It has always been my understanding that in any video transfer from film there is by necessity some cropping of the image to prevent the very edges of the frame from appearing. It can vary depending on the circumstances from film to film. In the case of movie titles, and to prevent undue cropping, the titles are zoomed-out slightly to present the maximum recorded image. I have seen this on literally dozens if not hundreds of movies on DVD from all of the Studios and I have always taken it to be a sign of them taking more care than less care.
This is not the case of the squeeze being applied in the release prints. The previous (special edition) DVD issues had unsqueezed titles, and the unsqueezed textless versions are available on the UE DVDs and Blu-Rays.
For those who dispute the distortion is there, I would recommend them viewing Moonraker title sequence. At one point there is a girls head that rotates through 360 degrees. The head grows fat then thin as it rotates around - clear evidence of one-dimensional squeeze being applied
The treatment is totally inconsistent as well. Thunderball, Moonraker and TWINE have all been squeezed while For Your Eyes Only and Die Another Day were presented correctly
It seems as if a lot of the problems with the UE DVDs (such as the incorrect color timing on Thunderball and Live and Let Die and the shoddy sound effects in some of the re-mixes) have been corrected, but MGM still sees fit to keep these mutilated title sequences
I just watched the Blu-Ray Dr. No last night and the whole film is windowboxed, or at least not as wide as the menus, warnings and 16X9 special features. My JVC DLA-HD350 projects onto a 4X3 screen, so I just zoomed the lens a bit so the image filled the screen edge-to-edge, but then the menus spilled over a bit. There was no difference in image width between the credit sequence and the body of the film.
A valid point. As I say, I don't condone the windowboxing and would prefer it wasn't so. But there are just so many other things to worry about regarding DVD and BD...
Surely the only issue here is the distorted image, not the windowboxing, which is an entirely valid presentation tool.
People clamouring for credits sequences to completely fill their screens should consider what message is sent to people who have overscanned sets, and who see letters falling off the edges of their screen.
That their television is unable to present the entire image that is actually encoded on the disc? Since it's perfectly true, what's wrong with that "message"?
Most people don't know what overscanning is, and they will assume that the transfer has been shoddily done.
What do you think they're less likely to notice - or find objectionable - slight black bars at the sides of the image (which shouldn't even be noticeable under ideal viewing conditions), or finding that the first and last letters of the movie's title has disappeared off-screen?
I don't care what anyone assumes about the way a particular image displays on his particular display. I do care--very much--about the way that image is actually encoded onto a DVD or Blu-ray disc.
When said image is encoded in such a way that it does not utilize the full resolution available to it, in order to appease a viewer whose own display is the culprit behind the framing problems--well, I think that's a shame. Not the worst problem affecting Blu-rays today (or even close to it, really), but a shame nonetheless.
Exactly. If encoding these properly meant that letters were going to be permanently chopped off the frame then that would be a serious issue. But they wouldn't be. They'd be there. The fact that some TVs are set to miss them, well that's the fault of those sets or the owners.
At the end of the day, these movies are supposed to reflect what was shown in cinemas. And, apparently, these title sequences don't.
I'm putting together a review of the 3rd Volume of the Blu-ray Bonds.
I see what you're talking about as far as the windowboxing of the credits, although I also noted that the textless versions of the opening title sequences are in the proper ratios. So for posterity, the original versions are present, without the text, but in a fashion that to my mind, preserves the artistry of the people who assembled them.
I also note that the end titles are similarly windowboxed, but not always with complete success. On Moonraker, the end titles still chop off the last letters of some names, including one assistant art director. And as the credits go up the screen, they slide a little bit over to the right so that the last letters start to go off the edge of the visible screen...
Could there be a legal reason for the window boxing ? Could be that by contract the names of actors and techs must be complete and not cut off. Since more people have sets where over scanning can cause names to be cut off, the studio is making sure it is in compliance by window boxing the titles. In days gone by TV stations used to stretch the titles to fill the screen on widescreen movies that were otherwise pan and scan so that the titles were not cut off.
I have read similar reports and it truly amazes me. Some people want to use "zoom" to get 2.35:1/2.40:1-aspect ratio to 16:9** (or "stretch" the 4:3-material to 16:9), just because they "don´t like black bars"? Jeez.. It should be obvious for everyone by now (it´s 2009 after all), that we have different aspect ratios and HDTV is "only" 1.78:1. "Casablanca" will be always 4:3 (1.33:1), "The Lord of the Rings"-trilogy will be always 2.35:1 and "Band of Brothers" will be always 1.78.1. So live with it, dammit.
Unfortunately, content providers in the U.S. are still catering to this mentality, On the networks, I've seen The Lord of The Rings shown at 1.78:1 on TNT-HD, Band of Brothers stretched and cropped into a horrible mess on History-HD, Hogan's Heroes cropped to 1.78:1 on Universal-HD, and just about every movie shown on AMC-HD stretched and/or cropped into a horrible mess.
Watching films on U.S. high definition networks is almost useless.
If it applied to over-the-air content as well, I could understand why someone might want some overscan--otherwise you'll be seeing the closed captioning data at the top of your screen. (You learn to ignore it after a while, I found, as my TV has little enough overscan that it's displayed.