Just for the record, the subtitled, letterboxed version of Venus Wars did something really cool. (You probably see this coming, but) They had the lower black bar slightly bigger than the top one, and the subtitles under the picture. Very cool. But I don’t think any other movie has ever done that.
I disagree that only “epic” films benifit from showing more than 2/3ds of the screen, the date that the film was made does make a difference, as new films are made with pan&scan in mind, so make sure anything important is in the middle or on only one side.
I honestly don’t “get” the problem people have with the bars. The screen itself is surounded with a plastic bezle anyway . . .
Anyone remeber those round-screened TVs that they made back in the 50s? I always kind of wanted one of them, to play nintendo games on as a conversation piece.
Man, I’m disjointed today. Even for me . . .
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“I’m glad they preserved the original parallelogram format . . .”
I’m not sure what the argument is - I don’t mean to step on toes here. I’ve already said that I don’t really have a problem with letterbox - the problem is that there are jillions of movies out there that are not in letterbox format. If, as you’ve so politely pointed out, there is no process to convert the 1.37:1 films, then my question would be: what happens to those movies? They would, I suppose, stay in their current format if they cannot be converted to letterbox.
My only issue with letterbox is that it’s aesthetically displeasing to my eye, which is understandably used to seeing the entire TV screen filled up. Eventually, this will not seem displeasing to me - it’ll be old hat. I see this happening when I can go to the video store and find that, say, 75% of the movies in stock are in the letterbox format. In other words, to me it’ll begin to seem more visually palatable once most of the movies are presented in this format. And from what I can tell, that’s how things are going.
I was thinking earlier that to accelerate this process I could purchase a rectangular-shaped TV when they’re cheap enough, but if by doing so I’ll have problems watching the older films (not a problem, of course - just the same issue I have with the letterboxed ones now, right?), then I think I’ll wait.
In the meantime, I’ll be rooting on my pal Technology, faithfully hoping they find a way to satisfy MY needs!
Interesting information. I think the likely scenario is that analog is here to stay. If 85% of the people in any area in the US has HDTV, I’ll be amazed. I think if even 50% penetration would be an incredible feat. I have a hard time imagining it will be above 20%. Anyway, it’s a fair bet that your analog TV will be working for a loooong time…
Ura-Maru, about subtitle in the letterbox area… .I’ve seen that on nice letterbox videos before. From my experience, if it’s nice, and it’s letterbox, there about a 50% chance they’ll subtitle it in the letterbox area. I don’t know why it 's not 100%, it makes a lot of sense to do it. Perhaps a reason not to do it is because seperating the subtitles from the picture too much will take your eyes away from the movie itself.
Woody Allen had a nice effect in the video of Manhattan. He colored the letterbox areas gray. It really matched the look of the film - it was a pleasure to watch.
Also on the subject, there’s one point against letterbox I don’t recall anyone mentioning. There actually is a fair amount of horizontal resolution lost in letterboxing. So no matter how you look at it, you definately are losing something in letterboxing. Then again, you lose something when you don’t letterbox. It’s a tradeoff. If you watch on a widescreen TV though, and your DVD has an anamorphic print (labelled “enhanced for widescreen TV’s”), you’ll get the full resolution, though. So you will have the best of both worlds.
Well, if you are talking about aesthetics, you are correct in that watching an old movie on a widesreen TV will have the same problems as watching a letterbox movie on a normal TV now.
However, in terms of resolution, it’s better to get the widescreen TV. You will be getting more total pixels. The letterbox movies that are anamorphic will look great, and so will the old movies. The anamorphic ones will use all the pixels in the screen. The old Academy-ratio films will use the same amount of pixels they did on your normal TV, so there’s no real difference. The only problem would be the aesthetics of not filling the entire screen up. Currently on a normal TV, watching a widescreen movie will mean that you lose resolution, which is bad.
This is really good to know. If it’s a matter of aesthetics, then I assume my mind will get used to it (just as the public got used to the TV image after years of listening to the radio). I’m ready for a new TV now anyway, but I’m just not in a position to plunk down money for one. When I do, it probably will be those widescreen TVs. I still say I don’t like the way the format looks now, but I can only assume the situation will improve - as it would if I got a widescreen TV. Thanks for your helpful words, Avumede!
I wouldn’t be so sure; new consumer electronics technologies take increasingly shorter times to penetrate the market. As an example, according to the Consumer Electronics Assocation, as of December 2000, 13 million DVD players have been sold in the U.S. Assuming for the sake of argument one player per TV household, that’s 14% penetration in just 3.6 years, up from only 5% a year ago. By way of contrast, it took 7 years to ship 10 million CD players, and 8 years to ship 10 million VCRs. I believe color TV took more than 10 years to ship 10 million units.
Also, the time period for affordability is smaller, thanks to the increased demand. Three years ago, a run-of-the-mill DVD player was a $300 investment; today you can take one home for $120 in some places if you want an off-brand, no-frills model. A 19" TV can be had for $150 or so today; my wife and I paid more than twice that for a brand-new 19" Zenith ten years ago.
If the top 10 TV markets in the U.S. don’t have 50% HDTV penetration in the next 5 years, I’ll be very surprised.
Two people have said now that there is no way to convert a 4:3 picture to a wider format such as 16:9 without stretching it and making the people look fat. This is incorrect. You simply do the same thing as when you convert a wide picture to a 4:3 one, only instead of chopping off the sides, you chop off the top and bottom.
Obviously, this is as bad as converting 16:9 to 4:3 by chopping off the sides (it might even be worse, since it could be less likely that the stuff on the top and bottom isn’t important), but I bet it will be done. Then the argument will be between the purists who want to see what’s on the top and bottom of the picture and the regular consumers who want the picture to fill their screens without black bars on the sides!
On the side of the people who hate letterboxing, there’s more to it than just having the picture being smaller and having black bars on the top and bottom. When you scale the image down to fit it on the screen, you also lose display resolution. In other words, in a frame where Ahnold’s face takes up most of the picture, it will be, say, 400 scan lines tall on a pan & scan copy. In the letterboxed version, his face will only be, uh, where’s my calculator… 292 lines tall*. That’s a serious loss of resolution.
Basically, there’s no way to win.
(based on a 4:3 screen being about 560x420 effective resolution, a 16:9 rectangle which fits on that screen will be about 560x315, wasting 25% of your vertical resolution)
Not on a DVD with an anamorphic transfer. Anamorphic DVDs basically don’t “waste time,” as it were, drawing the black bars over and over; they’re generated by the player, which then uses a “downscan” process to combine every 4 lines of resolution into 3, packing in more resolution. So the upshot of the process is that the DVD can use more resolution than would be “mathematically available” using the calculation you used.
You’re missing the point. I know the data is on the disc, and the black bars are not part of the video as it’s stored on the DVD. But the picture has to finally be drawn somewhere and that somewhere is a CRT which has a limited number of lines it can draw, which those black bars take up some of.
From your source, on the topic of a DVD player playing an anamorphic disc:
How it does this is much more intelligent than simply deleting every 4th line (it draws the lines into a buffer and then downsamples them using date from adjacent pixels, like Photoshop would do when resizing an image), but the bottom line is that the picture contains 400 or so lines of data which you’re attempting to display in about 300 physical lines.
When you reduce the number of physical lines you’re using to draw an image, it’s simply going to look worse. Take it to the extreme: draw the same 400 line image using only 10 scan lines on your TV. It won’t look good, no matter how smart the DVD player is.
I’m not claiming letterboxing isn’t worth it. I’m simply pointing out that there is a quality issue, contrary to what some enthusiasts (who probably have 16:9 TV’s anyway, so this isn’t an issue to them) would have you believe.
