Anamorphic stretching on Man Of Steel? What is this!? UGH! (1 Viewer)

[Neil S. Bulk]

Has anyone compared shots with the trailer?

 

[Brian Dobbs]

Bottom line is the screengrabs I posted (generated from Blu-ray.com and not myself) are accurate to what I see when I watch this at home.

Something is either wrong with mastering or Snyder purposefully wanted it to look like this for some unknown reason.

Whatever the reason, I'm so distracted by this effect that the movie is difficult to watch.

 

[Brandon Conway]

As best as I could recall this is how the film looked theatrically. Movies like this nowadays go through so many phases of manipulation for visual effects that it wouldn't surprise me if the slight vertical squeezing occurred in pre-production.

 

[moviebuff75]

I THINK this is what it looked like in IMAX. I remember it looking funny.

 

[Timothy E]

Is it possible that Snyder did this deliberately to make the actors look more like superheroes? The stretching of faces of Superman and Zod makes the actors' faces appear more round and their jawlines more square than otherwise.

 

[Neil S. Bulk]

This is all fascinating, but again, has anyone pulled the same exact screen grabs comparing the trailer to the finished movie. That seems like the best way to determine if there is or isn't an issue.

 

[Ken Volok]

Has anyone adjusted the settings on their players or TVs? I just fixed my roomates and he was watching the same film. Your settings should be at 16x9/ 1080

 

[Alan Tully]

I'm sure Warner are hoping this thread will go away fast! If anyone has the Brando, Mutiny On The Bounty DVD & Blu-ray, just look at the deleted prologue & epilogue included in the extras. The picture is stretched vertically, everyone's tall & thin. No reviewer has ever mentioned it.

 

[Brian Dobbs]

Is it possible that Snyder did this deliberately to make the actors look more like superheroes? The stretching of faces of Superman and Zod makes the actors' faces appear more round and their jawlines more square than otherwise.

It's on all faces, not just Superman and Zod. I started with those examples because I could easily find the screengrabs.

 

[Brian Dobbs]

Has anyone adjusted the settings on their players or TVs? I just fixed my roomates and he was watching the same film. Your settings should be at 16x9/ 1080

I wish it were that simple. It's not a zoom issue. The movie looks this way on all of my TVs. I was even more confident that this was an issue when I saw the screengrabs independently generated by Blu-ray.com's review.

 

[ScottHM]

I wish it were that simple. It's not a zoom issue. The movie looks this way on all of my TVs. I was even more confident that this was an issue when I saw the screengrabs independently generated by Blu-ray.com's review.

Judging from screen shots like this one it looks to me like only about a 2% vertical compression. That's assuming this object is supposed to be perfectly spherical.---------------

 

[Stephen PI]

This is exactly the same sort of distortion which has ruined for me the Blu ray of The Big Country. It's the Big Mac Blu ray syndrome.
I know this was a simple technical error by the transfer engineer on The Big Country ..you would think such an error would be impossible on Man of Steel - unless the movie was shown in cinemas in this weird stretched ratio!

"In the Heat of the Night" has a similar issue, which was broadcast on MGM-HD. Could this be a problem with MGM's mastering? I hope the blu ray isn't the same.

 

[Radioman970]

My screen at work isn't right and the thing looks even flatter....

 

[ScottHM]

My screen at work isn't right and the thing looks even flatter...

Unfortunate. Perhaps that's not a good place to watch Blu-rays.

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[Radioman970]

Unfortunate. Perhaps that's not a good place to watch Blu-rays.

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I meant looking at the pictures above. :p

 

[Jason Charlton]

Hmm, this almost looks like about the difference you'd get if you took an originally 16:10 image and squished it to 16:9.

 

[Brian Dobbs]

Hmm, this almost looks like about the difference you'd get if you took an originally 16:10 image and squished it to 16:9.

Right, it's not that dramatic of a difference, but it's still not quite right.

I've seen way too many incorrectly formatted televisions in bars and restaurants and computer monitors in offices to know when the picture isn't right.

 

[Jason Charlton]

The image I linked to above to demonstrate the difference between 16:9 and 16:10 was grabbed from a google image search and shows variance in both width and height. If we hold width constant at 1280, by my math the vertical dimension for 16:10 would be 800 instead of 720.

Using Photoshop, I expanded the first screen grab to 1280x800 and must admit, it looks a whole lot better.

 

[Stephen Brooks]

I will admit I see no difference between the BD and the way it looked in theaters, but I would think it would be fairly easy to check. We have a Blu-ray 3D, Blu-ray, bonus disc with the "Maximum Movie Mode", and the DVD. One film, four seperate discs, four unique video encodes. If the stretching appears the same across all four, it seems very unlikely to be an error.

 

[BIANCO2NERO]

"In the Heat of the Night" has a similar issue, which was broadcast on MGM-HD. Could this be a problem with MGM's mastering? I hope the blu ray isn't the same.

The screengrabs posted over at DVD Beaver are not encouragind sadly ...