Widescreen or Fullscreen?

zombie84 · Post by **zombie84** » 2003-10-22 05:46pm

Letterbox and widescreen is the same. Widescreen is the more common term nowadays, as letterbox has a derogatory connotation (implying that you lose image, which is not true).

The OAR is the only way to view a film and this means widescreen.

Anyone who prefers fullscreen to widescreen is just a complete fucking idiot. I dont read books with 1/3 of each page missing and i dont view paintings with 1/3 of the image cropped. Imagine if someone presented Da Vici's "The Last Supper" but instead of its landscape format, it reduced to a square so that all of the disciples are cropped off and we are left with Jesus eating by himself, and then passed that off as a representation of Da Vici's true intentions? Why should film be any different?

Its a travesty, a misrepresentation, an inferior presentation and a rape to art. And fuck all of you who would dare support that.

Chardok · Post by **Chardok** » 2003-10-22 05:57pm

HEY! 3 ppl voted fullscreen. Bet they were just sock puppets mocking me.....[/cry] (Oh, and Spanky, I tried messing with my DVD player...couldn't seem to find the options you are talking about...will continue...

zombie84 · Post by **zombie84** » 2003-10-22 06:03pm

I would like to point out the legendary Widescreen advocacy page, which i have been directing people to since 1998. Go there. read. Be educated. Be enlightened.

http://www.widescreen.org/index.shtml

Want to see examples of why Fullscreen should be punishable with death:

Two towers

star wars

Mask of zorro

Tommorrow Never Dies

Romancing the Stone

I rest my case.

ESB cannot be watched fullscreen!

Chardok · Post by **Chardok** » 2003-10-22 06:12pm

I AM A WORM for suggesting fullscreen was better! Thank you, Thank you spanky and Zombie for showing me the error of my ways! Holy fucking shit. I had no IDEA what I was missing! I am reformed! I have seen the light! God, you may take me now, for I have learned of the blasphemy which is fullscreen and am forever more rehabilitated! Purgatory, here I come! WooooooHoooooo!

zombie84 · Post by **zombie84** » 2003-10-22 06:15pm

Ah, my job is done. You have no idea how many people i have converted...

Vertigo1 · Post by **Vertigo1** » 2003-10-22 10:02pm

Chardok wrote:I AM A WORM for suggesting fullscreen was better! Thank you, Thank you spanky and Zombie for showing me the error of my ways! Holy fucking shit. I had no IDEA what I was missing! I am reformed! I have seen the light! God, you may take me now, for I have learned of the blasphemy which is fullscreen and am forever more rehabilitated! Purgatory, here I come! WooooooHoooooo!

He has seen the light! Come brother! Bathe in the holy light that is Widescreen and be healed!

Typhonis 1 · Post by **Typhonis 1** » 2003-10-23 04:25am

Widescreen However my Mother likes full screen because when she was younger she said tht if you saw a black bar on top and bottom of the screen on the TV it was going bad

LordShaithis · Post by **LordShaithis** » 2003-10-23 01:52pm

I actually explained this to a woman in a store a while back, and talked her into buying the widescreen Lion King.

neoolong · Post by **neoolong** » 2003-10-23 02:00pm

GrandAdmiralPrawn wrote:I actually explained this to a woman in a store a while back, and talked her into buying the widescreen Lion King.

I was at a Target before, and a clerk at the DVD departmen told people that the one with the complete picture was fullscreen.

Stravo · Post by **Stravo** » 2003-10-23 02:04pm

I play all the Disney DVD's I have in Widescreen for my daughter but when I go to her place her grandmother goes out of her way to play movies in full screen because she says the black bars annoy the kids. Yeah right, my daughetr watches widescreen with me and never says a word.

You gotta train them young people

BTW I happen to think that giving people a choice is precisely what future DVD's should be, after all what's the point of selling seperate DVDs? If Disney can do it for their movies why can't other studios do it?

Vendetta · Post by **Vendetta** » 2003-10-23 02:07pm

Pan & Scan is sometimes called full frame.

It comes from the way a 1.85:1 Academy Ratio film is made (that's 16:9), by barring off the top and bottom of the image that the actual camera takes (allowing the boom mikes to get closer, where they'd be in shot in a full frame picture) (Stanley Kubrick did several full frame movies)

The "Extra wide" screen that's become fairly common is called Anamorphic (2.35:1).

Pan & Scan isn't proper full frame, of course.

neoolong · Post by **neoolong** » 2003-10-23 02:14pm

Stravo wrote:I play all the Disney DVD's I have in Widescreen for my daughter but when I go to her place her grandmother goes out of her way to play movies in full screen because she says the black bars annoy the kids. Yeah right, my daughetr watches widescreen with me and never says a word.

You gotta train them young people

BTW I happen to think that giving people a choice is precisely what future DVD's should be, after all what's the point of selling seperate DVDs? If Disney can do it for their movies why can't other studios do it?

One of the problems is when companies only release it in fullscreen, even though it was shot for widescreen. Not that often, but it has happened.

The concept of putting both formats in single package makes the price go up, or you lose extras. I'd rather not see that happen and just have two different formats.

Vertigo1 · Post by **Vertigo1** » 2003-10-23 02:28pm

neoolong wrote:One of the problems is when companies only release it in fullscreen, even though it was shot for widescreen. Not that often, but it has happened.

The concept of putting both formats in single package makes the price go up, or you lose extras. I'd rather not see that happen and just have two different formats.

Not always. Sometimes they're put on a second disk. This was done with the Lion King DVD as well as Shrek and Ice Age.

zombie84 · Post by **zombie84** » 2003-10-23 03:20pm

you still lose space.

Having two version of a film on one disk destroys the bitrate and the quality becomes below-average. Having a second disk in a set takes up space that could be devoted for extras, and oftentimes jacks the price up.

Pan and SCAM shouldnt even be around anymore. No DVD was fullscreen when the format came out. This is the problem with mass marketing. Now that DVD is popular all the morons are making the format suffer while the film enthusiasts who made the format possible get shafted because joe blow is annoyed that there are black bars on his screen.

Fullscreen is the new term that pan n scan is being called and i dont like it. Pan and scan is what the process actually is, but since companies want to SELL you it, they make it look less derogatory--fullscreen implies that you get MORE, and that widescreen by comparison offers less (the myth that the black bars cover up information). If they labelled all the movies as "Pan and Scan", people would ask what that means and the clerk would have to say "oh well you lose half the image so to make up for it the image is artificially framed and panned in a vain attempt to compensate for the improper format". Then of course the customer would say "no thank you".

If the companies just sided with the filmmakers there wouldnt be any problems because people would be forced to realize the benefits of the OAR. Unfortunaly, the customer is always right, and more accuratly, the cutsomer is often a moron.

One thing that i think should be mandatory on all "fullscreen" DVD is the "why widescreen" feature. This is appearing on some DVD's here and there. My Die Hard SE and Pearl Harbor Vistaseries DVD both have video features where they compare the two versions of the films--the pan n scan and widescreen--and step you through how a widescreen image is formatted for a television and the loss that results. Its very enlightening for the uneducated. Unfortunatly these appear on widescreen-only DVD's, so most the time they're just preaching to the choir. The Pearl Harbor one is even a hidden easter egg! WTF?? How does that help people??

I just point all the naysayers to the Widescreen Advocacy website. The comparison pics speak for themselves. I've yet to see someone take a look at the differences and then still go with widescreen. Its not that people are stupid, just ignorant; most have no idea of what the differences are, and when they finally are educated they see the error of their ways. I remember back in the day before DVD when i had to seek out special Widescreen edition VHS tapes (which were very rare and very overpriced) and the clerks would always say "you do know these are widescreen right?"--as if there was something wrong with me! Idiots.

Vertigo1 · Post by **Vertigo1** » 2003-10-23 03:26pm

You loose bitrate, yeah. However you don't really notice the difference unless you're watching it on a HDTV capable TV.....or its down so low that it looks like its 256 colors. (like some eps of Stargate SG-1 because they cram 5 eps to a single DVD)

neoolong · Post by **neoolong** » 2003-10-23 03:42pm

Vertigo1 wrote:
neoolong wrote:One of the problems is when companies only release it in fullscreen, even though it was shot for widescreen. Not that often, but it has happened.

The concept of putting both formats in single package makes the price go up, or you lose extras. I'd rather not see that happen and just have two different formats.
Not always. Sometimes they're put on a second disk. This was done with the Lion King DVD as well as Shrek and Ice Age.

Which makes the price go up, like I said. What's cheaper, one disc or two discs?

zombie84 · Post by **zombie84** » 2003-10-23 03:45pm

I can notice the difference. Anyone with a trained eye can, anyone who watches a lot of movies and anyone who is a film buff, which is what the DVD is supposed to be for. Compression problems are the biggest challenge when transferring a film to DVD. DVD wasnt created because of its convienience for the fullscreen whores, it was created for its picture quality. I can always spot a bad transfer; now that excellent transfers like LOTR and Indiana Jones are so common the bad ones stand out like a sore thumb. I'm enthusiastically willing to sacrifice a few megabytes for commentary tracks but to cut the amount of disk space in half because of a pan n scan transfer is unacceptable. Even on 13 inch monitors you can spot the difference in quality--bleeding colours, edge enhancement, digital artifacting, lower detail...sometimes its not so bad but when you consider the total unnecessarity of it, its really unacceptable.

Vertigo1 · Post by **Vertigo1** » 2003-10-23 04:03pm

Thats odd because Ice Age looks crystal clear, and it has both the FF and WS on the same disk. Granted, the majority of the extras are on the second disk. If its done right, you won't notice the difference, and they don't cost that much more than a single format DVD movie. Like I said, certain DVDs you will notice a difference...like the SG-1 DVDs I previously mentioned.

Spanky The Dolphin · Post by **Spanky The Dolphin** » 2003-10-23 04:36pm

Vertigo1 wrote:
neoolong wrote:One of the problems is when companies only release it in fullscreen, even though it was shot for widescreen. Not that often, but it has happened.

The concept of putting both formats in single package makes the price go up, or you lose extras. I'd rather not see that happen and just have two different formats.
Not always. Sometimes they're put on a second disk. This was done with the Lion King DVD as well as Shrek and Ice Age.

And you still feel ripped off, because they're not really "two-disc sets," but more truthfully "one-and-a-half-disc sets".

neoolong · Post by **neoolong** » 2003-10-23 04:42pm

Vertigo1 wrote:Thats odd because Ice Age looks crystal clear, and it has both the FF and WS on the same disk. Granted, the majority of the extras are on the second disk. If its done right, you won't notice the difference, and they don't cost that much more than a single format DVD movie. Like I said, certain DVDs you will notice a difference...like the SG-1 DVDs I previously mentioned.

Ice Age was 81 minutes long. It's a lot easier to put both formats in for a short movie without suffering to much loss than it is for a longer one. And live action movies tend to be longer than animated/CG ones.

Spanky The Dolphin · Post by **Spanky The Dolphin** » 2003-10-23 04:43pm

That and I think CGI and animation are often easier to compress than live action, but last time I heard, the verdict was still out on the issue.

neoolong · Post by **neoolong** » 2003-10-23 04:46pm

Spanky The Dolphin wrote:That and I believe that CGI and animation are often easier to compress than live action...

Yeah, I think that's true too. But I haven't seen anything to confirm that. I thought of using bitrate, but I don't know if that would work to check.

zombie84 · Post by **zombie84** » 2003-10-23 06:02pm

CG doesnt have the detail and depth of reality so theres less information to compress. Especially a film like Ice Age with its fairly flat style and monocrhromatic colour scheme. An 81 minute simple CG film is much easier than a rich, live action 120 minute film.

Vertigo1 · Post by **Vertigo1** » 2003-10-24 12:21am

Spanky The Dolphin wrote:And you still feel ripped off, because they're not really "two-disc sets," but more truthfully "one-and-a-half-disc sets".

Actually, I feel more ripped off when I get DVDs like the SG-1 disks with atleast parts of 1 episode looking like shit.....

neoolong · Post by **neoolong** » 2003-10-24 02:46am

Part of the problem is that tv transfers are usually worse than films.

The other is that they stick so much on a disc to lower the number of discs. Lowering the price.

StarDestroyer.Net BBS

Widescreen or Fullscreen?

Do you prefer Widescreen or Full screen editions?