Re: HTF DVD REVIEW: Columbia Pictures: The Best Picture Collection
Quote:
| No, I'll admit I'm wrong - I just find it to be bizarre in this case. Like I said, where was the outrage when the first DVD came out years ago? Why would Columbia make a WS transfer for TV and use a FS transfer for the DVD? The whole thing makes no sense. This forum goes banana bonkers when some obscure craptastic flick is MAR, but no one cared until now that a classic used the wrong ratio? |
The problem is that up until the last few years-- and with some immodestly, largely due to posts like Bob F. and I have been making during that time-- no one knew any better. No one's ever done any research on this topic up until the past decade, and everyone simply forgot in the meantime.
The idea is, "there's an image on the film, show it that way," which is wrong, of course. There's a certain amount of image even on an Academy ratio film that is cropped off in the projector, but you don't see people waving their arms in the air about that.
What needs to be more carefully considered is if there is any question about a film's presentation, to go back to original documentation at the studio and barring that, in trade magazines of the day that have this information.
Originally, projectionists got their aspect ratio info from either the cardboard reel bands attached to the print, or through trade journals subscriptions that were available to them from the various theater chains they belonged to. Each magazine had practical information, including billing info, available from the studio, and magazines such as BoxOffice continued to print their aspect ratio information into the late '60s.
Since then, these methods of information have been long since abandoned and forgotten. Thankfully, there are people in a number of the studios HV departments that understand this concept and have been making considerations for such aspects in the transfer sessions.
As for ON THE WATERFRONT, I imagine that either Sony pulled the wrong master by accident, or TCM specifically asked or created a wide-screen master (since their station is not HD, it's not anamorphic).
Many of the requests a studio gets for masters are "full screen," even "pan and scan," so often the studio has a special broadcast master that is open matte, although also often zoomed-in and cropped to hide defects such as boom mics, hard mattes, etc. This type of master does no one any service, as it's not appealing to anyone who wants to see the film OAR or open matte in order to make their own decisions.
And that is the problem at hand. There are a lot of uneducated people making their own decisions because they think something "looks good" to them over something else. HV should be about what the DIRECTOR wants. If you want to do whatever you want to do with someone else's film, you might as well invest in a 35mm projector so that you can run something open matte, cropped, upside-down, or whatever. Leave DVDs out of it!
