If I remember the details correctly HBO wanted to do a cut similar to the Netflix one and Simon (and maybe others?) Went back through the entire series and meticulously edited the shots to still have the same meaning / context.
The result by the way is incredible. The Wire is one of my favorite shows of all time anyway, but the fact that you can watch it today in such high quality is a real delight.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZWNGq70Oyo
(edit: already posted in this thread, oops: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28737063)
You can see this in many other early 2000’s shows like TWW.
There's now an option to show the original aspect ratio, I didn't discover it for a long time though.
Amazon prime on my phone blows up 16:9 material too, chopping off the top and bottom to fit the wider aspect ratio, unless you're careful to 'zoom out'
Interesting. I've just checked on my iPhone, and 4:3 video stays 4:3, with black bars on the side.
Only passionate fans or enthusiasts care enough to make sure things are preserved to an acceptable quality. Companies will always do dumb things like change aspect ratio, remove scenes, ship low quality video, audio or subtitles.
Most of my friends laugh at me for still buying physical media, but the reality is I don't trust streaming services, or IP owners in general really. There is no way my kids are growing up thinking that Han didn't shot first.
When I was a kid in the 90's I remember that it was not uncommon to have black-and-white movie recolored to make them look more contemporary. This is arguably an even bigger betrayal of the original artistic vision and I expect done for very much the same reasons.
It's still good.
There is no good argument. Cropping out huge amounts of the actual material is not justifiable. End of story.
Even in cases where nothing too important goes missing, cropped video just looks really off. Oftentimes you'll see the tops of heads cut off at the top of the frame, or small details just on the verge of being visible. If something is framed just off center, the cropped version will show it very off center.
Just look at this shot, for example: https://imgur.com/KKiMbWP - nothing is missing, but the right character's bottom half is completely out of frame and it just looks incredibly weird. The floor also is totally invisible so you lose your sense of grounding.
It's just a complete lack of respect for the hard work that went into creating these shows.
Really, I don't even care about Seinfeld in particular. I've never watched it and I never will, because it's not my type of show.
But this isn't about Seinfeld, and I'm not personally inconvenienced by this or angry about it. I'm saying this because it's just universally a bad idea to cut 4:3 content into 16:9, regardless of what it is. It could the lowest tier commercial garbage or Twin Peaks or anything in between. You will always make things look awkward, and the viewer will subconsciously notice. This goes even for shows that had poor framing to begin. And of course that's not even touching on the fact that, in this case, it actually just ruined a scene by making the most important part invisible.
And personally, I think it's not up to any individual to say "I consider this work to be unworthy of respect" and start messing around with it and diminishing the experience for the people that do care. Someone else might be deeply invested in something you consider completely unremarkable.
What's more, you'd have to expect that some TV shows will end up getting remastered, then cropped, and then the masters get lost before a proper release is ever done. Again, not talking about Seinfeld in particular, but you'd be amazed at how many modern works become lost media even today, and this sort of thing isn't helping.
More seriously I've watched the show multiple times in 16:9 and it's mostly fine but I've always thought the 4:3 scenes on YouTube looked better, so I had some hope we would have the option on Netflix.
Also some people say the new transfer is too dark but I did not notice.
I didn't expect anybody to get the joke. Congratulations ;-)
(Not advocating for cropping, though)
Think of the screen like a wall in your house. You hang a painting on the wall. "Why do they make paintings in all these random sizes instead of filling this wall edge egde? Why? Grrr."
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/seinfeld/comments/17xn28/original_v...
Now I do: The producers filmed the show using equipment that would allow remastering for HDTV.
I remember back in 4:3 when it was far harder to find letterboxed VHS tapes, and when filmmakers often would make sure their scope movies also worked in 4:3 by filming in 4:3 and cropping to scope (with the exception of a few hundred accidentally revealed boom mics.) I have to believe that people would just get angry if they got home and realized that their tape wasn't going to utilize their entire television, so that's how the market shook out. The funny thing about movies from that period mentioned is that really both versions of a film were incomplete.
I also remember my grandparents watching DirectTV streams that were clearly stretched out horizontally on the screen, and how they didn't notice at all. They'd notice black bars.
Now that TVs are somewhere midway between 4:3 and scope, the problem has reversed itself. I've seen it solved by zoom, I've seen it solved by horizontal stretch, I've seen it solved by half-zoom and half-stretch, I've seen it solved by either half-zoom or half-stretch combined with half-black bars, even. Just showing it in 4:3 with black bars on both sides isn't significantly more popular than any of these options. And I have to believe that there's research, because, as this story shows, zooming can be expensive. You can do it automatically, and lose everyone's feet and the tops of their heads (or their whole heads in the right shots), or go over everything manually, moving individual shots that turn out badly up and down in a way that might depend on story. Also reducing the number of vertical scanlines makes old tv look like shit, so you might have to spend effort doing something about that. For that last, you can be saved if the series was shot on film and you have access to original materials...
All of this is good, because it is an impossible problem for industry to solve, therefore it will encourage piracy by purists, and piracy for things that aren't Seinfeld episodes will get a free userbase and attendant infrastructure. Also good for piracy are geoblocking and delayed broadcast times between countries. Here's hoping that the next Game of Thrones-type blockbuster series airs a day later in the UK:)
The funniest thing about 4:3 on 16:9 is that everyone's tv is the size of a bus now, and a black-barred 4:3 picture is certainly going to be a lot larger on those than the LP-sized screens families would have been watching the original broadcasts on.
Maybe the problem is a tv looks like a frame, and frames are made custom to fit the painting, and so any discrepency looks bad.
But now that tv's are both huge, and are featureless panels with little to no interesting frame let alone actual furniture quality cabinetry, maybe only now they can start to be seen as mini walls where it would actually be kind of pathological to require that every pixel always be lit just because they exist.
Just yesterday some folks have been bragging about how Netfilx proactively matches compensation of their emps - great - maybe that's a mistake. Because given how stupid such a decision is, how bad their recommendations are, plus their home grown productions getting worse with every week passing by, I wonder if it isn't time to weed out a little. Seems like this company is a cesspool of ignorance and incompetence...
