Posted on 12/06/2004 11:15:57 AM PST by ambrose
A plea: Avoid full screen DVDs
THE "Spider-Man 2" people sent me a "full screen" copy of their snazzy blockbuster. Glass half full: It's always nice to be remembered, especially with one of the year's best films and one of the all-time great comic-book adaptations.
Glass completely empty: I hate full screen. It's like watching only part of a movie. If paintings were presented in full screen, a Mona Lisa close-up would lack ears. Or she would appear with only half a smile.
I exaggerate, but that's my job, and you get the idea.
Most DVDs let you choose between full screen or widescreen. Some give you both options of the same disc, one on either side. Others, such as "Spider-Man 2," insist you purchase one or the other. Buyer's remorse gets you no sympathy in this business. Choose widescreen.
On standard TVs, compressed widescreen, aka letterbox, versions play across the middle of the screen. Horizontal black bands appear above and below the picture.
Reportedly, many people find the black bands annoying so they opt for full screen, which is also known as pan and scan. Pan and scan is a crime against nature. Carrying the warning, "Formatted to fit your TV screen," pan and scan fills the entire screen.
But to do so, it must cut out slices of the original images the filmmaker worked so hard to create. Often, so much of the picture is trimmed that the fragmented leftovers look like visual noise.
In "Spider-Man 2," for instance, rather than the Web-slinger swinging gracefully across vast cityscapes, he appears hemmed in by narrow passageways as he swings back and forth like a repressed pendulum. Oh, the inhumanity. When Spidey and evil Doc Ock face each other in the same frame, you sometimes get half of Doc Ock addressing half of Spidey.
This is not a horror film, but it could be. At times the camera pans from one character to the other instead of allowing you to see both at the same time.
That's not the worst sin in the universe but it comes close, especially if you view movies as art.
So let somebody else watch full-screen versions; you deserve better and so do the movies.
Buyer be aware ... If you are hunting for the perfect DVD for a holiday gift, take a peek at the Home Theater compilation of "The top 100 DVDs of all time, with a new attitude." The list was printed in the August 2004 edition of the glossy.
I'll give you the top choice in each category. You can chase down the rest on www.hometheatermag.com
Best music DVD was "The Beatles Anthology." Best TV on DVD, "Freaks and Geeks: The Complete Series Limited Edition."
"The Alien Quadrilogy" was No. 1 under best extras. "Finding Nemo" earned the top slot under best video, meaning clearest image. "Saving Private Ryan DTS" was picked as best audio.
"The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring Special Extended DVD Edition" and "The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers Special Extended DVD Edition" were chosen Nos. 1 and 2, respectively, in best overall DVDs.
Keep in mind that the selections were made prior to the release of "The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King Special Extended DVD Edition." The latter comes out Dec. 14.
Around the Bay ... Five films by San Francisco residents will be screened at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival, which runs Jan. 20-30 in Park City, Utah.
Announced last week, the selections include three features in the documentary competition: "The Fall of Fujimori" by Ellen Perry, "The Devil and Daniel Johnston" by Henry Rosenthal and "Romantico" by Mark Becker.
"Ballets Russes," a documentary by Dan Geller and Dayna Goldfine, will be shown in the noncompetitive "special screenings" division. "The Joy of Life," an experimental film by Jenni Olson, will play in the noncompetitive "frontiers" section.
Name that film ... Don V. wants to know the name of an old "farcical comedy." Here's what he remembers; The scene is a bishop's or priest's residence office. "The featured actor (Woody Allen?) is there to make some kind of request," Don writes. "The bishop's housekeeper, way up in age, is bringing them coffee(?), and it takes forever; she is a very slow walker, and she suffers from an extreme case of flatulence but doesn't know it because she is also deaf. Ring a bell?"
Maybe. Any of you know? Call or write; you know the drill.
DVD spotlight ... The December glut begins with an eclectic array.
"The Bourne Supremacy" should satisfy those in the mood for bloodletting and blurry car chases shot with hand-held cameras. The all-action, no-substance sequel to the superior "The Bourne Identity" plays better on the small screen than on the big. And Matt Damon succeeds for the a second time (eat your heart out, Ben Affleck) as troubled, amnesiac assassin Jason Bourne. Extras include a feature titled "Blowing Things Up."
Its goofiness is the raison d'etre for the Vince Vaughn-Ben Stiller comedy "Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story." Any movie built around adults playing competitive dodgeball can find a spot in my house. The disc includes a blooper reel.
"Matrix" junkies will no doubt drool over the more than 35 hours of extras included in the 10-disc "The Ultimate Matrix Collection." Isolate them from the rest of the people at your party.
Out Tuesday on DVD ... "Anacondas: The Hunt for the Blood Orchid," "Bandit Queen," "The Bourne Supremacy," "The Complete Pluto (Volume One)," "Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story," "The Girl from Paris," "Hermitage Masterpieces," "Hi, Mom!," "How to Steal a Million," "Infernal Affairs," "Julia Child! America's Favorite Chef" and "The Love Machine."
Also: "Maria Full of Grace" (with best-actress possibility Catalina Sandino Moreno), "The Mickey Mouse Club (Week One)," "Mickey Mouse in Black and White (Volume Two)," "The Phantom of the Opera" (with Robert Englund), "Smooth Talk," "Species III," "Transfixed," "The Ultimate Matrix Collection," "Wild at Heart Special Edition" (Nicolas Cage meet David Lynch) and "Young Doctors in Love."
Mail your movie-related questions, answers or insights to The Movie Guy, c/o Bay Area Living, 4770 Willow Road, Pleasanton, CA 94588. Faxes can be sent to (925) 416-4874. E-mail The Movie Guy at bcaine@angnewspapers.com or call him at (925) 416-4806.
One more reason to consider "full screen" vs. widescreen. Travel. When you are looking at a handheld DVD player or even one in the backseat of a car (or airplane headrest), it gives the "maximum" size image.
There is no widescreen standard. That 16x9 ratio will still result in black stripes on the top/bottom or left/right side of the screen at times. Some will have their aspect ratios "fudged" to appear to not need letterboxing.
Pioneer pitches LD as "60% sharper" than VHS. LD image quality is roughly comparable to standard 16mm film, VHS is roughly comparable to 8mm film. There are no home video formats comparable to 35mm or 70mm film. The pulse-FM data structure on an LD (unlike ordinary VHS/Beta), is defined to hold all the information present in the composite video signal. Depending on source material and the transfer to disc, LD is above live TV broadcast quality: For NTSC, this is 425 TVL (luminance lines horizontally for 3/4 of the screen width) and about 482 scan lines, compared to 330x482 for broadcast. For PAL, the numbers are 450x560 and 400x560, respectively. Compare this to 240x482 for good VHS (recorded, pre-recorded is probably less). Only recently have Super-VHS approached LD capability, and ED-Beta has gone even further with its resolution of 525x482. Of course, pre-recorded material is not widely available in these VCR formats. Even using S-VHS/ED-Beta to tape off-air still only reaches the 330x482 of the broadcast signal (400x560 in PAL countries).
Also:
NTSC discs: * 2 analog channels (last discs like this were made in the 80's) * 2 analog channels + 2 uncompressed digital channels * 1 analog channel + 2 uncompressed digital channels + 5.1 Dolby Digital channels * 2 analog channels + 5.1 DTS channels PAL discs: * 2 analog channels (last discs like this were made in the 80's) * 2 uncompressed digital channels
Complete FAQ here
Yeah. The fast forward on LD's was much, much better than dvd. And the CLV discs (the ones that were only 1/2 hour per side) had remarkable abilities. I had a disk with something like 50,000 pictures of airplanes. Again, pre-divorce. Never did see them all...
Still, DVD is, much better for lots of practical reasons, not the least of which is size and portability.
Reader's Digest subsribers would beg to differ.
Thanks... but what sold me on the LD format was that it offered letterboxing and digital sound.
And you can now watch an entire movie on DVD without going from side a to side b.
I had some LD's left after the divorce in 1997 and the used record store that sold them then was taking no new movies. None.
It has been in decline for quite a while. It is good as an odity, and nothing more. A few purists will pay big bucks for an original, but Laser Rot will probably take it's toll in the long run.
These things aren't 78's...
You haven't been to ebay lately have you?
Reader's Digest is the 'pan and scan' of the literary world. :-) Somewhere Dr. Bowdler is smiling.
Zoom doesn't seem to work quite that way as even the letterboxing will remain (albeit in something that does not look to be the right ratio).
Zoom should only be used to look at details in a scene (and only if a DVD has adequate compression).
Heh, heh. For me that is a BIGGIE.
I was a big proponent of Laser in the mid-to-late seventies. Seattle was a test market for the original Magnavox machine, and I was the only one in the stereo stores I worked in that sold any quantity. And I myself owned one the minute I had the cash at salesman discount.
But I am pragmatic about it. It's time came and went. There is little it has to offer over DVD. When the DVD was even talked about, I KNEW that laser was dead, dead, dead.
Anybody ever see the movie where pirates find booty and it contains a bunch of laserdisks and one of the pirates says something along the lines of "What good are these? You can't record on them."
That is what we usually got from customers back then. I would then ask them if they had a record player. 8^>
Not every movie collectors want are even available in LD. There have been many recent movies, i.e., LOTR trilogy that isn't offered on LD.
That's why I enjoy both formats. Heck, I even own DVHS that offers both video and sound in the best quality offered for home video today.
Lawrence of Arabia was not meant for television screens.
Some films I will only watch on a movie screen (even though it may be years between screenings).
Blade Runner is among those.
Some need the "size" to work properly. I found suprisingly that even the end sequence to Blake Edwards/Peter Sellers' The Party needs a big screen.
Perhaps home projection will work on some of them. I'll need to bring some to a friend's a try it out.
Collectors don't count...
I think that Fantasia also got cropped in one of the rereleaes.
"There is little it has to offer over DVD."
You underestimate the masses out there who are purists who want titles like the OT of SW or Hamlet. Those are the collectors who are still investing in the format.
Not to open any new can of worms here, but I used to sell RCA "needle in a groove" video disks.
Any comments... 8^>
"Some films I will only watch on a movie screen (even though it may be years between screenings)."
You must be left wanting for a long time...
And there there are the people who just don't understand the difference. "I hate the black bars - why do they put them there?" Grrrrrr.... You'd think now that widescreen TVs and computer monitors are popping up all over the chopped screen crap would actually be disappearing not proliferating.
"Collectors don't count..."
They're the ones with $$$ in their pockets to burn...
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