Fun fact: The X-Files production team foresaw the coming of 16:9 home entertainment, so they made some effort (increasing with later seasons) to try and "protect" a 16:9 frame, which allowed for an unusually good 16:9 Blu-ray restoration. [https://www.tweaktown.com/reviews/7499/look-inside-the-files...]
I learned this from the older X-files DVDs, which have some unusually good special features.
I saw a movie in a theater years ago where the projectionist did not change the lens and/or mattes when switching from previews to the main feature. The projected image was much taller like a 1.85 or a 1.78, but the feature was shot wider 2.35/2.40. However, the image wasn't protected for the taller aspect, so all of the on set gak could be seen as it was never meant to be shown at the taller aspect ratio.
I've also sat in transfer sessions where the Pan&Scan decisions were being made to transfer wide screen down to 4:3 vs just doing a center crop extract. It makes you appreciate just how much effort is needed when done as best it could be rather than just the fast/lazy way.
Not saying it had anything to do with X-files, but also when you shot something for TV but were not entirely sure if the capture would ever go to the movies, you protected the wide frame.
Also, if you shot a movie but wanted it to look good in TV later, you put the most important action somewhere in a 4:3.
35mm film is more square than rectangle. When you shoot wider aspect ratios, the whole frame is exposed. The eyepiece on the camera has lines on them to allow the DP to see the framing for the desired aspect ratio vs the whole frame. So it wasn't just a Titanic as example, it was pretty much all film was shot like that.
When digital cameras like the ones from Red came out, you can tell it the aspect ratio so it only saves the active pixels of the full sensor and ignore all of the out of aspect pixels. That's a brave operator doing that, and I've only seen it in the wild once.
Not to dismiss the X-files team, but 16:9 was already around when they started. Just not in the states. Japan started getting 16:9 CRTs in the early 90s, Europe followed in the mid 90s. America lagged another half decade and effectively skipped 16:9 CRTs mostly going straight to plasma/lcd.
I never watched the widescreen version of The Wire they put out years ago but now I'm curious again. That show was a bone deep 4:3 product and the show plays with it constantly. Here is an interesting breakdown that made me really appreciate how clever they got while trying to be pretty subdued with the cinematography on The Wire https://vimeo.com/39768998
I watched both; both are good, in different ways. Some scenes that I remember being beautifully composed in 4:3 lost to the transition, while others have improved markedly.
They made a ton of effort on it, recognising it's a different version altogether:
> The new version of The Wire, then, will differ both creatively and technically. In certain cases, such as a scene in season two where longshoreman gather around a body, Simon said he believed the added space would add a vulnerability to the scene that wasn’t possible in 4:3. But he describes other scenes where the added space distracts the eye, and the remaster zooms in on the characters to retain that intimacy.
David Simon's earlier work, "Homicide" had a lot of interesting switching between film + video and aspect ratios as well. I think it's something that he's been interested in for a long time.
I don't know, currently watching Babylon 5 Season 3 and I think the CG is pretty impressive. It's not high resolution or sharp, but the ray tracing is excellent. A lot of moving parts flying around everywhere with lighting and planets in the background.
What he's talking about is that the CGI in B5 was filmed in 4:3 and not in 16:9 like the rest of the show. When they did the "high res" releases they had to make the choice of doing everything in 16:9 or in 4:3.
In 4:3 it looks good and like the original airing show, in 16:9 any non-digital/composite shot looks freaking fantastic. But once you get to any digital or composite shot it takes a nose dive in quality.
A very well written show. It's crazy to think a lot of people don't even get to watch this, because it's so hard to find. I couldn't find it anywhere (except for DVD's) so I had to resort to torrents.
I'm guessing about 10-15 years ago I was watching a documentary on the re-release of Ken Burns Civil War.
They were highlighting the digital tools they were using to restore and enhance the original film capture for new streaming services etc.
They showed one of the restorers using a fascinating tool where one window was a video feed of the original film's "first pass" to digital. One of the landscape scenes had a small smudge in the upper right hand corner so the restorer pauses the feed, goes back frame by frame and then was able to drag and drop the frame into another window where he used Photoshop like tools to fix everything and then drag and drop it back into the "feed". Seemed VERY efficient and shows how good tools can really accelerate a workflow.
Restoration tools are very cool. One tool I liked allows you to draw a marquee around an area you'd like to fix. It then allows you to shift the frames forward/back in just the highlighted area to find a frame without the blemish. Obviously a more static shot gave better results, but it was fast and easy to use. Much easier than trying to use a blemish/clone tool. Doing the same fix with rotoscoping techniques would take much more time/effort.
The documentary is no longer available (or, possibly, only available in the US), but the tool you're describing is pretty common in digital video editing. In DaVinci Resolve the dustbuster tool will look a few frames ahead and behind of the one where you want to paint out a mark, and make its best guess based on that.
I've used it to paint out tape dropouts on VHS transfers with remarkable success.
Stories like this regularly make the rounds when movies or shows that the original creators put a lot of love and thought into are "remastered" on the cheap. The last one I saw was the story about the garish colors in digital versions of old Pixar movies - amongst others, they intentionally exaggerated green hues in the digital original to compensate for the transfer process to analog film stock which was less sensitive to green. When Disney transferred the movies to digital formats and streaming, they took the digital original 1:1, so the colors now look off (https://animationobsessive.substack.com/p/the-toy-story-you-...)
What happened to the early Pixar movies isn't at all the same, though. They weren't remastered, they were just transferred to a media that they were not originally mastered for.
Through work I once got into conversation with the guy who did the re-mastering into 96kHz of the ABBA back catalogue. Up until that point CD re-releases of their material was apparently all converted from the cassette masters where they'd massively exaggerated the HF to compensate for the fact that cassette had a notoriously terrible HF response...
A few years back I had the sudden realization that I'd upgraded all my video equipment to HD and then 4k, but hadn't really done anything with my audio. So I went out and got nice equipment (Nice DAC, Headphones, Speakers, Etc).
One of the first things I learned once I could hear music properly was that I had favorite "versions" of different albums. They truly are NOT created equally, but it's not something you can really appreciate on a crummy Bluetooth headset either. Once you can you really start to appreciate the work that folks like your friend do.
So odd that they didn't slap a film emulation on top of that. Although maybe not any existing software emulates exactly the film stock they used, any film emulation would look more true than a 1:1.
Part of the reason this one is news is that there's really zero excuse for it being done "on the cheap": HBO can afford the very best, and their reputation kiiiind of depends on it.
Not just that, they seem to have also applied some weird auto-cropping that made “choices” no human doing the job would have, meaning that in some scenes characters who were meant to be in frame aren’t, then suddenly and surprisingly appear when there’s a cut to another angle (this is usually in group dialog scenes—like “oh that’s who they were talking to!”)
personally, I started re-watching Mad Men JUST because of these errors!
I love audio commentary, behind the scenes, and other looks behind the veil. I would love the ability to see more of unedited, 'raw', or 'mistakes' in older tv shows. Hell, I would even pay for it.
Whats really interesting to me is that no one 'decided' what's worthy of inclusion like they do with behind the scenes stuff
They didn’t just forget about CHI, they got all the way to releasing this to customers without ever watching it themselves. This is crazy levels of incompetence.
It's even weirder when you consider how big of a deal this was for Star Trek only a few years ago (well maybe more than a few...). You would have thought people in the business would know about this.
Everyone is underpaid and overworked. All things considered the companies probably think it’s worth the trade off, they’ll just fix it and republish. Might even end up with more viewers in the end! How many people have learned that Mad Men is on HBO Max as a result of this?
Execs have less and less shame as the years go on. Pride in artistic endeavour? That’s not going to make the shareholders happy.
Also cuts down on QA costs, offloading the burden of finding and cataloguing issues to the user. Since this is a monopoly, as you can't have multiple vendors competing for the best 4k restoration, and you can't have multiple streaming services competing for quality, they don't consider brand impact with low quality products because that's meaningless in this case.
They spent a lot of money doing a decent remastering job of TOS and TNG.
The public did not spend a lot of money on buying these remasters - they lost a lot of money.
The DS9 documentary "What we left behind" had some HD reproduction. It was great, and I was lucky enough to see DS9 on a big screen at an semi-arty cinema in Hackney (not a chain, but did have popcorn), but doing this type of production is expensive.
Automating it is far cheaper, and although it comes out crap - people would prefer to watch stuff in 16:9 and either
1) Have stuff (like the hold in the Friends wall) which wasn't suppose to be there
2) Crop stuff out (see the first 20 years of Simpsons)
With the Simpsons there was enough outrage that they gave an option to fix it, but for those who remember 20 years ago it was very common for the average viewer to have their TV simply stretch 4:3 to fill the entire screen width. Nowadays a whopping 4 in 5 people in America are using their phone at the same time as watching TV, they simply aren't paying attention.
> You would have thought people in the business would know about this.
People in the business world seems to only know business, and that's the limit of what they care about. Place these people into the arts, and you quickly see how important it is to have at least a single ounce of care when you work on projects where you want some level of quality.
But I think HBO, Netflix and most TV/streaming services are run by business-people still, as they think it's a numbers game, not a arts game. Eventually someone will understand and take the world by storm, but seemingly not yet.
> People in the business world seems to only know business, and that's the limit of what they care about.
You’d think these people would go off and be executives at a ball bearing manufacturing company or something and leave the arts alone, but it never happens that way.
>But I think HBO, Netflix and most TV/streaming services are run by business-people still, as they think it's a numbers game, not a arts game. Eventually someone will understand and take the world by storm, but seemingly not yet.
Because they are businesses? Just because something is art doesn't mean expenses can be more than revenue.
There was an enormous increase in the supply of entertainment over the last 20 years, in the form of Youtube, TikTok, Instagram, Reddit, WhatsApp, HN, video games, etc. Demand stayed the same, maxed out at 24 hours per day. One should expect changes in quality and quantity and price in a market with drastically shifting supply and demand curves.
I am not criticizing anyone. Just explaining the dynamics that led to the dramatic reduction in value of the legacy businesses that produced professional video content, and the inevitable repercussions.
Prerelease about 4K remaster premiere will please shareholders and push the stock price up, while actually doing a good job will only hurt the bottom line.
They never intended to show anything to the right of the doorframe on TV, so there's a random sign on the wall and a big hole in the wall (which makes sense if you are a camera crew wanting to film a sitcom in the apartment, that doesn't make so much sense in the fictional world that anyone would have a big rectangle cut out of the wall between their apartment and the hallway).
I might be wrong but I don't remember the original framing ever showing the sign, so I assumed (perhaps incorrectly) that it was there ready for them to move in shot if they ever wanted it, but that as seen in this image it's not supposed to be on camera
In that case your memory (or perhaps just attention to detail when watching) is better than mine, and I withdraw my previous belief! Thanks for the correction
This post explains it nicely, by showing the noticeboard they normally use to cover that camera hole (which looks like an unfinished window frame, missing its architrave): https://x.com/MattBaume/status/1661785600050233344
I think it is the open hole in the wall next to the door -- which no real apartment would have. I think that part was meant be cropped in the final frame, maybe?
I think this is just another case of "over-optimization to make shareholders happy in the end ruins everything". I.e., the normal enshittification problem.
Pretty sure all of that does make financial sense:
- Being able to write 4k will bring people in to re-watching/watching the show for the first time.
- Redoing the CGI, etc., would have cost a lot of money.
- Very few people will cancel their subscription or stop watching because of stuff like that
- So in the end, no one cares
I.e., it makes financial sense to do the minimum possible.
Sure, if this were a project you care about, if it were your company that you are also emotionally invested in and maybe proud of, etc., things might look different. But your actual customers are shareholders, which in the end are predominantly giant ETF brokers and pension funds, that don't care about anything else but what your stock price looks like and whether you are in the S&P500. They probably don't even know what your company is doing.
Only if you’re optimizing for easily measured metrics alone. The value of a companies brand is not just some arbitrary number on a balance sheet it does influence the easily measured metrics like the number of customers you have across multiple segments in a noisy way. Which then influences your profits, which those institutional investors do care about.
That said, the general public is more price conscious than most people on HN. Walmart is generously rewarded for finding a good price:quality match for a huge segment of the population.
On an Apple TV with first gen Homepods connected it is incredibly laggy. Specifically rewind and fast forward take sometimes up to 10 seconds to respond. And even then they never seem to get me to the correct location. It’s pretty maddening.
Set up a site for fans to point out errors and vote on them.
Then have HBO have just one editor interact with fans on the site, fix the most popular errors, and talk about them, maybe stream a little of the editing process.
Damn, that's terrible. Reminds me of The Simpsons being cropped into 16:9 for Disney and obscuring the joke that all the Duff brews come from one pipe.
I've had people make the Duff argument about real beers. Putting bad batches in a different can is a great way to do quality control on your main brand though.
It's weird that they'd have the crew in the frame anyway. Was it really not possible to have them out of frame? I guess being able to "do it in post" makes people lazy?
It's the fact that shooting is enormously expensive per-minute, and time-constrained. Think of the sheer number of crew involved. And then think of the sheer number of shots you have to get per day, to stay on schedule and on budget.
If there was a mixup and it's going to take half an hour to get and set up a longer hose, it's much cheaper to have 1 person do it in post if it takes a day, versus delay the shot for half an hour while 50 people wait around. (And no, you often can't just shoot a different shot in the meantime, because that involves rearranging the lighting and set which takes just as long.)
Possibly some issues with the hose length and the ability control the flow? Or perhaps it’s just an off the shelf up chuck chucker that doesn’t have a longer hose?
They were set up to shoot that scene that day and they were on a tight schedule. They started to set up and they realized they only had 12 feet of hose, or that the pressure dropped too much with a longer length of hose. They discussed all the options, and fixing it physically would take too long or be too expensive. Thus another "we'll fix it in post!" moment was born.
Probably more a function of "shit happens" when doing something new (making and using a "vomit hose") in a big, multi-functional project (shooting a TV show).
If it can be fixed in post, what's the problem? The only flaw here is that they completely screwed up and forgot post for these scenes (in the remaster).
Apparently they didn't forget. Lionsgate did all the necessary work, then someone sent the "wrong file" to HBO Max, and it seems nobody checked it properly before uploading it!
Given the volume of material these streamers are handling, I expect QA is minimal. I remember when I was watching Frasier on Amazon Prime, a bunch of the episodes had been configured to play in the wrong aspect ratio. Clearly nobody had ever bothered to check them.
When I worked in the VOD industry we never almost never did a precheck of the files. The content provider (Lionsgate in this case) would upload the files that would then get ingested by the CMS system for normalization and transcoding. The most check the distributor did was add metadata marks for ad breaks and random checks for transcode quality.
I set up custom ingest workflows many cable companies around the world and they all worked the same. You just had to trust that the providers sent you good copies and get them to fix their shit if it was wrong. Most of the time it was bad metadata (episode description, ect).
Friends on Netflix one day years ago had the extended versions of the episodes. They fixed it quickly, but it's kind of a shame since it'd be nice if we had the choice to select which version we wanted to see.
I’ve seen movies on Prime where the audio was very badly out of sync. I thought it was my setup at first, but I was able to isolate it to particular titles. Like watching a bad dub from another language.
> Given the volume of material these streamers are handling, I expect QA is minimal
Yeah, I expect QA is minimal for these shows that are past their prime. Only fans will really watch them again, it's probably not worth it to spend the extra time to review every single episode. (But of course, fans will care! I'm just saying it's probably not worthwhile for HBO to check)
I guess the crew has to stay pretty close to the end of the hose or it becomes hard to time the... flow... correctly. Likely, they still had to process the frames anyway to make the... flow... look like it comes out of Sterling's mouth, not from the side of his face, so it was basically no extra cost.
Fun fact: The X-Files production team foresaw the coming of 16:9 home entertainment, so they made some effort (increasing with later seasons) to try and "protect" a 16:9 frame, which allowed for an unusually good 16:9 Blu-ray restoration. [https://www.tweaktown.com/reviews/7499/look-inside-the-files...]
I learned this from the older X-files DVDs, which have some unusually good special features.
I saw a movie in a theater years ago where the projectionist did not change the lens and/or mattes when switching from previews to the main feature. The projected image was much taller like a 1.85 or a 1.78, but the feature was shot wider 2.35/2.40. However, the image wasn't protected for the taller aspect, so all of the on set gak could be seen as it was never meant to be shown at the taller aspect ratio.
I've also sat in transfer sessions where the Pan&Scan decisions were being made to transfer wide screen down to 4:3 vs just doing a center crop extract. It makes you appreciate just how much effort is needed when done as best it could be rather than just the fast/lazy way.
Not saying it had anything to do with X-files, but also when you shot something for TV but were not entirely sure if the capture would ever go to the movies, you protected the wide frame.
Also, if you shot a movie but wanted it to look good in TV later, you put the most important action somewhere in a 4:3.
Some movies were shot in 4:3 (ish) and cropped in the theater. Titanic is an example.
(For the pedantic, yes there is a name for this technique, and yes the ratios aren't exactly 4:3.)
35mm film is more square than rectangle. When you shoot wider aspect ratios, the whole frame is exposed. The eyepiece on the camera has lines on them to allow the DP to see the framing for the desired aspect ratio vs the whole frame. So it wasn't just a Titanic as example, it was pretty much all film was shot like that.
When digital cameras like the ones from Red came out, you can tell it the aspect ratio so it only saves the active pixels of the full sensor and ignore all of the out of aspect pixels. That's a brave operator doing that, and I've only seen it in the wild once.
Not to dismiss the X-files team, but 16:9 was already around when they started. Just not in the states. Japan started getting 16:9 CRTs in the early 90s, Europe followed in the mid 90s. America lagged another half decade and effectively skipped 16:9 CRTs mostly going straight to plasma/lcd.
I never watched the widescreen version of The Wire they put out years ago but now I'm curious again. That show was a bone deep 4:3 product and the show plays with it constantly. Here is an interesting breakdown that made me really appreciate how clever they got while trying to be pretty subdued with the cinematography on The Wire https://vimeo.com/39768998
I watched both; both are good, in different ways. Some scenes that I remember being beautifully composed in 4:3 lost to the transition, while others have improved markedly.
They made a ton of effort on it, recognising it's a different version altogether:
> The new version of The Wire, then, will differ both creatively and technically. In certain cases, such as a scene in season two where longshoreman gather around a body, Simon said he believed the added space would add a vulnerability to the scene that wasn’t possible in 4:3. But he describes other scenes where the added space distracts the eye, and the remaster zooms in on the characters to retain that intimacy.
https://www.techhive.com/article/599415/hbo-remastered-the-w...
David Simon's earlier work, "Homicide" had a lot of interesting switching between film + video and aspect ratios as well. I think it's something that he's been interested in for a long time.
Similar with Babylon 5, although the CG has not aged as well.
I don't know, currently watching Babylon 5 Season 3 and I think the CG is pretty impressive. It's not high resolution or sharp, but the ray tracing is excellent. A lot of moving parts flying around everywhere with lighting and planets in the background.
What he's talking about is that the CGI in B5 was filmed in 4:3 and not in 16:9 like the rest of the show. When they did the "high res" releases they had to make the choice of doing everything in 16:9 or in 4:3.
In 4:3 it looks good and like the original airing show, in 16:9 any non-digital/composite shot looks freaking fantastic. But once you get to any digital or composite shot it takes a nose dive in quality.
There was recent (last few years) work done to fix all of this.
https://www.modeemi.fi/~leopold/Babylon5/DVD/DVDTransfer.htm...
I have these versions, and it's world better than everything beforehand. It's also a good opportunity for a re-watch!
A very well written show. It's crazy to think a lot of people don't even get to watch this, because it's so hard to find. I couldn't find it anywhere (except for DVD's) so I had to resort to torrents.
The first season or two you can definitely see the crew in the safety margins, sometimes the camera crane too
When you have an OLED screen then 4:3 aspect ratio is fine because the black bars aren't backlit, so it's not a problem.
A side story on the techniques for restoration:
I'm guessing about 10-15 years ago I was watching a documentary on the re-release of Ken Burns Civil War.
They were highlighting the digital tools they were using to restore and enhance the original film capture for new streaming services etc.
They showed one of the restorers using a fascinating tool where one window was a video feed of the original film's "first pass" to digital. One of the landscape scenes had a small smudge in the upper right hand corner so the restorer pauses the feed, goes back frame by frame and then was able to drag and drop the frame into another window where he used Photoshop like tools to fix everything and then drag and drop it back into the "feed". Seemed VERY efficient and shows how good tools can really accelerate a workflow.
I'm not sure if the above scene is in the below quick documentary but there are a lot of other cool "behind the scenes of restoration" moments: https://www.pbs.org/video/civil-war-restoring-civil-war/
Restoration tools are very cool. One tool I liked allows you to draw a marquee around an area you'd like to fix. It then allows you to shift the frames forward/back in just the highlighted area to find a frame without the blemish. Obviously a more static shot gave better results, but it was fast and easy to use. Much easier than trying to use a blemish/clone tool. Doing the same fix with rotoscoping techniques would take much more time/effort.
The documentary is no longer available (or, possibly, only available in the US), but the tool you're describing is pretty common in digital video editing. In DaVinci Resolve the dustbuster tool will look a few frames ahead and behind of the one where you want to paint out a mark, and make its best guess based on that.
I've used it to paint out tape dropouts on VHS transfers with remarkable success.
Do you do VHS transfers professionally or your own personal VhS? Stacks of VHS sittin in a corner that I need to decide what to do with
Stories like this regularly make the rounds when movies or shows that the original creators put a lot of love and thought into are "remastered" on the cheap. The last one I saw was the story about the garish colors in digital versions of old Pixar movies - amongst others, they intentionally exaggerated green hues in the digital original to compensate for the transfer process to analog film stock which was less sensitive to green. When Disney transferred the movies to digital formats and streaming, they took the digital original 1:1, so the colors now look off (https://animationobsessive.substack.com/p/the-toy-story-you-...)
Discussed here a few weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45883788
What happened to the early Pixar movies isn't at all the same, though. They weren't remastered, they were just transferred to a media that they were not originally mastered for.
Through work I once got into conversation with the guy who did the re-mastering into 96kHz of the ABBA back catalogue. Up until that point CD re-releases of their material was apparently all converted from the cassette masters where they'd massively exaggerated the HF to compensate for the fact that cassette had a notoriously terrible HF response...
A few years back I had the sudden realization that I'd upgraded all my video equipment to HD and then 4k, but hadn't really done anything with my audio. So I went out and got nice equipment (Nice DAC, Headphones, Speakers, Etc).
One of the first things I learned once I could hear music properly was that I had favorite "versions" of different albums. They truly are NOT created equally, but it's not something you can really appreciate on a crummy Bluetooth headset either. Once you can you really start to appreciate the work that folks like your friend do.
So odd that they didn't slap a film emulation on top of that. Although maybe not any existing software emulates exactly the film stock they used, any film emulation would look more true than a 1:1.
Part of the reason this one is news is that there's really zero excuse for it being done "on the cheap": HBO can afford the very best, and their reputation kiiiind of depends on it.
The did something similar to Buffy The Vampire Slayer when "upgrading" it to HD. It lost all/most of the color grading and was cropped to 16:9.
Some night scenes now take place during daytime and you can see booms and camera operators in many shots.
It never even got a blu ray release. The only way to watch it at home without egregious errors is still DVD as far as I know.
Not just that, they seem to have also applied some weird auto-cropping that made “choices” no human doing the job would have, meaning that in some scenes characters who were meant to be in frame aren’t, then suddenly and surprisingly appear when there’s a cut to another angle (this is usually in group dialog scenes—like “oh that’s who they were talking to!”)
I have the PAL DVD release, and I have to say the color grading has never been great, although it obviously at least has the correct effects applied.
The PAL release is already the bad copy (starting with season 4 I think). You already had odd stuff in view that wasn't supposed to be visible.
The only way to watch this show properly now is the 4:3 NTSC DVD release.
I think the recent streaming releases also have the music altered in many places. The show just got <bleep>ed up basically. It's a real shame.
Hmm, I didn't notice any "odd stuff in view" when I watched it, so at least it wasn't obvious. I'll have to keep an eye out next time I watch
personally, I started re-watching Mad Men JUST because of these errors!
I love audio commentary, behind the scenes, and other looks behind the veil. I would love the ability to see more of unedited, 'raw', or 'mistakes' in older tv shows. Hell, I would even pay for it.
Whats really interesting to me is that no one 'decided' what's worthy of inclusion like they do with behind the scenes stuff
100% chance I would have never noticed the "puke hose" tech in the background. I never saw the Gorilla in that classic "basketball video".
Great article, I really thought it was a recropping like friends (and many others). So weird that they just forgot about CGI.
They didn’t just forget about CHI, they got all the way to releasing this to customers without ever watching it themselves. This is crazy levels of incompetence.
It's even weirder when you consider how big of a deal this was for Star Trek only a few years ago (well maybe more than a few...). You would have thought people in the business would know about this.
Everyone is underpaid and overworked. All things considered the companies probably think it’s worth the trade off, they’ll just fix it and republish. Might even end up with more viewers in the end! How many people have learned that Mad Men is on HBO Max as a result of this?
Execs have less and less shame as the years go on. Pride in artistic endeavour? That’s not going to make the shareholders happy.
Also cuts down on QA costs, offloading the burden of finding and cataloguing issues to the user. Since this is a monopoly, as you can't have multiple vendors competing for the best 4k restoration, and you can't have multiple streaming services competing for quality, they don't consider brand impact with low quality products because that's meaningless in this case.
They spent a lot of money doing a decent remastering job of TOS and TNG.
The public did not spend a lot of money on buying these remasters - they lost a lot of money.
The DS9 documentary "What we left behind" had some HD reproduction. It was great, and I was lucky enough to see DS9 on a big screen at an semi-arty cinema in Hackney (not a chain, but did have popcorn), but doing this type of production is expensive.
Automating it is far cheaper, and although it comes out crap - people would prefer to watch stuff in 16:9 and either
1) Have stuff (like the hold in the Friends wall) which wasn't suppose to be there
2) Crop stuff out (see the first 20 years of Simpsons)
With the Simpsons there was enough outrage that they gave an option to fix it, but for those who remember 20 years ago it was very common for the average viewer to have their TV simply stretch 4:3 to fill the entire screen width. Nowadays a whopping 4 in 5 people in America are using their phone at the same time as watching TV, they simply aren't paying attention.
The number of people
1) Who notice
2) Who care
3) Who are watching older stuff
4) Who will pay for it
Is tiny.
> You would have thought people in the business would know about this.
People in the business world seems to only know business, and that's the limit of what they care about. Place these people into the arts, and you quickly see how important it is to have at least a single ounce of care when you work on projects where you want some level of quality.
But I think HBO, Netflix and most TV/streaming services are run by business-people still, as they think it's a numbers game, not a arts game. Eventually someone will understand and take the world by storm, but seemingly not yet.
> People in the business world seems to only know business, and that's the limit of what they care about.
You’d think these people would go off and be executives at a ball bearing manufacturing company or something and leave the arts alone, but it never happens that way.
>But I think HBO, Netflix and most TV/streaming services are run by business-people still, as they think it's a numbers game, not a arts game. Eventually someone will understand and take the world by storm, but seemingly not yet.
Because they are businesses? Just because something is art doesn't mean expenses can be more than revenue.
There was an enormous increase in the supply of entertainment over the last 20 years, in the form of Youtube, TikTok, Instagram, Reddit, WhatsApp, HN, video games, etc. Demand stayed the same, maxed out at 24 hours per day. One should expect changes in quality and quantity and price in a market with drastically shifting supply and demand curves.
Dont criticize the billion dollar corporation >:(
I am not criticizing anyone. Just explaining the dynamics that led to the dramatic reduction in value of the legacy businesses that produced professional video content, and the inevitable repercussions.
Prerelease about 4K remaster premiere will please shareholders and push the stock price up, while actually doing a good job will only hurt the bottom line.
Great article.
Can someone explain what was wrong with that _Friends_ screenshot? I can't tell.
They never intended to show anything to the right of the doorframe on TV, so there's a random sign on the wall and a big hole in the wall (which makes sense if you are a camera crew wanting to film a sitcom in the apartment, that doesn't make so much sense in the fictional world that anyone would have a big rectangle cut out of the wall between their apartment and the hallway).
The “five card charlie” sign is part of the set that’s supposed to be on camera, but the hole in the sheetrock obviously isn’t.
I know you are right here but it is also true that many real New York apartments have crazy things like the hole in the sheetrock.
Who doesn’t want a permanently open serving window between their apartment and the public hallway
I might be wrong but I don't remember the original framing ever showing the sign, so I assumed (perhaps incorrectly) that it was there ready for them to move in shot if they ever wanted it, but that as seen in this image it's not supposed to be on camera
I distinctly remember the "5 card Charlie" sign from the original SDTV broadcast back in the day.
In that case your memory (or perhaps just attention to detail when watching) is better than mine, and I withdraw my previous belief! Thanks for the correction
The apartment was a bunch of 2x4s and plywood in the middle of a big sound stage building on the Warner lot in Burbank. It's still there afaik.
This post explains it nicely, by showing the noticeboard they normally use to cover that camera hole (which looks like an unfinished window frame, missing its architrave): https://x.com/MattBaume/status/1661785600050233344
There's a window-hole in what should be an exterior apartment wall facing a hallway. Right side of the screen.
New York apartments rarely have holes in their walls opening to the hallway.
haha. Take a look at the massive unfinished window into the hallway =).
I think it is the open hole in the wall next to the door -- which no real apartment would have. I think that part was meant be cropped in the final frame, maybe?
There's a cut out on the wall for cameras on a different angle.
I think this is just another case of "over-optimization to make shareholders happy in the end ruins everything". I.e., the normal enshittification problem.
Pretty sure all of that does make financial sense: - Being able to write 4k will bring people in to re-watching/watching the show for the first time. - Redoing the CGI, etc., would have cost a lot of money. - Very few people will cancel their subscription or stop watching because of stuff like that - So in the end, no one cares
I.e., it makes financial sense to do the minimum possible. Sure, if this were a project you care about, if it were your company that you are also emotionally invested in and maybe proud of, etc., things might look different. But your actual customers are shareholders, which in the end are predominantly giant ETF brokers and pension funds, that don't care about anything else but what your stock price looks like and whether you are in the S&P500. They probably don't even know what your company is doing.
Sorry, rant over ;P
Only if you’re optimizing for easily measured metrics alone. The value of a companies brand is not just some arbitrary number on a balance sheet it does influence the easily measured metrics like the number of customers you have across multiple segments in a noisy way. Which then influences your profits, which those institutional investors do care about.
That said, the general public is more price conscious than most people on HN. Walmart is generously rewarded for finding a good price:quality match for a huge segment of the population.
Unrelated: does anyone else experience huge lag with HBO streaming app? It’s easily the slowest I regularly use on Samsung smart tv.
On an Apple TV with first gen Homepods connected it is incredibly laggy. Specifically rewind and fast forward take sometimes up to 10 seconds to respond. And even then they never seem to get me to the correct location. It’s pretty maddening.
This could be an EXCELLENT marketing opportunity.
Set up a site for fans to point out errors and vote on them.
Then have HBO have just one editor interact with fans on the site, fix the most popular errors, and talk about them, maybe stream a little of the editing process.
Yes a bit like modern car companies do by pushing out whatever untested experimental feature they have and let the customers figure them out (or die).
That would require HBO to actually care.. They've already been paid, I don't see them fixing any of this for the streaming service.
marketing for people to engage with HBO Max and Mad Men... they haven't "already been paid"
>Update: the season one episodes are being updated live on HBO Max to their correct positions and titles. The corrected title:
>They've already been paid
HBO sells a subscription. Presumably, their goal is to be paid again, and again, and again.
It honestly seemed like pretty sharp marketing to me already when I read about it on AV Club.
True
Damn, that's terrible. Reminds me of The Simpsons being cropped into 16:9 for Disney and obscuring the joke that all the Duff brews come from one pipe.
You can switch to the original 4:3 though
Edit: and I'm getting flagged lol
The Simpsons > Details > Remastered aspect ratio > Off https://i.imgur.com/pQohgQp.jpeg
That option wasn't added until some time later.
I wish Netflix did it for Seinfeld.
I've had people make the Duff argument about real beers. Putting bad batches in a different can is a great way to do quality control on your main brand though.
It's weird that they'd have the crew in the frame anyway. Was it really not possible to have them out of frame? I guess being able to "do it in post" makes people lazy?
It's not laziness!
It's the fact that shooting is enormously expensive per-minute, and time-constrained. Think of the sheer number of crew involved. And then think of the sheer number of shots you have to get per day, to stay on schedule and on budget.
If there was a mixup and it's going to take half an hour to get and set up a longer hose, it's much cheaper to have 1 person do it in post if it takes a day, versus delay the shot for half an hour while 50 people wait around. (And no, you often can't just shoot a different shot in the meantime, because that involves rearranging the lighting and set which takes just as long.)
Possibly some issues with the hose length and the ability control the flow? Or perhaps it’s just an off the shelf up chuck chucker that doesn’t have a longer hose?
They were already gonna edit it in post to remove the hose anyway.. Might as well remove the crew too in that case.
Hypothesis:
They were set up to shoot that scene that day and they were on a tight schedule. They started to set up and they realized they only had 12 feet of hose, or that the pressure dropped too much with a longer length of hose. They discussed all the options, and fixing it physically would take too long or be too expensive. Thus another "we'll fix it in post!" moment was born.
Probably more a function of "shit happens" when doing something new (making and using a "vomit hose") in a big, multi-functional project (shooting a TV show).
If it can be fixed in post, what's the problem? The only flaw here is that they completely screwed up and forgot post for these scenes (in the remaster).
Apparently they didn't forget. Lionsgate did all the necessary work, then someone sent the "wrong file" to HBO Max, and it seems nobody checked it properly before uploading it!
Given the volume of material these streamers are handling, I expect QA is minimal. I remember when I was watching Frasier on Amazon Prime, a bunch of the episodes had been configured to play in the wrong aspect ratio. Clearly nobody had ever bothered to check them.
When I worked in the VOD industry we never almost never did a precheck of the files. The content provider (Lionsgate in this case) would upload the files that would then get ingested by the CMS system for normalization and transcoding. The most check the distributor did was add metadata marks for ad breaks and random checks for transcode quality.
I set up custom ingest workflows many cable companies around the world and they all worked the same. You just had to trust that the providers sent you good copies and get them to fix their shit if it was wrong. Most of the time it was bad metadata (episode description, ect).
Friends on Netflix one day years ago had the extended versions of the episodes. They fixed it quickly, but it's kind of a shame since it'd be nice if we had the choice to select which version we wanted to see.
I’ve seen movies on Prime where the audio was very badly out of sync. I thought it was my setup at first, but I was able to isolate it to particular titles. Like watching a bad dub from another language.
> Given the volume of material these streamers are handling, I expect QA is minimal
Yeah, I expect QA is minimal for these shows that are past their prime. Only fans will really watch them again, it's probably not worth it to spend the extra time to review every single episode. (But of course, fans will care! I'm just saying it's probably not worthwhile for HBO to check)
I guess the crew has to stay pretty close to the end of the hose or it becomes hard to time the... flow... correctly. Likely, they still had to process the frames anyway to make the... flow... look like it comes out of Sterling's mouth, not from the side of his face, so it was basically no extra cost.
They were out of frame. Out of the 4:3 frame.
Edit: I jumped the gun and thought we were talking about the Friends screenshot.
No the original was 16:9, you can see they have been digitally removed in the shots from the Blu-ray.
But it was never intended for 4:3. They were always in frame, just digitally removed.