on all four sides. I assume that this was done to enable presentation of a widescreen movie on the old 4:3 televisions.
Also, I have a hard time spotting movies like this, and if anyone can tell me how to avoid these damn things, I would certainly appreciate it.
The term you want to avoid on DVD is “letterboxed”–you want “anamorphic widescreen.” Raising Arizona was a very early DVD release (1999) when letterboxing was common and widescreen TVs were rare. You are unlikely to run across many letterboxed DVDs today, and I’m assuming no letterboxed Blu-Ray (though I haven’t checked any.) Going by Amazon, there was a re-release of Raising Arizona on DVD in 2009–it is probably anamorphic widescreen.
Double-checked to see which site had the DVD release date right, 1999 or 2002–it was 1999, because here is a review from Feb 2000. (Not that it is a material issue.)
My understanding is that “letterbox” is 4:3 aspect ratio with black bars left and right. “Windowbox” is black bars left and right and top and bottom. Perhaps that’s wrong.
I decided to return the DVD to Amazon, and I turned right around and purchased the BD version.
We’ll see.
The DVD doesn’t have black bars on the left and right–that is what your TV/player is doing in order to display the 4:3 movie on a 16:9 screen. If you choose the proper option on your DVD player or TV menu, it would zoom on that image to fit the screen. ("And “letterbox” has always meant black bars on the top and bottom.)
1.85:1 is going to be slightly letterboxed at the top and bottom when displayed on a 16:9. They’re not quite the same ratio. There may be a setting on the TV itself to stretch or zoom into the image to fit. Depending on how sensitive you are to it, it may or may not bug the crap out of you.
Nah…I’m used to the thin bars top and bottom - they’re usually very thin.
It’s the thick black bars top, bottom and side to side that bug me.
Sure, I could zoom it and fill my widescreen, but that’ll be a loss of resolution.
Well, you wouldn’t “lose” resolution–it just wouldn’t be there in the first place. But if resolution is so critical, you really should be buying Blu-Ray in the first place. The DVD of Raising Arizona, zoomed to your screen, would be 720x390, or 280,800. A Blue-Ray would be 1920x1038, or 1,992,960 pixels–7.11 times as many pixels. That difference vastly overwhelms any difference in pixels from a letterboxed DVD to an anamorphic widescreen DVD.
I move movies from TCM that I’ve recorded off my DVR to save space. From time to time I notice that some of these movies are “window boxed” (or whatever) as in the OP. Black bars on all 4 sides when watching on the PC. Checking further with editing software and such reveals that it’s part of the file. The actual resolution of the film is far less than the video resolution.
(Oddly they don’t show that way on the TV screen.)
I have no idea what’s going on here.
And this from a channel that runs a promo pointing out the flaws of pan-and-scan, cropping, etc.
I think the issue is that Turner just doesn’t give a shit about providing a good presentation (just google TCM aspect ratio, you’ll see many complaints.)
I did get a refund for the DVD of “Raising Arizona” (Amazon didn’t want it back) and I purchased the Blu-ray. Thankfully, the BD version is what I expected the DVD to be. Annoyingly, the cases for both the BD and DVD versions show the same aspect ratio - 1.85:1, and I have uploaded photos/screen shots here. I tried to make sure that the bezel of my television’s screen is visible in these shots.
The television and the BD player used for these shots were the same for both discs and no changes were made to the settings.
Again, I do wish I had some way to spot these DVDs before I buy them, but it’s good to know that the BD version will probably display correctly.
The Raising Arizona DVD tells you what format it is on the package–read what I circled in red in the bottom left-hand corner. Again, the word to look for is “letterboxed.”
Also, the text is low resolution on your DVD case photo, but if you look, you’ll see that this is a 200x release (I think that the last digit is a 4, but it could be a 9) while the one I posted is from the original 1999 release. I’m 99.999999999999999999999% sure that the DVD case you show isn’t the edition of the DVD that you had (and if it was the case and the DVD was letterboxed, then I’m 99.999999999999999999999% sure somebody switched discs between two copies of the movie.)
Rereading your post, I see that your image probably is an actual photo of the DVD you have and not one you found on the internet. And I see that as of 2007 RA still didn’t have an anamorphic widescreen transfer and that the newer DVDs (as of then) were deceptively labeled. The normal practice is to note whether a movie is letterboxed or anamorphic/“enhanced for widescreen.”
(My copy of RA (which I bought in 1999) has the same packaging as the photo I linked, FWIW.)
