how TV screens made watching movies worse

hi the video you're about to watch is rendered entirely in virtual reality i don't know about you but when i'm watching 360 video on a standard display i want to meet god and although a headset is indeed the best way to watch standard viewers needn't worry everything you need to see is contained within this safe cell enjoy the video and remember the alamo a wise guy once said that from the moment home video became a thing every movie had two lives the first at the theater and the second much longer one at home for better or worse for as long as there's been a difference between watching movies on the big screen and the little boy there's been a discourse a conflict you might say over which is the best way to watch videos at home actually should this cool jpeg fit the screen or fill the screen how big should it be what size of the screen should be even is he behind you oh not anymore should the media adapt to the medium or should the medium adapt to the media and at what point does artistic merit become more or less valuable than accessibility i thought this was going to be a pretty easy video just slapped together tidy over for the halo video three months later i don't even know if i'm sneezing on the surface of this shit what was supposed to be a fun little filler video about the quirky black bars on the screen is like morphed into this tangled mess of ideas and concepts conflicting ideologies on accessibility and artistic merit expression versus limitations screen sizes theaters vr remasters that make things worse zack snyder pixar movies getting re-rendered 30 years of heated debate between consumers distributors directors movie rental stores my dad and most of their opinions are fucking stupid the kicker is that a lot of the problems we're dealing with today are the exact same ones we were dealing with 40 years ago before i was so much as a cum in 1904 most people's screens were not only the size of an amoeba but they were also very square this was good and cool and then there was vhs suddenly movies meant for massive screens that engulfed viewers would have much longer second life people's homes with tiny screens fuzzy video and crap sound if you are old and gay happy pride month in advance you may remember this being a pretty huge point of disagree from the 80s onward from indiana jones and the last crusade it's expected to be one of the all-time home video best sellers but when spielberg requested it be released in the widescreen or letterbox format paramount protested they said there was resistance to letterboxing from video dealers and from the general public the thing i really want to emphasize here is that screen sizes were for the most part treated as an inherent limitation movies were made for the theater first and the tape the only way many people would ever experience the thing second for the longest time you didn't have a choice you got what you got and what you got was usually pen and scan a busted up fan edit of the movie that actually played in theaters here let me show you what i mean here's a shot from bus it's a pretty standard medium shot like it like it's a bit tight but decent enough it fits in both characters i am lying to you [Music] this was a lie [Music] here's what it actually looked like dude got cropped out of a movie he was in let's look at both versions at the same time by splitting our own screen notice that in the letterbox version you see both actors all the time but in the cropped or pandan scanned version below you see either connery or harrison ford one actor is always missing and so is the dynamic of the two of them looking at each other during the whole scene these aren't like you know really offensive examples this was the standard moments like these were constantly being lost in the conversion from one format to the other what's less obvious though is how much the pacing and framing are negatively affected too i talked to steven spielberg recently about letterboxing and he was feeling fairly frustrated he says that panning and scanning where they take the widescreen picture and look at first part of it and then another part of it that that turns long shots into medium shots and medium shots into close-ups and it puts cuts where he didn't have any cuts and it still gets worse directors cinematographers animators not youtubers cameramen they all put lots of thought into shot composition you know it's not just what you show that makes a picture nice to look at is how you show it and in the same way that cropping out a character leaves you with less information cropping out half a scene leaves you with less balance it look bad pan and scan is dumb and stupid but for me the worst part of it is that it was an issue that for me the worst part of it is that it became an issue of accessibility it was basically impossible to experience movies properly outside the movie theater there was a set amount of time you could see any film the way it was intended to be seen and when that opportunity went away it was gone for 20 plus years the only remaining option being to watch a mangled butchered version of it on your very cool but also probably bad tv i look i know this is a bad time but i gotta piss here just watch this hi if you're watching this it means i had to take a piss last week i got so angry that i killed my roommate cold blood second degree why most extreme primate was unavailable to watch thankfully my neighborhood is now safe thanks to private internet access vpn using advanced network computers across the globe pia masks your true ip and allows me to browse the web from anywhere i want japan mexico friend no friend not france but like i could go there just really don't want to many vpns today feature a questionable marketing tactic that i like to call lies compare this to pia who's got their whole ass source code on display it gets this is genuinely cool good program good service one of the only vpns i actually trust they didn't pay me to say that part it's just true here's how to order visit www.privateinternetaccess.com forward slash noodle visit now to order your copy of private internet access vpn for less than two dollars a month and four extra months completely free click now hey thanks for waiting eventually as it became clear that this wasn't going to stop some shows and movies would begin to make both widescreen and full screen versions in-house instead of it being handled by the paper cup in the office manufactured in china 1986 preserved in time by me currently located peace district park austin texas coordinates 3028 negative 97 75 check it out most common was a technique called shoot and protect which which is where you make the thing in one ratio like with michael ogre here but keep everything you need inside a safe zone so that when it's inevitably cropped nobody misses out on anything important this is smart but it is also fucking suck because it means that nobody framing these shots had the ability to take full advantage of either ratio leading to shots like this that are full of negative space for no reason or this where edward donkey makes a joke about something that's not it's not on the screen yet yeah and there's that bush that's shaped like shirley bassey we passed that bush three times already now pixar they had the coolest solution they weren't content to just pan scan or protect we developed in-house a whole suite of tools and a whole system for for getting the film onto video in a way that we're all happy with we don't feel we've made any compromises after finishing the theatrical version they went back and decided shot for shot how to completely reformat everything on screen whether to zoom in zoom out pan and scan or even just move characters around to make every shot work it's so cool movies made this way were truly the perfect solution neither accessibility nor artistic merit were sacrificed everyone could be sure that no matter how they chose to watch they weren't just getting all the information they needed but they were getting an experience taylor made for their setup regardless of what it was we are so proud of a bug's life on video because you are going to see a bug's life the way we intended it oh yeah i think you got something there let me let me just [Music] you now have piss ear in case you were born yesterday happy birthday it goes without saying nowadays that there are a lot less limitations to factor in tvs today are shaped in the 16x9 ratio this is a compromise it sits between both extremes and so you don't gotta shrink anything too much to fit it properly picture and sound have improved a whole lot being able to count the pores on doug walker's face is now normal and most of us have grown used to the letterboxing and pillar boxing of anything that's not a video game we have learned our lesson [Music] you may remember the recent controversy surrounding the simpsons released on disney plus which was vertically panned and scanned on release this was a genuinely awful way to watch the show there were several jokes that were just straight up cut out of the frame fans made such a big stinky about it in the socials that disney ended up creating a feature that allows you to actually choose which version you'd rather see less fortunate is seinfeld for a number of reasons another show produced entirely in 4x3 the latest release currently on netflix was upscaled to 4k for some reason and panning scanned across the board again jokes were just missing and again this elicited a reaction big enough online to make headlines as far as i can tell netflix has yet to even acknowledge it a lot of old stuff on a modern display should be so simple and and yet here we are with robin hood in case it gets more fucked up the more you know about it the whole movie was animated in 4x3 right but no not really they had a safe zone of 16x9 because when it played in theaters they chopped off the top and bottom i'm pretty sure it was like this because that's just how projectors work back then movies came to the theater in 4x3 because that's just how they were shot and the cropping happened physically by matting the top and bottom of the projector lens but what you ended up with here were countless home video releases that were actually zoomed out compared to their theatrical cuts by the way when robin hood came out this was the average tv size the cherry on top is that even though the dvd copy is also in 4x3 it says on the back and fine print that this version is presented in its original theatrical ratio which we have just established to be demonstrably false i read this and thought i was an insane man so when i saw that the hd remaster of the thing for blu-ray and disney plus was released in 1.67 by one i asked my local psych ward if they take visa so like it's it's cropped right but not all the way cropped it's zoomed in but it's not the full 16x9 people saw in theaters it's it's neither why would you do this you know you can make an argument for this or this being the right way to watch it i'm really glad that disney decided that the only option for people today was neither fuck you probably the weirdest and most confusing part of all of this is imax this is unfortunately the part where i have to talk about justice league dino i'm sorry for those underneath rocks justice league is a re-release of the movie justice league directed by zack snyder and released in good old 4x3 i could be wrong on this but what i think a lot of people missed about this whole shenanigan is why snyder chose a stupid shape for his movie he doesn't just like boxes in truth the reason that this thing was made this way is because it was specifically made for imax theaters now there were a lot of limax theaters out there but true imax is actually really interesting mostly due to technical shit that boils down to it look at it sound good but there is one thing they can do that no other theater can they can actually expand their ratio from ultra wide all the way into 1.43 which is almost 4x3 snyder saw the size of a true imac screen in the theater and screamed hamanhamona awuga then shot and came which is understandable i would never do such a thing but you must admit screen do be large long story short the imax experience of such an impression on all zack that he decided to produce an entire movie for these screens which is a genuinely cool idea and one that i'm not opposed to in theory here's a catch of the nearly 6 000 movie theaters currently operating in the us less than 30 are full frame imax theaters snyder had effectively created a movie that less than one percent of his audience would ever see the way he actually intended the rest of us are joss whedon's justice league we all lost but some of us chose to lose twice imac's done poorly isn't a new thing either transformers 5 is a nauseating movie to watch partially because it changes ratio almost every cut partially because i have yet to watch it sober what you got to understand though is that these are outliers the standard good approach to filming for multiple ratios in the theater was actually established by one of the first movies ever to do it the dark knight yeah i am a film enthusiast and yeah i am white here's how the movie opened in imax [Music] chris noland north's movies even when they're released on blu-ray have a bit of a habit of occasionally inflating like this but only to as far as a standard tv would allow the same thing that you'd see in any imax theater that can't do a whole ass floor-to-ceiling projection this is not a perfect solution but all expanded scenes were shot to protect and so even a completely cropped version is still always properly framed and totally watchable unlike dune which got fucked up director dennis says his movie was designed to be seen in imax he's all about the physical size of the thing factoring into the language of the film which you know makes sense considering the subject matter but again how many people are ever gonna actually have a chance to see it that way the only way to watch dune right now is fully cropped no matter if you're streaming it or own it physically whatever now that the movie's out of theaters the only way to watch this thing the way the creator truly intended is to go back in time you know it's cool it is it's cool that filmmakers are finding new ways to push cool shit out they ass but is it worth it if only a privileged few are ever going to be able to see that work at its best this is a really complicated question to answer and everyone's going to have their own response but for me the most important thing is that more people have the opportunity to see movies like doom the way their creators intended which at the moment is impossible unless this you are wearing a potential solution maybe hopefully vr that's why this whole video has been like this it's the only way i could properly show you the size depth and scale of what i've been talking about watching a movie has always been an experience limited by your environment but when your environment can be anything you want the only limits become your budget your time comfort level mass adoption distribution pixel density sound quality and the fucking sky dude i know it's it's not a practical solution but if headsets keep getting better like they have been lately i can see them being a great way to watch stuff in the near future in the meantime it just bothers me that i'm being told left and right that the ideal way to watch things i really like are just completely unattainable in the past i've ranted about how much i believe artistic intent to be paramount like the company and i mostly still agree with that sentiment but if there's one thing even more important to me than being able to watch things the way god intended is being able to decide for yourself which way is best for you this ties into something mr weird director scott derrickson said about disney's recent joints to let people watch imac's versions of marvel movies at home interestingly he never intended for the expanded version of his movie to be seen outside the theaters because as he puts it you'll inevitably be observing the frame whereas in theaters you're almost inside it at the end of the day though what i appreciate the most about this is where he lands at the end i'm not bothered that disney gives viewers the option i just said that it wasn't my intention if people want to watch it that way that's up to them for as much as i despise disney plus as a concept and for as much of a nightmare as the gaming side of all of this is at least both of these give people options access to whichever version they want to see i don't think that's too much to ask of most media [Music] hey you may have noticed i didn't talk about videos of game i i tried to but this thing was such a fucking nightmare to write that i decided it'd be better to give its own little dlc video alongside the concept of aspect ratios as a form of expression and other pretentious shit expect that soon halo video is still coming [Music] you

Channel: Noodle

Views: 1,253,492

Keywords:

Id: wlUV6y5TUko

Length: 18min 30sec (1110 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 19 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/johnnymetoo]

Never seen a YouTube video before that responds to your phone's gyro sensors.

[u/pine_ary]

I really like the use of VR. Makes it feel like a conversation. This is fresh af

[u/_Js_Kc_]

How about just following a goddamn standard? Shoot 16:9, make theaters 16:9. Barring that, letterboxing is obviously the right solution, not cropping and panning.

[u/_Neoshade_]

There’s a single, simple solution to this that works for all movies and TV ever made: LEAVE IT ALONE!!!
Todays screens all have a computer behind them, whether it’s a TV, phone, tablet or PC. Do NOT crop the video. Do NOT put black bars on the sides or the top, do NOT reformat into a different size, just do nothing! When someone plays the video, simply allow them to chose the zoom-level themselves on their playback device. TVs have been capable of this for years. Adjusting the zoom to fit to the width or the height of the screen should be standard on any device. On YouTube, you just pinch in or out. On my TV, there’s a button for it.
If you leave the original video alone, then why viewer or venue can choose for themselves how to present it. Problem solved.
There’s only one hitch that I can see, and that is making zoom behavior universal on all devices and platforms, and allowing the intended aspect ratio/zoom level to be saved as metadata so that your TV or phone’s video player will load the best format by default. A single software update for any non-compliant devices/apps could have this sorted out by next week.

[u/norieeega]

TL;dw?

[u/vndifj]

does anyone know the name of the dance songs noodle uses for the transitions? i know the first one is DKC the rest no clue