MGM/UA Did it again: Windowboxing on opening credits of Moonraker!!! (1 Viewer)

[Brian Borst]

Overscan doesn't add distortion to a picture, you just miss some bits of the image. How much you miss depends on the television. If you have an LCD or a Plasma screen, there's a chance you can turn it off in the television menu. Apparently the Bond titles here are squeezed a little, so that all the credits can be seen. That adds the distortion.

 

[Douglas Monce]

Apparently Maurice Binder had a tendency to put credits well outside the title safe area of the frame. It has been reported here that some theaters had problems keeping the titles on the screen when Thunderball first ran in 1965. The windowboxing on that title at least seems to be on the print as a method of fixing that problem for theaters.

Doug

 

[Roger_R]

Or they could have just taken the textless, unsqueezed version (which should also provide better overall picture quality) and recreate the text digitally.

 

[Stephen PI]

That could have been my post you were describing. I ran the film in January 1966 and we had to do some adjustments to the screen masking, the aperture/mask projector plates were okay, to prevent some titles that were overlapping the edge of the screen.

 

[Douglas Monce]

I believe it was your post that I'm thinking of.

Doug

 

[Gary Seven]

JUst managed to watch these last night (the opening 15 minutes) to check on these claims. While indeed the credits are window boxed, I do not find the image distorted. I don't remember what I saw in the theaters but paying attention to the screen shots as they occurred while viewing I also took notice of other shapes while watching, checking for distortion. The rest of the graphics looked normal and in proportion and I saw several examples of other graphics that were perfectly round and not oval or "squeezed". So in the end, I found it acceptable.

 

[Lord Dalek]

Overscan refers to do a degree of cropping on all four sides of the image done by old tube tvs. It does not apply to HD.

What you're seeing on the other hand is proper anamorphic widescreen (except maybe with those 1.66:1 titles, they should have small black bars on the left and right sides to maintain the ratio) where the image pretty much fills the screen.

 

[Will_B]

The mind will actually correct much of this, it's true. If you sit in a movie theatre on the far left or far right, pretty quickly you'll see things as normal even though if you snapped a pic of it everyone would be tall and narrow.

I think we can agree that these distorted opening sequences are "acceptable" -- but they aren't "good".

 

[Gary Seven]

If the globe in WINE is distorted by being "squeezed", why are they so many other perfectly round objects in the graphics throughout the sequence? Would they not also be more oval or squeezed? If the opening sequence is indeed squeezed, it seems that it would apply to all graphical objects and that was indeed NOT the case. I paid careful attention to that fact. So I question the validity of these claims.

 

[Hamilton72]

It would be very interesting to get some kind of official response to this. If this genuinely was how the titles were shown in theatres (I honestly can't remember back 10 years!) it would be a fascinating insight to find out how, why, etc.

 

[Joe Karlosi]

Don't get me wrong - I don't condone this. But man, when I think about how picky we're becoming these days. Here we are with beautiful Blu-rays, these films look amazing, and is it really THAT big a deal when you think of it? I recall dealing with a cruddy pan and scam VHS of this once upon a time...

 

[Will_B]

For me, it is a belief -- which may be terrible mistaken, but it is how I feel -- that these discs, sold in the thousands to consumers, may someday be all that is left of our film history. So if they mess these up, they're ruining the future's opportunity to see the films properly.

This may be unrealistic, because realistically, California might not fall into the ocean taking all the celluloid with it, or the server farms where these films are kept might stay online for centuries.

But it feels like an act of betray to the future, to make things difficult.

Why not make sure there's a few thousand perfect copies of the film out there, so that the future has a good shot at having a perfect copy of the film?

I suppose in a few thousand years they'll be able to fix the distortion with no loss of quality. But still... Lowry or whatever they're called does shoddy work.

 

[Brandon Conway]

The main mistake of this logic is believing that a home video format will be the means of preserving the film. It's a byproduct, whether HD or not.

 

[Will_B]

Yes, it is a byproduct, but, consider the chances of archeologists finding several movies on disc when those discs are nicely distributed around the entire planet (or at least, whatever countries Bond films are popular in) versus finding a print buried in California.

There's a greater chance of survival if the materials are scattered.

Not that it will be our problem.

 

[Douglas Monce]

There are many HDTVs that overscan. It may in fact be more models out there that over scan than don't.

Doug

 

[Jeff Robertson]

Perhaps it would have been more accurate to say that it does not apply to "pixel based" displays. Although, these sets can do their own overscanning if you want them to.

 

[Osato]

Agreed.

 

[Bryan^H]

This film looks and sounds absolutely stellar. For that reason I can't complain about the windowboxing.

 

[Joe Karlosi]

Yeah - and I mean, it's just the credits, folks!

 

[ATimson]

"Just the credits" might fly with most movies, but in Bond movies they're more or less a short film of their own.