More OAR Ignorance (1 Viewer)

[Karl_Wiers]

For those always on the lookout for ignorant columnists, and the even more clueless public, there is a URL pointing to an article up on Slate discussing letterboxing on TV.
Slate story Slate discussion board
Have fun with them...

 

[Joshua Clinard]

If you read beyond the first paragrah, you will see that the article is obviosly written by someone who knows what they are talking about. It is well written, and I think it sums up how most of us feel about widescreen. The article might not be the best explanation of widescreen and it may not convert most people, but the intent was honerable. I haven't taken the time to read the message board yet, so we will see what others think about it.

 

[Karl_Wiers]

You are correct. My post was created in a moment of passion after reading through the rather weak article and then the horrible, horrible posts on their message board. Just for a laugh, read through the posts on that slate board.

After reading through a bunch of the posts again I think most of them must be trolls; which makes them almost funny.

 

[Jeff Kleist]

Most of these people seem to be 12 yo, and a lot of them seem to have their DVD players set to "16:9" television mode, since I see references to "distorted" and "funhouse mirror"

PLEASE! HARDWARE MANUFACTURERS! STOP SHIPPING YOUR DECKS IN 16:9 MODE!

 

[Lars Vermundsberget]

Well, I had a look at both the article and the message board, and in my opinion this doesn't look very bad at all.

The article may not be the optimal and perfect pro-OAR article, but I think it's reasonably balanced and informative - and it's not written by a "black bar"-hater.

The message board has its share of "idiots", but after checking a few of the messages I also get the impression that there are quite a few knowledgable and "intelligent" people around.

So - if the studios could pretty much bring the catering of the ignorant to a stop - I think there is hope for OAR in the US, which is important even to me in Europe.

 

[Jeff_P]

Sorry if this article is too long but I thought some people might find this interesting. There was also a streaming clip of a scene from Blade Runner in widescreen and pan&scam.
Open Wide
Why The Sopranos and ER put those black bands across your screen.
By Eriq Gardner
Updated Wednesday, February 6, 2002, at 2:09 PM PT
Five years ago, TV producer Dick Wolf (Law & Order) tried something that no one around him thought he could pull off. He introduced a TV series, Feds, in what movie buffs call "widescreen" format: with black bars stretched along the top and bottom of the screen. The result? "The show wasn't very successful, and some of the letters that came in to CBS were quite amusing," Wolf told the Akron Beacon Journal last year. "I think the best one was: 'I paid for my entire TV screen. Would you mind filling it?' "
For nearly 50 years, stories like this have circulated through the TV industry as tales of warning. TV viewers would only accept images in full-screen, without those black bands. But turn on a TV today and you'll see cars winding their way through curvy highways, colorful hip-hop music videos, and highly rated shows like The Sopranos, ER, and The West Wing—all, despite 50 years of industry logic, in widescreen.
What happened to the anti-widescreen masses?
Few TV executives, it seems, now remember that widescreen, also known as letterbox, was supposed to be a bulwark against television. In the 1950s, back when being a media conglomerate meant owning a movie studio and a movie house (as opposed to a studio and a TV station), studio honchos worried that the arrival of television would spell doom for film. To lure consumers out of the living room, they tried to emphasize the spectacle—the scope—of the moviemaking craft. Studios starting racing their versions of spectacle—Cinerama, CinemaScope, VistaVision—into production.
Widescreen was a brilliant marketing ploy but also a headache-inducing turf protector. It meant that there would always be something fishy about movies viewed on the small screen. Most feature films are shot with wide lenses, so they have to be shown on rectangular screens that are somewhat wider than they are tall (as much as 2.7 centimeters across for every 1 centimeter down)—in other words, the dimensions of a movie screen at your local theater. Most TV sets, on the other hand, are roughly square (generally about 1.33:1). To show a movie on a TV screen, you have to adjust to the smaller ratio. One way is to simply crop out the sides of the picture so it's not as wide. Another is to "pan and scan" across the image, showing only the most important part of the frame at any one time. But auteurs and cinema purists raised hell over both methods, arguing somewhat rightly that they were equivalent to lopping off the sides of a Picasso portrait so it would fit the wall.
Then came a third, less intrusive method, the letterbox format: essentially pushing the top and bottom of the TV screen toward the middle, making it shorter, so you can fit the entire width of the image. Letterboxing makes the picture look smaller, but you see the entire picture. (To see the difference, watch the opening of Ridley Scott's film Blade Runner: first in full-screen, then in widescreen.)
As classic movies were released on video, letterbox became the favored format for fans and moviemakers. In the late 1990s, commercial producers starting experimenting with ways to make their advertisements feel more "classy." If widescreen was good enough for Brian De Palma, it was good enough for P. Diddy. A hip-hop video director named Hype Williams started to use wide lenses to jazz up his productions. And ER producer John Wells, looking for ways to bring buzz back to his medical drama, went into 16:9 mode at the start of the 2000-2001 season. As Wells explained it to the Beacon Journal: "We noticed that a large number of commercials were being broadcast in letterbox form. We called the advertising department and asked why ... and they said, 'Well, because it looks classier.' Well, we've got a classy project. And I think that, increasingly, you want to be able to distinguish your show in an ever more cluttered marketplace as something that stands out."
Widescreen has become a great fad. It doesn't seem to matter that unlike movies, there is no technical reason to prefer the format for a TV show. Widescreen is great at showing the expanse of a landscape, but majority of TV shots are interiors and close-ups.
Also integral to the widescreen coming-out party has been the explosive growth of DVD sales. By purchasing DVDs, consumers could now see the original aspect ratios of their favorite movies, and indeed, the widescreen option became a huge selling point to get customers to upgrade from VHS to DVD. Some chain stores such as Blockbuster, in the belief that its customers will want from DVD what they got from VHS, are showing signs that they may be ready to short-stock widescreen versions on DVD.
But so far, the emergence of DVDs has generated little comment from those entertainment industry execs who have long insisted that widescreen couldn't be popular. The dollar trends may force them to change their attitude, as a new market opens in DVDs of popular TV shows, like Buffy, The Sopranos, and The X-Files. Seventeen spots on Amazon's Top 100 DVD list are taken by epics originally produced for the small screen.
Meanwhile, virtually every theatrical release shown on television continues to appear in full-screen. Since it's a myth that today's TV viewers will start letter-writing campaigns every time a movie shows up in widescreen, isn't it time to bury the hatchet between the movie and TV worlds? After all, television has never looked less square.

 

[paul o'donnell]

Nice.

 

[Jack Briggs]

I would only take exception to this:

"Widescreen has become a great fad."

It ain't a fad. It's the wave of the future.

Thanks for posting this!

 

[LarryH]

Curious that they seem completely to have omitted any mention of the upcoming 16x9 standard AR for HDTV and the new sets in that format.

My impression is that ER has been formatted as 16x9 in order to escape being obsolete when 16x9 becomes the standard.

 

[Joshua Clinard]

There is another thread discussing this article.
http://www.hometheaterforum.com/htfo...threadid=44638

 

[Butch C]

You might get a smaller picture, but with widescreen you get more of it. People like you can be compared to the little kid that will trade dimes for nickels because the nickel is larger.

You see the discussion board wasnt all that bad.

 

[John Berggren]

The article says that there is no good reason for television to be created in widescreen. Wouldn't the eventual 16x9 standard be reason enough?

 

[StephenT]

You might get a smaller picture, but with widescreen you get more of it. People like you can be compared to the little kid that will trade dimes for nickels because the nickel is larger.

I love that! People have come up with many analogies to show why pan and scan is bad, and the painting one is alright. However, this speaks to the people that prefer and want pan and scan (many times due to ignorance, granted), and it's brilliant!

 

[Andrew_Sch]

hate the widescreen format. I bought a big screen TV and when I watch a video it only uses a portion of the screen. Widescreen on a TV looks compressed and unnatural. Widescreen sets for the home are not big enough to make the format work.Until they make widescreen LCD sets at least 5 feet across at a decent price, widescreen will continue to be unsatisfactory in the home.

That's from a fellow named "Neil B." And I'm completely speechless

 

[Steve Felix]

I tried to set someone straight on the concept of open matte.

 

[Karl Englebright]

I've been reading the postings on that board and they are sure interesting! It kind of gives me a better idea of the type of people that argue for Pan and Scan. :frowning:

 

[David Lambert]

The message board posts that leave me aghast are the ones from "Cherokee", who talks about wanting it on the biggest screen/picture possible so he can see more of JLo "shaking her buttocks" and Dolly Parton "shaking her boobies". :rolleyes

 

[Jack Briggs]

And it kind of makes you glad you have a place like this to come to as a respite.

 

[Karl Englebright]

Amen to that!

 

[Patrick McCart]

Nice article. Cinerama was an indie product, though. The studios WISHED they had come up with it!