Sick and Tired about Pan & Scan (1 Viewer)

[Jon Mahoney]

Why? I love OAR but why limit people's choices? It's not hurting people who love OAR to have a full screen alternative. A lot of people still have smaller TVs in a lot of rooms and don't want "black bars". I don't agree with them, but then again I have a 42" Plasma HD.

I have family friends who have a couple of 19" and are perfectly happy with them. They do buy Full Screen / Pan & Scan and prefer it. They know the benefits of OAR, but where they don't want a larger TV they would prefer Pan & Scan.

It's not that hard to look at a purchase and determine if it's P&S / OAR.

 

[Glenn Overholt]

Why? That's easily answered. It is because some movies are released ONLY in P&S.

That's what really sucks!

Glenn

 

[Patrick McCart]

Super-35 is full aperature 35mm, which is 1.33:1. Exactly like the silent films of the 1920s and earlier.

 

[Mark Kalzer]

Indisputably true. It takes a lot of time painstakingly just colour timing every shot on a DVD transfer, but a pan and scan is literally a guy at a computer picking one shot at a time, where to pan. It is in essence, most especially for a 2:35 anamorphic film, some guy re-shooting the film and changing it entirely. I doubt the director is ever involved with this process because he or she almost always finds the whole process sacrilegious. If you spend that much time, that many hours making a film in scope, carefully choosing shots, spending hours on every single one of them, you just can't be bothered to care about this re-interpretation.

The saddest thing about this is that I doubt HDTVs are doing anything to resolve the problem. While myself and all of you know how to use our HDTVs properly to maintain OAR, many are still challenged by the whole notion of aspect ratio. Just like how many wrongly believe that just buying an HDTV is enough to achieve true 'HD', they continue to feed their HDTVs the same picture meant for their 4x3 tvs, meaning additional black bars added electronically by the player. They continue to lament about black bars, and continue to buy fullscreen DVDs interpreting the term fullscreen incorrectly.

The problem is of couse the term 'fullscreen'. It's too easily mis-understood, and is no better from the term 'standard' that used to be used. The only accurate term is pan and scan.

 

[Stephen_J_H]

Actually, it's closer to 1.66:1 when you remove the sound stripe, and even wider if done in 3-perf pulldown, which seems to be the method of choice as of late (see QT's Kill Bills and Death Proof as examples). Silent films were very rarely 1.33:1 and in some cases were taller ratios like 1.20:1.

 

[Patrick McCart]

Yes, many of the newer Super-35 films are shot in 3-perf, but most films in the process are 4 perf 1.33:1 full aperture as usual since the 1980s.

Silent films were very rarely 1.20:1, as really only those released with Movietone soundtracks would be presented as such. Even Vitaphone films like The Jazz Singer had 1.33:1 full aperture 35mm prints.

http://www.widescreenmuseum.com/oldc...edfilmbase.jpg
(35mm frame from "The Freshman" circa 1925 - This is what nearly all silent prints would look like)

That silent 35mm frame is basically what is used for Super-35, unless it's the 3-perf variant that is being used sometimes now.

 

[Gabriel.H]

How about the term "half-screen" for pan and scan movies and "full-screen" for OAR movies since that's how it really is anyway.

 

[Mathew B]

Exactly. In Europe, nearly all releases (barring catalogue) are in widescreen. I've heard no disputes over it - no one's demanded fullscreen versions or anything. It may sound harsh, but it's exactly the way to do it.

 

[Chuck Anstey]

This is a very poor and dangerous philosophy to believe in. Such an idea can be (and has been) used against you just as easily as it can against "them". If home video departments believed in that then we would never have had widescreen movie releases since "people will buy movies, whatever their form" and 99% of home video sales were P&S. Fortunately capitalism prevailed and since that there was a market for movies released OAR they decided to fill it.

I only buy OAR releases and I try to educate others about the difference and why OAR should be their prefered version but let me tell you a story. About 6 months ago we borrowed the first two Bourne movies from a friend on DVD. While the second movie was OAR, the first was P&S/ full screen. I think BI was more full screen than P&S but regardless it wasnt OAR. I tried to rent the movie but all they had was full screen. So now I am in a dilema; do I watch it non-OAR or be so narrow-minded and inflexible that I refuse? I watched it and enjoyed it a lot because the story (you know that thing people bitch about that movies today seem to lack) was really good and well done. I now own The Bourne Identity and The Bourne Supremacy on HD-DVD in OAR and enjoy watching them from time to time. My wife and I also went to see The Bourne Ultimatum in the theater and had a very nice date, the first one in a long time. All of that would have not transpired if I was not willing to watch a non-OAR version of a good movie.

 

[RickER]

Thats not always true. I remember i got as far as standing in line to buy a movie, only to see the FULL SCREEN, it was blue letters on a black back ground. damn near missed it! Some only tell you on the back, and if you buy online it can be even harder to tell.
I can think of a few titles that do not have a widescreen version!
Funny, the other day i was in Best Buy, and 2 young twenty year old guys went up to the media guy and asked where the full screen Transformers was. They were a little mad that their was not one. I can only smile a little when they HAVE to own the widescreen....thank you!

 

[Francois Caron]

It's even worse in Quebec where the Régie sticker could cover the text that tells you if the release is widescreen or P&S.

Here's a nightmare for you all! A family buys/rents a P&S title, then S-T-R-E-T-C-H-E-S the image on their 16x9 TV!

 

[Marty M]

As I stated in an earlier post, studios didn't start producing DVDs in P & S until Joe Sixpack stopped using his VCR started purchasing DVD players. Almost all DVDs were only produced in OAR before this. So, the studios have been trying to appease Joe Sixpack from the beginning, so I don't see them stop producing the P & S versions until widescreen TVs become the norm.

 

[DanMel]

Anyone know if the studios have any plans on cutting the tops and bottoms of 30's and 40's OAR Fullscreen movies so that they fit on wide screen TV's? Thirties and Forties movies make up about 75 percent of my movie watching and have bought up about 500 movies and shorts so far so that I can get the Full screen OAR before any alterations to the picture ever start being done.

What are you widescreen people's views on cutting off part of Bogart's head in casablanca and similar movies to fit to the new wide screen tv's. I suppose they could start doing this for joe sixpack and his widescreen TV but thankfully I think Joe Sixpack does not normally watch the superior black and white films from the 30's and 40's. He doesn't like watching black and white any more than watching bars on the sides of his widescreen TV. Widescreen TV's may bring a sharp decline in releases of OAR full screen movies from back then in the future but thankfully I have a very large selection already. I do hope that Sony get's all the OAR full screen shorts for the Three Stooges re-released before any "modified to fit your widescreen TV" messages start appearing. I also watch a great many 60's TV shows likeThe Twilight Zone which could also be targets for "modified to fit your wide screen TV" logo in the upcoming years.

 

[Chuck Anstey]

That simply isn't true. When DVD was first released, there were plenty of dual releases or flippers for P&S and also a sizeable number of films released P&S only. While the ratio of OAR to P&S may have been reduced because of an increase in the number of dual release titles, has there been any movie released on DVD in the past few years as P&S only with no OAR version available? Seems some people might derive more pleasure denying someone else a P&S movie than rejoice that they finally can see nearly all of them in OAR and certainly much more than when DVD first came out.

Don't try to force the studios to make a single choice because we are on the wrong side of that market force. We just need to be diligent in making sure studios always release a movie in OAR, regardless of any other version they choose to also release and educate others as best we can why they should want OAR too.

 

[Patrick McCart]

If Turner Classic Movies goes HD (which it will by 2009), you won't worry about it. So far, WB is the only studio to release 4x3 films in HD (Casablanca and The Adventures of Robin Hood) and they're both correctly pillarboxed.

Actually, I expect studios to just not release 4x3 films rather than release them intact or cropped to 16x9.

 

[TravisR]

Obviously, I can't see the future but I would think that 1.33 movies will still be presented in their proper aspet ratio because the people that want to buy 'old' movies will overwhelmingly want them in the correct aspect ratio. The 15 year old with a PS3 and wants the picture to fill his screen will never watch (let alone buy) a movie like Casablanca.

Granted, a title or two may come out and be cropped but it won't take long for the consumer outcry and poor sales to make the studios realize that the people buying older titles don't want to see those movies cropped.