LaserDisc: You’re Watching It Wrong

you're watching your L DS wrong well not you and you're okay you seem to know what you're doing but the rest of you you're watching them our own [Music] you may or may not be familiar with the running aspect ratio police a gag on pages like laser is forever on Facebook but regardless of the aspect ratio police there are a ton of people out there distorting images pulling them like taffy of older standard definition videos on their modern HD TVs and ironically there are a number of those standard definition sources sources that are also widescreen or letterboxd like a lot of these lasers behind me releases that were specifically designed to keep image purity and composition of films in mind so I did a video not too long ago all about laserdisc audio and that was one of the you know topics that people ask me about a lot but apart from a few others that we're going to get into shortly one of the other major topics that people ask me to talk about and I've been thinking about making this video for ages but just haven't got around to focusing on it but the topic is laserdisc aspect ratio and and what that means and why it's a problem and why it's become kind of such a hot-button issue because of all of the laserdisc topics have discussed this is the most controversial this is the one that can turn internet threads into war zones and it's people take this one a little bit more personally so get ready we're gonna talk about aspect ratio so there are a number of factors at play here a lot dealing with old standard definition video including people not knowing what four-to-three is so we're gonna talk more about that laser discs themselves pushing the boundaries of what four to three was people misinterpreting the widescreen written on their latest jackets to be something indicative of their television set and not something else there was the HDTV transition particularly on cable that trained viewers to become used to seeing funhouse imagery on screens and people becoming less and less comfortable with physically adjusting their TVs as TVs get smarter and they actually require less interaction and then of course there's the HD TVs that don't have the proper capabilities to watch your laserdisc correctly so more on that later and of course the big one which is people fetish sizing their TVs and of course television is a wild luxury that revolutionized how people experience filmed content and they can experience it in their homes like it's a major step forward but a lot of people forget that it is a screen and a screen is important to the art but it's also there to serve the art as a tool and as people started worshipping their TVs like the ape started worshipping the monolith in 2001 a Space Odyssey soon the tool became more important than the art panning and scanning became preferable because it filled the entire screen every inch of which you paid for with your hard-earned dollars so in terms of pan and scan you know the art was being mutilated to fit the screen like the Mona Lisa being turned into a proper square because you don't have a frame that's rectangular enough to hook show the full image but a screen is just a screen it's a blank canvas yeah you shouldn't cry followed because you're not using all of it at all times you don't cry about the rinds and the seeds that don't make their way into the orange juice actually you press and squeeze oranges you're not mad that there aren't more seeds and stems floating around and your wine as you're drinking it so the the art being forced to serve the tool is a factor that plays into a number of home-video aspects from panning and scanning to of course stretching which we're going to get into but first we need to talk shapes for a bit let's start with this one I fill my videos in 16 to 9 but back in the day a lot of cinema releases and old television of course shared this common shape 1.33 2 1 films were later revised to the very similar academy standard of 1.37 2 1 they did it to add space for the film soundtrack etc and that that's like another video in and of itself but in any case it means that no matter what the height of the images the width will always be 1 point 37 times that number this ratio of width to height is called the film's aspect ratio cinema fought back by bringing about a wider experience in theater so over time there have become a number of aspect ratios but here in the states the most common are you know I'm not gonna talk about this division and all sorts of ultra Panavision 70 all sorts of other things so yeah don't don't worry we're just gonna focus on the most common aspect ratios and we'll save you know talking about 70-millimeter and all sorts of other things for another video altogether because aspect ratios is just a mineshaft you can never get out of but here in the states he hasn't mentioned the most common ones are the OG 1.30 7 to 1 so 1.37 times wider than it is tall then there's a variant of that called Academy standard flat which is using that same filming technique but then adding mats in the theater usually putting a little mask in front of the projector adding mats in the top and bottom to make a wider widescreen composition most of the time that was one point 85 to 1 so it would be 1 point 85 times wider than it is tall but there could be any number of different variations depending on country some countries went with like one point 66 to one and sometimes any solution in between those was considered a viable screening presentation but one point 85 to 1 in the States here is or was the most common of the matted widescreen ratios and it was just a little bit wider than one point 78 to 1 which is HDTV or 16 to 9 it's just a little bit wider than TVs and the third most common is anamorphic 2.35 - one which is also known as Panavision CinemaScope and there's a bunch of different terms that have been used to represent that and then also sometimes that's referenced as 2.39 to one or 2.40 the one because with 2.35 - one sometimes these splices at the top and bottom of the the image were a little too visible so theaters sometimes would know mask that a little bit to hide those places but so those three ratios 1.33 to one or 1.37 to one 1.85 to one and 2.35 to one are the most common here in the states for especially for traditional film and then everything's gonna get wilder and once we move into digital but thankfully with laserdisc we're mostly talking about film old-school film old-school aspect ratios and in the perfect world which wasn't always the case but theaters would be set up for a constant height situation in which the one in those ratios the 1.37 to one the 2.35 to one the one would always be a constant would be a certain height it would be the height of the screen that you're projecting on so the screen itself would be as wide as 2.35 to one and then as you showed say a matted movie at one point 85 to 1 curtains on the side would close in and the screen you wouldn't be seeing as much of the screen because the height would still be the same and then if you were showing an older movie that was like Casablanca or something the curtains would move in even more for a closer to a square situation and still rectangular but it's more square-ish so then conversely as you know you would watch yeah an older movie and then you know watch some old trailers or something like that and then a Panavision movie would start it would be magnificent the curtains would open up and the image would get huger wider and bigger so if you were watching an older film say again like Casablanca Citizen Kane or something if the screen was 10 feet high the width would be one point three seven times that so it would be thirteen point seven feet wide and then if you're watching Batman Returns it'd be eighteen point five feet wide and then if you're watching Blade Runner it'd be you know twenty three point five feet wide so it just kept getting wider and bigger television is fixed at one boy in 33 to one at least vintage television before we got into HD TVs so that in order to show the composition of a film properly it created some problems because the constant hype scenario was completely out the window because of this fixed ratio of a television screen 1.33 to one when you're trying to show the proper composition of a film on it the only solution was to make the one change and keep the width of it constant so no matter if you're watching 2.35 two one films or 1.85 dawuan the width of the TV screen is always going to be the same they're always going to fill the screen from edge to edge what changes is the one so in this case as the film gets wider it gets narrower and you actually get less detail hence letterboxing which is the term for adding redundant black bars to the unused portions of the image on the top and bottom and then the thin rectangular image left usually if you're looking at like a 2.35 to one film in the center of your screen it kind of looked like the rectangular litter box opening that you pump letters into it the litter box on your street corner it was a pretty cool solution and you know CDs did it and laserdisc ran with that ball especially thanks to people like The Criterion Collection previously we had employed either those films that were shot with mats that I mentioned before you either take those mats off or you know slightly zoom the image and that was a pretty easy solution but when you had the wider films like the 2.35 to one scope films you had a pan and scan those so you had to focus on 1.33 to one subsection of that wide image and move it around to follow the subjects of the narrative as it went so that was considered the solution for watching wide features on television for a long time James Cameron liked to call that image triage because yes your lopping off extensive portions of the imagery and in this case it's not the orange rind this is the the portion of the imagery that you're supposed to see yeah that's all part of the composition and it'll balance the image etc so the downside as I mentioned before is that the television screen has a fixed amount of those horizontal TV lines so as you're going smaller and smaller to create these wide images you're using less and less of the televisions whereas solution so you can see far fewer like closer facial details etc in those really wide films and then you get an even beyond normal scope films when you get into stuff like you know Ben Hur etc it starts looking like this thin kind of little strip in the center of your television so it definitely paid to have a bigger tube TV back in the day or a projection CRT TV when those were a big deal so yeah I mean later boxing was primarily a laserdisc thing as television and many VHS tapes were presented in four to three panet scans for two three is just another way of saying 1.30 three two one it's the same it's the same dimensions if you multiply one into three and then you multiply them 1.30 three times three you also get roughly four so it just becomes four to three it's a lot easier to say like why is 16 290 BS are also 1.78 to one so you can adjust the ratio with mathematics as much as you want or as little as you want but yes everything was presented in quote/unquote full frame four to three except for a laserdisc which did lazy just did have a lot of four to three content and pennants can releases and very similar and television shows obviously too but especially after you know The Criterion Collection started picking up steam more studios got involved in letterboxing and it started to kind of become a thing for die-hard film buffs and cine ass and so laserdisc was the format of choice for those people so when hgtv family rolled around and i mentioned before it's 16:9 or 1.78 to one it's a different composition than older TVs so a whole new series of problems arose because of that especially if you wanted to show older films and older television shows on 16 to 9 because those old dimensions didn't match the box anymore so you had a couple options you had a leave those dimensions alone and place tall black or sometimes gray as some TVs feared that putting bars on the side of your image and leaving them there static for a while would create burn-in but anyways you would put some tall black or gray bars to the sides of the original image and that was called pillarboxing or you could be take that four-to-three image and just pull it side to side until the entire thing fills a 16 to nine frame which now results in the characters of that film or TV show looking short and fat and some clever nude mix conceived options see the panorama stretch which keeps the center of the image the same but pulls the sides even harder under the assumption that whatever you're filming will be centered within the frame so the subject will look normal but if he suddenly or she suddenly moves to the right or it goes to the left of the screen you can watch their heads just get torn apart and as I mentioned before a byproduct of you know and then almost an entire generation of people becoming accustomed to watching mutated friends the television show and other shows you know Seinfeld's etc just stretched kingdom come they got so accustomed to that that their eyes were becoming trained to accept distorted imagery as a perfectly suitable option and many LD enthusiasts will still watch their discs on the old four-to-three TVs you know they're still pretty popular in retro circles but this time marches on more and more people are using their players on newer television sets which again creates some problems in terms of compatibility you know signal compatibility is just one thing alone you know making sure that this new DMI enabled television set can handle the RCA jack or maybe s-video signal coming out of your old laserdisc player but assuming that's not an issue and you can just plug in place a maybe you've got an old yellow RCA jack N or you're using the the green jack from your TV so you can connect the player right away it's not always plug and play and TVs have become smart now but the smarter they become the less prone we are to tinkering with them and wanting to get involved in settings and changing things cuz I mean you can go out right now and get a UHD player and a high speed HDMI cable plug that into your TV and boom you're done you're gonna get sound and picture one cable and it's probably gonna be your TV's gonna be pretty much calibrated pretty well out of the box it might be a little bit too bright or whatever but it's probably gonna look good and you're just gonna keep on rolling so yes it will work and you don't need to know why and so that becoming the norm creates all these other unfavorable scenarios like the people I know who think that HD means everything looks weird because of the so-called soap opera effect which is you know another video altogether also known as motion smoothing etc it's the technology that's named a million different things and different TVs that makes your filmed content look like cheap soap operas so hence the soap opera effect and people just feel powerless to deactivate that feature or don't even know it exists and then they just slowly grow to accept that North by Northwest looks like the guiding light because their TV tells them that so likewise there are a lot of TVs that will accept legacy inputs you know things from old VCRs and laserdisc players etc but they will also do what they want with that signal so if you hook it up and then you throw in a laserdisc player that's four to three or 1.33 to one old television size your new TV is just gonna take that signal and pull it side to side until it fills the entire 16:9 screen it'll just pull it side to side that's what I like to call taffy vision how do you defeat taffy vision you have to do something as I mentioned before back in the day people used to actually use their televisions you had vertical and horizontal hold VHF UHF dial all sorts of knobs and things like that you had to get up and you know tweak it if the picture was going out of whack but the more our TVs do for us the more and more we start sliding closer to those big giant blobs from wall-e and we're kind of helpless against our televisions wishes but in order to correctly watch old four-to-three content on HDTV you more than likely have to do something just like when your LP you drop on please at 45 rpm and every one sounds like chip mocks you have to turn a dial when your fridge freezes your fruit and your so does you you know change the temperature setting and your car starts driving away on you drop it into park there are things you have to do to adjust your expectations of that tool and you're gonna have to get involved in ways beyond turning on the power and switching the input all right so that's that's the bad news and apart from that general reticence from people to adjust their TVs and people having already been trained to accept things like motion smoothing a lot of people are just gonna accept or tolerate the stretched imagery if they notice it as just that's what old stuff looks like on HD TVs they'll know what's wrong but they'll be like well that's just how it looks now the people that don't know what's wrong that are just you aren't really successful old and noticing that people have been turned into short fat people you know perhaps they've already been assimilated into accepting that sort of imagery before as I mentioned during that transition from standard-definition times and HD times when cable would just constantly bombard people with Taffy vision and then you know if they're gonna maybe question it they look at their laser disc and it says widescreen right on it so here's part of the problem that white screen on the laserdisc it's not talking about your television it's telling you it's talking about the film that's on the boys at risk it's saying that that film was theatrically shown wider than an old school 1.30 to 3 to 1 or 4 to 3 television and that it has been letterboxed on the laserdisc for 4 to 3 televisions to preserve that film's original widescreen composition it's not talking about your TV sorry it also doesn't help that different studios would label that technology differently some people would say widescreen some people would say deluxe some people would say litter box some people would say deluxe letterbox you know all these different kind of terms thrown at it to sound cool and they didn't always match and this is also led to the misbelief that widescreen discs mean something and letterbox discs mean something else some think that only 2.35 to the one films are labeled as widescreen and 1.85 to one films or labeled as letterbox now it sits on a Studio to studio basis nobody wants to call it the same thing twice because there yea studios so if you're watching old stuff like VHS tapes on a new TV it's it's a weird situation because it pulls everything like taffy but when you're getting involved in widescreen laser discs it gets even a little weirder because if you're watching something that's like an old television show it's gonna fill it side to side filling the entire screen and there are tons of laser just out there they're just gonna be the same those old TV shows and pan and scan titles etc but then you're gonna throw on Star Wars and in order to watch that stuff before 2 3 stuff on a new TV you're just gonna have to find your television controls if they have them they will have aspect ratio control sometimes it'll be labeled a wide mode or zoom or aspect or something like that what's what's this say this remote says aspect so there's it changes from manufacturer to manufacturer so you need to find that chances are if you don't have any zoom features which we're gonna get into in a bit you can hopefully at least have a four to three mode because at least televisions know that some people are gonna be watching some old junk on them at some point and it's pretty simple to have a four to three mode implemented than a television but you just have to find that choice so in any case if you find one of those options you find four to three you select it and then BAM suddenly the proportions are correct and there's black or gray bars on either side of the image to correctly fill the entire 16 to nine frame as I mention before here's where things get wonky when you watch letterbox or widescreen LEDs you're suddenly encountering a product that was specifically designed to preserve cinematic composition and designed for old TVs only and apart from a handful of squeeze or in markedly enhanced discs widescreen L DS are still four to three so now you're watching your widescreen star wars you hit that four to three button your TV still adds those bars those pillar box bars to the right and left of the image but the source material your laserdisc your widescreen laserdisc also has black bars burned into the top and bottom of its image so now you've got what we call window boxing because your image is now a little window and it's boxed in on all four sides and window boxing is a totally acceptable solution because even though you've now got a rectangular image floating within the confines of the rectangular screen of your HDTV at least the compositions of that floating image are correct and on a lot of modern sets with super inky black brightness settings you can sit down turn off the lights and if your set is big enough it's essentially identical to watching an older 27-inch CRT TV you won't even notice that there's bars on the side and top but you can also zoom the image and here's where things get tricky because TVs do not all approach zoom correctly but the idea is very similar to what TVs do automatically you pull the image you stretch it side to side but you know if you've ever clicked the constrain proportions button on Photoshop or whatever what this does is also pulls it equally top and bottom so what you're essentially doing is zooming in on the image and stopping when if you know you hit the sides of it so you're essentially cutting off the top and bottom of the image but because the discs were watching are widescreen discs that unused image is just blender Box bars they're just useless bars that we're cutting away so all that matters is we're filling side to side and we're actually using much more of the HDTV screen now unfortunately some TVs don't really have much in the way of zoom options or they have multiple zoom options and they're not really labeled intuitively and then there's the problem of some TVs locking HDMI input so if you decide you want something else maybe you run it through like a little converter box or something to turn your laserdisc RCA jack into HDMI sometimes those converter boxes will stretch the image automatically and then even if your TV has a zoom option it's powerless against that HDMI image coming in it just get 16 to 9 and that's all it's gonna do so you got to kind of figure out what your TV is capable of and then yes a lot of TVs do have zoom options sometimes too many and they will find all sorts of creative ways in destructive ways to pull and stretch the image and also apply brands centric terminology to those options and it can get super confusing my Sony projectors I use a zoom setting but there's also a wide zoom setting which you don't want to use on my sharp 4k it's cinema mode which is like buried I think it's like the sixth or seventh option in aspect ratios and on some of the Samsung TVs I missed we're thinking think it was zoom one those are very unhelpful zoom one and zoom two but they don't really tell you which ones which and what it does so yeah it's very hard to tell intuitively whether the which is being pulled and also over cropped or anything like that so your best bet is the get like Robert loggia and get a F in manual and study that mf'er and if you don't have your manual for your TV chances are it's still available as a PDF on the internet so bust out a laptop or a phone and try and download that sucker and it should list if there are any sub zoom options and then confusingly describe them in extra confusing ways to let you know what those options do but what you need to do is look for something that maintains the proportions of the image while it pulls it so it pulls the side to side and also expands a top and bottom now your TV's probably smart but it's not that smart and yeah I've got a TV that has an auto aspect ratio function but it can't tell that I'm watching on a letterbox laserdisc no way so it seems like it's magic what it's doing but it's not it's really just coincidence in order to properly show every letterbox double D with zooming you would need a zoom feature that was incremental you know like 1% 2% 3% and just keep zooming and little by little but TVs that AB zooms usually just zoom until the sides hit the sides of your 16:9 TV it just so happens that as mentioned before the most common widescreen ratios are wider than your television set your HDTV 1.85 two one and two point thirty five to one four two point four to the one here in the states are super common so a lot of the laserdisc you're going to be trying to zoom are gonna be wider than your TV's so when I mentioned before it's gonna pull it until it gets to the sides because they're wider you're never gonna get to a position where image is being cut off it's just useless black bars so it just happens to be convenient and one point maybe five to one is pretty darn close to 16:9 so if you're watching a film like Shawshank Redemption it should essentially look like the full screen and it might even be depending of your TV's overscan if you have like a perfectly scanned image you'll have very very thin letterboxing bars the top and bottom left over for you to see but otherwise it's pretty much identical to a full fullscreen HDTV if your why 2.35 2-1 films they'll still be black bars on top and bottom but nowhere near as drastic as they were back in the day on the four to three TVs because though a lot of those black bars are gonna be cut off by the zoom process on the negative side as you're zooming in you're not gaining any resolution as I mentioned before yeah there's that fixed amount of TV lines so as the image will get larger it won't be clear so the image is too soft you may either want to like sit back a little bit or revert back to window boxing from before and having black bars on all four sides so really all you need are two options to watch these old LDS you need a four to three setting and a zoom setting for everything from old TV shows to music videos to pan and scan things whatever you use four to three if you're using old you're viewing the widescreen film you use zoom things only get complicated when you have those weird ratios we're not you know so weird overseas but say like the original James Bond films which were one point 66 to one so it's in this kind of netherworld limbo between old-school television and HDTV so you need a processor to scale in percentages incremental e to scale that correctly because if you zoom that it's actually gonna cut a little bit to the top and bottom off and then if you watch it window box you're gonna have still thin black bars in the top and bottom so unless you have an external processor that can scale correctly or you have a pretty cool TV that can scale in percentages those might pose a problem but there aren't a ton of 1.66 2:1 titles and you're watching those window boxed is perfectly fine with me and I did mention squeeze all these before so we got to get into that like I mentioned before I said LEDs were four to three interestingly also were DVDs but DVDs didn't give us a lot of these problems for the most part there were a lot of DVDs especially early on that we're not formatted for your TV's they were not anamorphic lis enhanced and they have the exact same problems with white screen releases on those that we have with laser discs and you know it's either gets pulled side-to-side like taffy vision or you put it in four to three mode and it's got when you know window boxing or you have to zoom the suckers but a lot of DVDs were anamorphic lis enhanced which is really cool it basically takes that HDTV 16:9 image and does the opposite it squeezes it inward onto the four to three frame of like an old television and when you put that into your modern TV it's just gonna pull it back out and return it to normal it's really cool because it's a way to use more of the resolution because if you put like a 2.35 to one film on a HDTV it's got fewer black bars than an old like CRT TV would have so when you squeeze it you're still using more of the picture then you are in older letterboxing techniques which just wastes resolution on showing black bars so it was a cool idea interestingly laser just did it first contrary to popular belief widescreen televisions which weren't necessarily HDTV at the time but widescreen televisions were marketed more of a niche product here in the States but fairly early in the 90s in fact there are a number of LEDs we're gonna get into that were promo items for those TVs so laserdisc actually did release not many like there's like 31 titles I think totally of anamorphic lame hence the same thing they take that 16:9 image and squeeze it into four to three and then when you put it on a 69 TV it just pulls it right back out again and because those niche TVs were kind of aimed at the same kind of market that laserdisc fans would settle into they released Warner released four titles was Unforgiven the fugitive grumpy old men and Free Willy as anamorphic enhanced or squeezed titles the downside is if you watch them in an old TV it's going to be the opposite of the short fat syndrome you're gonna see the anamorphic squeeze desk and everybody's going to look super tall and super thin all the time because it wasn't made for those old TVs and yeah so those four were given away with Toshiba televisions and they're definitely hard to find and they're hard to notice because of the nomenclature on him later in Japan there were I there were a lot of promo discs that said Iran and demo material and that sort of thing documentaries but there was only about maybe 10 more narrative feature films that were released in Japan but they were called squeeze LD and some of them like a later Terminator 2 release are still worth a you know pretty penny nowadays the American you know promo ones can go for some decent coin too and there are a handful of pal titles and like a couple more movies from Germany in particular but usually yeah you're you still overall dealing with far less than 50 discs altogether but that's the rare case when LD is plug-and-play you grab one of those discs drop it in your player you plug your player directly into your HDTV your HD TVs super smart and kind of stupid at the same time it's going to grab that image pull it side to side and inadvertently correct the image back to its original proportions DVD did a cool thing by bringing a new trick to the game had those anamorphic discs but they made them backwards compatible with old televisions by implementing a feature in the players to be able to pull that image back into its proper dimensions and then add its own black bars on the top and bottom to show it on old four-to-three televisions a super cool feature and so a lot of people watching those anamorphic enhanced discs on old TVs didn't even notice anything was going on but then if you watched on your new wider television set you were getting more resolution and everything was getting pulled side-to-side it was cool it was a really good idea you just had to tell your player whether or not you were watching it on a 4 to 3 TV or 69 TV that was one area in which DVD you know brought that laserdisc idea to the next level so how do you tell if you had one of those discs well if you got one of those Japanese ones you're probably gonna know because you imported them and they're also gonna say squeeze LD right on there in the states it's gonna be little more difficult because the jackets are almost identical to the regular for two-three letterboxed commercially-available releases but it's gonna have a tiny little box on the back that says these discs are manufactured and a special anamorphic Lee squeezed format to be compatible with your new Toshiba 69 TV is this a promotional and intended for resale so yeah they're not cheap but they look so nearly identical to their regular commercial counterparts that they can easily slip through the cracks and be found amidst the bins at rift markets and half-price books etc so it always pays to check the back of the jacket for that if you're looking for those squeeze this a lot of people get confused over the anamorphic part because again like widescreen it can mean different things widescreen on laserdisc weren't talking about widescreen televisions it was talking about film anamorphic release squeeze discs is different than anamorphic scope film which I mentioned before those 2.35 2:1 films there's a couple different fashions that you can make those but essentially when they were shown in theaters whether they were super 35 or filmed with lenses that squeezed the image automatically they were printed that same way with the whole wide image squeezed centrally on to the square-ish film frame and then another lens would be in front of the projector which would pull it out to its normal composition so it's the same concept so hilariously laserdisc manufacturers loved using buzzwords and they loved talking about you know anything cool and theatrical that they could put in the jacket so there's tons of discs that on those 2.30 five-to-one films will specifically mention you know the letter boxing is to preserve the anamorphic Lee enhanced theatrical presentation it gets a little complicated when you have squeezed discs which are anamorphic Lee enhanced versions of films that were anamorphic aleihi filmed like Unforgiven so it was like an anamorphic Lee enhanced disc of an anamorphic 2.35 to one image so you might think you have an anamorphic Lee enhanced disc but it's not talking about the disc it's talking about the theatrical presentation of the movie and the way it was filmed but forget about squeeze this for now they're rare and they're expensive and acting to be that big of an issue unless you're really into collecting them we probably talked way too much about them and there's only about ten narrative available overall but I just want to portney that because that's the one occasion where you pop it in and pulling it 16 to 9 is going to be the option so I mentioned the Fuhrer over this on the Internet and particularly the Facebook forum so I should probably mention the aspect ratio police or the ARP which is this tongue in cheek but semi serious group it's not nobody's really you know deputized or anything in it but it's kind of grown up and evolved in forums like the laserdisc forever forum and Facebook etc and they're people that kind of keep an eye on people posting screenshots and and you know shots of them in their living room watching their movies with their image completely distorted and they're just letting people know that they're watching the movie wrong sometimes it's done with tact the times not so much so if you're ever watching like you know if you ever scrolling through lasers forever and you see someone saying now spinning and they've got a tacky vision image and then you scroll down a little bit farther and you see it like a little you know police beacon icon or you see a Jif of you know a rearview mirror shot of a bunch of police cars pulling up behind someone you can know the vas pect ratio police are on their way and this often creates very defensive responses and people digging in their heels and a lot of times you hear that I prefer to watch it that way you can't tell me how to watch it and yeah as no one can tell you you can't pull an image like chewing gum I mean it's your it's your desk it's your TV you can also flip your image upside down if you like or Jack your tint or your hue so that everything looks like the Hulk you can do those things people generally don't probably because they're TVs don't do those things automatically to the laserdisc image if it did suddenly a lot of people would be preferring to watch Hulk vision and preferring to watch their films upside down because when it comes right down to it nobody actually prefers to have their image distorted because if that was true they'd be screaming bloody murder every time they went to the theaters and saw a film that had the correct composition or anytime they were watching yo Netflix or any HD cable programs or anything else like that that was showing a correct composition and they certainly wouldn't be able to tolerate watching a you know a film on an old CRT TV cuz it wouldn't be deliciously stretching that image as they prefer and then that night they'd be breaking into museums to grab paintings when no one's looking and pull them side to side because they prefer that way and this i perfer is kind of this knee-jerk evolution of the old clarion call from back in the day when panning and scanning was a big deal and that was the the ultimate of the TV worshipers forcing the art to be serving the tool every inch of that glorious screen needed to be filled at the expense of image composition art be damned filled the screen the screen is important the movie and that's much and this especially created a lot of tension in the DVD era because DVD was unifying laserdiscs tendency to letterbox things and to preserve the widescreen compositions was unifying that and VHS is tendency to remove mattes and or do panning and scanning and zooming and all sorts of other image manipulations in order to make that image fit the old 4 to 3 televisions those two kind of camps would always have some sort of ruckus going and there would always be a war words brewing on internet forums or Walmart floors because yet it was becoming an issue so yeah a lot of the people said you know they preferred full-frame or fullscreen DVDs because it filled their screen so now if people are adapting that to this aspect ratio' police issue of people stretching their laserdisc ironically it's filling their screen with more black bars because when you take a movie like speed which is 2 point 35 to 1 your TV's am I automatically gonna stretch it and it's gonna take that kind of squished central bar and pull it side to side but it's also gonna pull all those freakin black bars side to side so ironically if you zoom the image you're actually filling more of your TV and yes the aspect ratio police can be obnoxious at times but you kind of have to understand that one laserdisc was you know before now a lot of people are coming at it like it's stupid a whole video you know it's it wasn't always stupid old video it also was something that was aimed at cine ass it was aimed at film buffs and it was taking steps to preserve things like film composition so when you're in a specialty group posting pictures and commenting on the amazing picture quality of your image and your image is pulling something into Taffy vision people are gonna comment on it like there's just no ifs ands or buts about it they're gonna comment it just like if your picture was completely jacked a Hulk vision green and they're gonna comment on and just as if you had rolled into a carpentry group holding hammers and screwdrivers buy the wrong and saying I'm ready to do some kick-ass carpentry because that's really all this your HD TV is a screen and a tool and you just don't know how to use it properly and there's no shame in that but lots of egos get bruised in the process of explaining that situation you know much like in the film crazy people if you've ever seen it where Dudley Moore was leading a bunch of psychiatric patients into becoming ad executives and they were kind of delivering this you know tell sell people the truth for once and old people would be lining up around the block because they want to use a product that will let them go to the toilet again you know in this case all you got to say is I don't know how to use my TV to do this thing sometimes it might be my TV can't do that thing so that'll be the next step in which case you'll most likely get a you know get-out-of-jail-free card from from the AARP and yeah different TVs different brands they're gonna use all sorts of different terms and nomenclature and not all of them are gonna do the exact same things and give you the same amount of features so maybe we'll not zoom it all but as much before some of them if not all of them should at least have an option to adjust the image to four to three so you could do window boxing at the very least hopefully maybe you don't have a remote and he can't access any of this stuff it's a possibility maybe it's gonna be stretched City or nothing at all and do use some hi-fi examples like you know nobody can tell you that you can't listen your headphones spun the wrong way or flip the polarity of your speaker cables or put a block under your turntable so it's sitting at a 45 degree angle those things are wrong but nobody can tell you you can't do those wrong things so the air P get called out a lot because they're bringing these issues to light and they're being snobs by letting people know that they're destroying their image and yes they you know it gets old you can't tell me how to watch my and you can't tell me not to destroy my image so yes it's true they can't do that but they're not really being snobs maybe some of them are they're just telling you that you don't know how to use your tool and I really blame me because modern TVs are complicated this hell what with HDR and everything like that you can get lost for days in submenus it's it's kind of wonky stuff sometimes but again widescreen no these was made specifically to preserve the composition of films that that was important in some fashion so taking that and distorting it is kind of a slap in the face of film buffs they're gonna react that way even if you're watching old pan and scan movies you're stretching them that still you know payments can was a specific solution it was a mutilation but it was a specific solution specific solution to showing those widescreen films on older television sets so it was a solution for old TVs so then ironically when you're taking those old four-to-three panet Scannell DS and and pulling it on a modern HDTV or even a little VHS tape if you're pulling that or whatever it's like you're adding a distortion to a distortion you're mutilating the mutilation it's like even more levels of screen and sanity and some people don't even really think about images some people maybe only focus on sound and and vice versa so maybe you know image composition isn't your thing or you don't even care about this remotely and sometimes you look at this pulled Taffy vision you're like that looks freaking awesome I'll let you in on a secret don't even bother telling anybody that just put a disclaimer at the top of your post saying yeah my TV doesn't allow me to change my aspect ratio bummer and then everyone will feel sorry for you and they'll be like oh cool bro yeah just put that there just take that little kind tip from me and it'll get the aspect ratio total police totally off your back but it that stuff does matter to you an image composition is something you want to have preserved yeah grab a manual learn how to use the tool don't let your television make the art serve it let your television serve the art that's all there is so I'm sure there's probably some questions will hash mile below thanks for hanging out everybody that's been laserdisc aspect ratios the beginner we'll get into like a discussion of film aspect ratio some other time cuz that's a huge can of worms so many aspect ratios so little time but yeah again this probably be tons of questions drop them below and yeah be yeah aspect ratio police you know be kind to the stretchers let them know the best you can in the least now be way possible and image stretchers you know be slightly respectful of the aspect ratio police cuz like I mentioned before it's just like you rolling in their carpet reform like go to build a cabinet so let's build a cabinet put some widescreen l D's in there and watch them correctly on the TV an HDTV I'll talk to you guys below Cheers thanks for hanging out

Channel: Culturedog

Views: 23,637

Keywords: LaserDisc, LaserDisc: You’re Watching It Wrong, laserdisc, laser disc, laserdics, laser dics, lazerdisc, lazerdisk, laserdisk, lazer disc, laser disk, 4:3 television, 16:9 television, widescreen, widescreen LD, anamorphic widescreen, squeeze LD, letterbox, pillarbox, windowbox, tv zoom, aspect ratio, film composition, standard definition video, high definition video

Id: HkxJhmLZ-tg

Length: 45min 53sec (2753 seconds)

Published: Sat May 09 2020