>the general public thinks they want it. Or thinks they need it.<

The general public are morons when it comes to this kind of stuff. Who can blame them , though. This was probably thought up by the same people who came up with "Now available on DVD and video".


Gary

V The Miniseries (original) is the same way, cropped to 16:9 - must be a WB thing.

They advertise widescreen TVs by saying "Now you can see what you were missing", and showing the "extra" bits on each side, which is a bit of joke when in fact they've cut off the top and bottom.

Who knows, in a few years when everyone has widescreen, someone will come up with a new "Now you can see what you were missing" campaign and reveal an "extra bit" at the top and bottom. Back to 4:3 !

THis isn't anything new - I forgot which but Disney's Bambi or Dumbo came out maybe 10 or so years ago on VHS they created a "widescreen" version of it - just added black bars to the 4:3 aspect ratio - and when people started complaining en masse Disney yanked it and returned it to "full frame". A few other, more modern, titles that pop into my mind are the orginal Night of the Living Dead and Halloween , both which now have versions out that are "restored" and "presented in the original theatrical ratio of 16:9" even though they were not shot that way. I've worked on many films that could easly be "restored" with a 16:9 aspect even though when they were shot the camera operator always was told to "frame for TV".

If the source is 4:3 video then certainly letterboxing it to 16:9 is plain DUMB. Even on a 16:9 monitor there'll be loss of resolution to say nothing of potentially loosing part of the action and changing the look and feel of the content. Leaving at the original 4:3 makes perfect sense. Our el cheapo 16:9 TV will either display it at 4:3 with back bars at the sides OR we can have it fill the screen with the top and bottom cropped.
If the source is film is where it gets messy, none of the film formats are 16:9 so some or a lot of either letterboxing ./ cropping is needed. One day I'll get my brain around just what the standard film ARs are, I seem to recall 1.85:1, 2.1:1 and 2.4:1 being mentioned, yet all the cinema projectors I've seen only have two lenses, hmm, makes me wonder.

EDIT

Just did a little research, I think 1.85:1 and 2.35:1 are the only surviving formats for projection of 35mm.

Boy this reminds me of some thing I saw years ago when DirecTV first hit the market. One night I decided to get a movie on PPV, think it was Johnny Mnemonic and they offered the 4:3 and "LBX" ver. Well after about an hour some thing just didn't look right. So later after the movie was over I found when the two ver would start at the same time. After flipping back and forth a few times, sure enough "cropped". To this day I never got a really answer as to why they did that, of course I was never offered a refund.
Always previewed any PPV after that, now they wanna go and mess up DVDs. I give up ... LOL

This "aspect" thing is out of hand at the present time and the new HDTV sets and tuners don't help a bit with the scaling problems. My new Samsung T-165 HD tuner shows analog 4 x 3 with the correct height but the width expanded about 20% making circles look oval. The
overscan has always been a source of linearity distortion. Hold the
taking lens tolerance to under 1% then blow it to hell on the TV set
or aspect conversions.

JJK

Re the PAL Speedup Thing, I don't quite know what else they could have done. Going from 24fps to 25fps you can either do a frame rate conversion resulting in some loss of image quality or run the movie 4% faster. Now with the audio you can either hope that the 4% shift in pitch isn't going to be too noticeable or else pitch shift it back. From what I know pitch shifting has its problems as well.
It's quite likely though that the video was encoded at 24p and it's actually the DVD player that's playing that out at 50i with the attendant speedup. On a NTSC player it does the 2:3 pulldown thing so there's no audio issue.
Of course if I'm right then if you had a DVD player and display capable of 24p then you'd get to see the movie exactly as it was meant to be shown.
But I'm still a bit vague on this, I'm not 100% certain what happens to a 24p DVD in PAL land, maybe they get played out at 48i and the TV just copes. I've come accross at least one DVD that seemed to output at an odd frame rate, most things coped with it but trying to record it directly to VHS caused all sorts of issues for the VCR yet it'd capture fine into Vegas. I've also got a few DVDs labelled "NTSC" but they seem to play out as PAL from the DVD player.
Guess when I've got some time and maybe a analogue waveform monitor I'll do a more detailed study of this.

This all goes back to a post I made elsewhere, here, regarding screen ratios and HD standards. It just goes to show that this is not "ready for prime-time!" Hence, I'm in no hurry to spend the money on a technology that isn't consistant. When the powers that be get their act together, only then will I seriously consider "stepping up" to the next level.

J--