Nimbus

Hypothetical question -

with the "not so great" press HD-DVD & BlueRay is getting, do you think the studios will start releasing HD discs with both widescreen & pan-n-scan features to drum up business from videophiles and joe-sixpack?

The reason I ask is that when DVD took off, I was excited that there was a format that 'appreciated' the directors vision and the 'original theatrical presentation' - but when DVD hit the big time a lot of movies I expected to see released in widescreen were released in p-n-s or 'open matte'.

So we know how the studios feel about widescreen releases, so do you think that they will give us 4:3 HD releases just to sell the newest "toy" on the block just to get more sales?

And will "PAN AND SCAN" releases actually ever disappear?

redford

Some day down the line it will probably happen. I fairly certain most many of the studios have both OAR & 1.78 editions of their films that are wider than 1.85.

Nero

No. There's no point. A 4x3 HD version would just be pillarboxed in a 1.78:1 frame, after all.

On the other hand, cropping 1.37:1 and 2.40:1 films to 1.78:1 is a distinct possibility. Disney has also talked about putting a 4x3 standard definition version on some of its Blu-ray releases along with the HD version.

Augustes

I have no doubt we will see some movies being cropped to 1.78:1. Hell, Warner did it on the North By Northwest DVD, and that wasn't even an HD disc.

redford

Isn't the OAR of North By Northwest 1.85:1? Virtually all 1.85:1 films are cropped to 1.78:1. And really, with overscan, you would be VERY hard pressed to ever notice the difference.

Going from 2.35:1 to 1.78:1 would be a travesty, IMO (like the original Lord of War release), but 1.85:1 to 1.78:1 is really unnoticible with the overscan issues of TVs.

Nero

I always used my Malata to eliminate overscan, so it made a difference to me.

Nimbus

Is it just me or does Pan-and-Scan and HD/Blu seem like an oxymoron?

redford

Two things:

1.) What about those with 4:3 HDTVs? There are a lot of those circulating, and I realize that HD is natively 16:9, but couldn't there still be some conceivable advantage for a "J6P" (as much as I dislike that term) with a 4:3 HDTV to have a 4:3 pan-and-scan image? Wouldn't this show up as a windowboxed 4:3 image that they could zoom in on, similarly to how those with widescreen TVs zoom in on non-anamorphic widescreen movies? Or maybe it could be a 4:3 image stretched to fill a 16:9 window that the TV could then stretch out vertically?

2.) Pan-and-scan could still survive as a form of cropping 4:3 material, because these movies could be vertically panned and scanned, in effect changing the cropped section based on the importance of what is happening at the top or bottom of the screen. I don't know if this would technically be considered panning, since I usually think of panning as horizontal, but it is the same general concept.

I know others have already mentioned cropping 4:3 to fit in a 16:9 frame, but I'm not sure if they have meant a simple crop (cutting off the top and bottom equally throughout the movie), or vertical "pan-and-scan."

Both of these ideas may be a little far-fetched, but I am just hard-pressed to believe that the studios are going to completely give up on a process that has become so ingrained in home video.

Nimbus

They're not cropped. They're open matte by 11 pixels.

Augustes

We've already seeen numerous anamorphic transfers on SD-DVD (World's Fastest Indian, Lord of War) that are modified from 2.x : 1 down to 1.78 : 1, so I'm POSITIVE we'll be seeing "full screen" 1.78 : 1 transfers on Blu-Ray/HD-DVD.

As Suprmallet said, HBO-HD is already promoting this travesty by showing 2.35 : 1 movies in 1.78 : 1. A few examples are Batman Begins and Black Hawk Down.