This is precisely the reason why I refuse to pay Cable or Satellite providers their exhorbitant fees for butchered films. When one complains, one only gets the "that's what the majority of our customers want" argument. Well--- if I'm a customer and the product is substandard in my eyes, then I'll be damned if I'll pay for it. "The Red Shoes" should be out very soon in a Blu-ray of the restored version and, until then, when I get the urge to watch the greatest ballet sequence in movie history, I'll continue to so so on my still-glorious Criterion dvd-- in the CORRECT full-screen ratio! Can you believe we've put up with the Letterbox Lament only to have it morph into the Cropper Crapper Clash!!! I'll stick with off-the-air and dvd/blu-ray. Cable and Satellite are picture-wise not up to first-class off-the-air HD transmissions.... but the off-the-air programming is so awful (Idol, etc.).....well, end of rant! The Viewer will never win-- except by simply turning the damned thing off! Joe B in NOLA
--- On Thu, 6/11/09, McDaniel Kirby <[email protected]> wrote: From: McDaniel Kirby <[email protected]> Subject: [MOPO] Slightly OT: HD DVD pan and scan To: [email protected] Date: Thursday, June 11, 2009, 9:36 AM This is by Glenn Erickson from the website DVD Savant: Hello! Well, Savant has run into something worth complaining about! I DVR'd MGMHD's Hi-Def cablecast of Michael Powell's The Red Shoes a couple of days ago and discovered something very disturbing. Ever since about 1970 or so I've been a regular whiner about the practice of Pan-Scanning widescreen movies for flat televisions, pointing out ruined compositions, squeezed title sequences and the famous shots where we see people's noses on each side of the frame while the Pan Scan stays firmly planted on a table lamp at screen center. The ability to see movies in their real aspect ratios is what pulled me into the expensive hobby of laserdisc collecting; as I'm sure I've said too many times, I bought a 16:9 television in 1995, two years before enhanced DVDs came around, for the express purpose of cropping full-frame transfers of movies that were supposed to be matted for widescreen. Now, in 2009, widescreen TVs are finally the norm and the transition is complete. Except with what I saw with the 1948 The Red Shoes, a flat 4x3 1:37 aspect ratio feature film. MGMHD was showing it Tilt-Scanned to 1:78. Somebody decided that Powell's classic looked nice at the wider ratio, you know, to fill widescreen TV screens. MGM pillar-boxed The Quatermass Xperiment full-frame, when it should be at least as wide as 1:66, and now they've taken it upon themselves to chop up a widely acknowledged classic. The Red Shoes is a ballet movie, and the first thing that happens in many shots is that feet cross the line out of the bottom of the frame. Masking off feet in a dance movie is a serious problem, to say the least. When Powell and cameraman Jack Cardiff get fancy with mattes, double exposures and strange angles, the Tilt-Scanning makes it difficult to locate our intended focus. This movie has just had a major restoration / repremiere, and doesnot need to be "reformatted" to fit our TV screens". So for heaven's sake, someone sic Martin Scorsese, Thelma Schoonmaker and the disc producers at Criterion on these people ... let's not let Tilt-Scanning get a foothold on HD video! Kirby McDaniel www.movieart.net Visit the MoPo Mailing List Web Site at www.filmfan.com ___________________________________________________________________ How to UNSUBSCRIBE from the MoPo Mailing List Send a message addressed to: [email protected] In the BODY of your message type: SIGNOFF MOPO-L The author of this message is solely responsible for its content. Visit the MoPo Mailing List Web Site at www.filmfan.com ___________________________________________________________________ How to UNSUBSCRIBE from the MoPo Mailing List Send a message addressed to: [email protected] In the BODY of your message type: SIGNOFF MOPO-L The author of this message is solely responsible for its content.
