‘Seinfeld’ fans upset that Netflix’s aspect ratio cuts out jokes

https://www.rollingstone.com/tv/tv-news/seinfeld-netflix-aspect-ratio-1236110/

by 74d-fe6-2c6 • 5 years ago

114 108 5 years ago

For me as a huge Seinfeld fan this is practically painful to watch.

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...

Grakel3• 5 years ago

Not to mention the insane sound volume range. I have great hearing and I hold the remote the entire time, turning it up for dialogue and down for everything else.

gomox4• 5 years ago

Do you have a center channel?

jrootabega2• 5 years ago

Just remember you are probably part of a relatively small and relatively enlightened portion of the population. Netflix will gladly piss you off if it means they get more profit out of the bulk of their customer base, who are just interested in consuming more.

iso12103• 5 years ago

This was the case with Simpsons when it came onto Disney Plus - they took the 4:3 and didn't just blow it to 14:9, but 16:9 -- throwing away a quarter of the original image.

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'

mhb• 5 years ago

Andrex• 5 years ago

There are way more issues with Buffy on top of that too, and my Disney ire will forever be stoked until they rectify the situation (as the current owners of 20th Century Television.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F28XcxHxH6k

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZWNGq70Oyo

spiffage• 5 years ago

Thanks for telling us about the option to use the original aspect ratio! I'd basically given up and might never have found out.

d3nj4l• 5 years ago

It's still not "fixed" because Indian Disney+, which is run by a Disney subsidiary, still doesn't allow you to watch the Simpsons in 4:3.

fortran77• 5 years ago

The "Simpsons" on FXX is unwatchable. It's cropped/blown up to 16:9 and it looks like they took a scan meant for HD resolution and blew that up, so everything looks jaggy and blurry.

vladvasiliu2• 5 years ago

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.

iso12103• 5 years ago

I'm talking 16:9, I was watching a fairly recent south park (from about 2015) on an iphone12 mini, there are two options that double tapping toggles between, one is the original 16:9, the other zooms in so it's full width (including the notch), so 19.5:9. In other words it's taking a 1920x1080 image and only showing 886 lines, dropping 97 lines from the top and bottom.

tzs• 5 years ago

Another annoying way to 16:9ify The Simpsons is how it was done for broadcast/cable syndication originally. They did some kind of nonlinear scaling where the aspect ratio was unchanged at the center and increased as you moved to the sides.

iso12103• 5 years ago

But why would you want to mangle the picture no matter how you do it?

ryandrake• 5 years ago

One thing the article doesn't seem to address is why these cuts are happening? What motivates a streaming company to go out of its way to re-shape the aspect ratio of a film? It is totally possible to re-digitize film without changing aspect ratio. Look at the re-done Star Trek TNG Blu-rays, they're amazing and with the original aspect ratio preserved. All widescreen TVs I know will play 4:3 content perfectly fine. Is there some technical reason that a 4:3 video can't be streamed?

colejohnson66• 5 years ago

People probably don’t like the black bars. Or at least the people in charge think so.

orloffm• 5 years ago

There is just no feedback from viewers to managers making decisions, and people actually doing work cropping don't have authority to override them.

I-M-S• 5 years ago

I was under the impression the series will be digitally remastered and resolution upscaled, which doesn't seem to be the case?

vadfa3• 5 years ago

The series was filmed in... film. There is no need for upscaling. They digitalised it from the film and it looks as if it was recorded yesterday.

weird-eye-issue• 5 years ago

It's pretty amazing the digital-equivalent resolution that actual film has (depends on the film size obviously but if you were to compare average film size to a average 10+ year digital camera it's a huge difference)

lrem• 5 years ago

Scanning with a better scanner can be confused with "digital remastering".

j-bos• 5 years ago

Technology connections gives a great intro into this concept : https://youtu.be/rVpABCxiDaU

Bud3• 5 years ago

For another striking example of this, see the original Star Trek series. It now looks 10x better than it ever did when originally shown on TV.

whitehouse3• 5 years ago

This isn’t unique to Netflix. The replays in syndication are also 16:9. As are the blu-ray releases. I finally bought the full series on DVD as I’d rather the original aspect ratio.

vadfa3• 5 years ago

I watched this in 16:9 on Amazon Video (it's been available for years) and I disagree it's a problem. I think they did a great job. Yes, some things were cut out, but you could count them on one hand. Having said that they should've offered a 4:3 version. I would have watched that one version had they offered it.

conradfr2• 5 years ago

"Having said that" ... https://youtu.be/RS49gJ2eKrY?t=37

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.

vadfa3• 5 years ago

"Having said that" ... https://youtu.be/RS49gJ2eKrY?t=37

I didn't expect anybody to get the joke. Congratulations ;-)

tofukid• 5 years ago

Almost all TVs have an option to zoom to fit 4:3, so there’s no need to stream a cropped version. At least they should provide an option to view the original.

jefftk• 5 years ago

Done well, aspect ratio conversion involves editorial decisions: what part of the frame is most important to preserve? This isn't something TVs can automate.

(Not advocating for cropping, though)

mkr-hn2• 5 years ago

I imagine the situation will improve in the future with TVs that have one or two on-board cores for handling trained models (like Apple's newer chips) that can run models trained on editorial pan-and-scans and try to apply it as an alternative to scaling.

whywhywhywhy2• 5 years ago

Just another reason not to do it. The only person who has the right to make those decisions is the original creator and they’d more likely just say ship it as intended.

conradfr2• 5 years ago

Yes, watching Seinfeld on Netflix, the zoom-ins, the framing. I was enchanted.

foob• 5 years ago

There's a great blog post by David Simon on the conversion of The Wire from 4:3 to 16:9 [1]. It goes into a lot of depth about some of the trade-offs and considerations as well as the lack of communication from HBO. Unfortunately, the video examples don't seem to work anymore. I can't help but wonder if HBO sent YouTube a DMCA takedown for David Simon's clips from the post (or they got taken down automatically). It's pretty sad if the creator of a show can't even post short clips from it to illustrate some of the design decisions behind them.

[1] http://davidsimon.com/the-wire-hd-with-videos/

f0e4c2f7• 5 years ago

I remember reading that blog post at the time and being flabbergasted.

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.

kristofferR• 5 years ago

It's not really the same issue though, with The Wire they had access to original master footage that had a wider view, so the 16:9 versions didn't crop into the 4:3 footage, it just added footage on the sides of the image.

https://i.imgur.com/SK1sPD9.jpg

dogma11382• 5 years ago

In some shots yes but not in all, in others the extra wide shot could not be used because production elements could be seen or it drastically changed the framing of the scene so cropping was also extensively used.

You can see this in many other early 2000’s shows like TWW.

remram2• 5 years ago

Also the Buffy remaster, where interestingly they uncropped the footage, showing some of the filming crew, microphones, etc.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZWNGq70Oyo

(edit: already posted in this thread, oops: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28737063)

urthor2• 5 years ago

That's brilliant. That's the way it should be done.

dogma11382• 5 years ago

It’s quite strange because even if he wasn’t the creator it seems that it should fall very much under fair use because you critique the editing / remastering of the show from its original broadcast aspect ratio to a new one.

NelsonMinar2• 5 years ago

Cropping is never the right choice for media presentation. Ever.

simias2• 5 years ago

I think that it's much better for marketing it to a newer generation. I suspect that for somebody in their early 20s starting to watch Seinfield these days a 4:3 ratio would immediately make the show look dated. I mean surely they ran the numbers and figured out it was worth it? Otherwise it wouldn't be so common with so many TV shows.

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.

Bud3• 5 years ago

"Make it look dated" is just not a good argument.

There is no good argument. Cropping out huge amounts of the actual material is not justifiable. End of story.

throwawayboise• 5 years ago

The show is dated. Nobody has a mobile phone. Very few computers (I think Jerry has a Mac Classic in his living room). The cars and street scenes are all from the 1990s.

It's still good.

goldenkey3• 5 years ago

Mainstream media disagrees. In fact, cropping context is their main technique :-)

noisem4ker• 5 years ago

I'm actually horrified to see stretching on the rise, especially in news broadcasts. "Oh, this singer just died? Let's have a disfiguring retrospective of their 80s music videos where they appear 2x as wide now."

NelsonMinar2• 5 years ago

Mainstream media is wrong.

krispyfi• 5 years ago

It's times like this that I think that piracy is the only way to preserve pop culture.

draw_down• 5 years ago

Yes, another example is the 90s show Beavis & Butthead. A big part of the show was the two characters watching music videos and making fun of them. It’s a licensing nightmare so a lot of them got cut out in subsequent releases of the show.

willcipriano5• 5 years ago

Anything with musical guests also suffers from this issue. There is no legal and complete copy of SNL that you can buy, no matter what you are willing to pay. A great deal of MTV's content isn't able to be sold, and MTV was probably the most important television station from a cultural perspective during it's heyday.

einpoklum• 5 years ago

Arrgh, matey! Conservation ahoy.

willcipriano5• 5 years ago

I maintain a cultural archive of about 60 terabytes for this purpose. I have both the original and upscaled Simpsons and Seinfeld, but I mostly focus on stuff that people never think about (ever hear of Jon Benjamin Has a Van, that sort of thing). As storage mediums and formats change I carry it forward, last year I started adding YouTube creators. Eventually I'll hand that task off to my daughter if she also sees that work as important.

mkr-hn2• 5 years ago

You can always ship it to the Internet Archive if she doesn't and you can't find a way to maintain an independent copy. Maybe by then you can set up some kind of organization like IA for the replication value.

everyone• 5 years ago

One of the tragic effects of the MAFIAA's legal efforts to stop piracy, was that, though they could never reduce the amount of popular stuff being pirated, they did manage to shut down a lot of niche sites or private trackers, where people had meticulously curated rare and obscure content that was impossible to get anywhere else.

jrootabega2• 5 years ago

That was a good show. Got any Exit 57?

dudul2• 5 years ago

That and/or owning DVDs/BRs.

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.

nindalf• 5 years ago

I hope your kids get to watch Han shoot first in 4K - https://www.thestarwarstrilogy.com/project-4k77/

whywhywhywhy2• 5 years ago

Absolutely. Preservation can only be achieved properly through passion not money. The copyright holders of these cultural artifacts don’t care about them enough to properly preserve them.

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.

Brian_K_White4• 5 years ago

BBC throwing away or taping over all those Dr Who tapes.

Asooka• 5 years ago

I sometimes dream of there being a license to pirate, kind of like paying for Netflix. You'd pay 15 bucks per month to an agency that monitors the well known trackers and divides the proceeds accordingly. Or maybe a cloud service where scene releases can be uploaded and people can pay for monthly access. Just anything that lets the copyright holders to have their pound of flesh, while allowing the people actually invested in the quality of the product and its distribution do their thing.

anaganisk• 5 years ago

There was something that was known as DVD or BluRay, Digital download release for the same. Do u think having available to download is something which is not possible in this age? Studios and companies just went full greedy, they just want to milk you constantly for every time u watch it.

pessimizer• 5 years ago

I have to believe that this has been rigorously tested, and that a lot of viewers are lost when they see black bars on their television.

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.

navjack272• 5 years ago

The whole concept of black bars has always confused me. I know what they are I know what people generally accept the concept of what they are. but they aren't actually what they are. There are no black bars. The content is the size that it is and it's just stretching undistorted to your screen. It's not adding black bars. You're just not using parts of your screen because you shouldn't be using those parts of your screen. Maybe if content like that had a old console TV bezel on the side that had channel dials and the power button and a speaker on one side and half of a bezel and a blurry living room background with a picture of a family on the other that would make people feel more comfortable?

Brian_K_White4• 5 years ago

This. In another comment I tried to equate it with a painting on a wall. A painting never fills the wall. The painting is whatever size and shape it is, and that's that.

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.

gandalfian2• 5 years ago

First world irritation - when I finally got a 16:9 television they started making TV shows even wider so still letterboxed! Why? Grrr.

Brian_K_White4• 5 years ago

Why do you even care that there are letterboxes? Why must every pixel be lit just because they exist?

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."

gandalfian2• 5 years ago

Hmm well you can rationalize these things either way but in the end I find it nicer to have the tv filled edge to edge. I just do.

bananamerica5• 5 years ago

It doesn't look as pleasant, that's all.

bananamerica5• 5 years ago

Longtime fan since the 90s. Have rewatched in 16:9 many times. I don't care. Seinfeld is just not this kind of show.

Brian_K_White4• 5 years ago

It's a show about nothing, watched by people who choose to watch a show about nothing. Such people indeed would not care.

bananamerica5• 5 years ago

I believe that you're joking, but let me cease this opportunity to address a common misconception. Seinfeld is obviously not about nothing, it's about the minutiae of culture and social interactions that was often ignored on shows from that era. The other reason why it's "about nothing" is that, unlike Cheers from example, the characters don't have real arcs, they don't become better human beings on any level. They never learn, never transcend, remaining pretty much the same selfish assholes they started as. There are no moral lessons. From that perspective, Seinfeld is about "nothing", but a nothing that is actually full of fun little obsessions of no consequence.

ericpauley• 5 years ago

16:9 reframes of Seinfeld have been around a long time. Did Netflix reframe anything or are they using these existing versions? For what it's worth the reframed version is not a simple crop, and in fact sometimes previously-unused parts of the film are used[1]. It's not just a crop/upscale of the original broadcasts, though perhaps the same effort didn't go into this reframing as The Wire, which as others have noted is excellent.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/seinfeld/comments/17xn28/original_v...

gwbas1c2• 5 years ago

Yeah, I used to see it in bars all the time 10 years ago. Full 16x9, full HD. It was clear that they went back to the original film to make an HD version.

flotzam• 5 years ago

Just to put a bit of competitive pressure on the butchers at Netflix, for Seinfeld S01-S04 there are 1080p torrents with the correct 4:3 aspect ratio:

https://thepiratebay.org/search.php?q=seinfeld+aspect

0xdeadb00f• 5 years ago

At this point Netflix is practically begging us to use TPB :)

gwbas1c2• 5 years ago

Back when the show broadcast for the first time, I didn't understand the big "Filmed in Panavision" logo at the end of the credits.

Now I do: The producers filmed the show using equipment that would allow remastering for HDTV.

baobabKoodaa• 5 years ago

This serves as another reminder that you get the high-quality product by pirating content, not by paying for it.

dada786412• 5 years ago

If I had done directing or camera work during the 4:3 era and saw my work cropped to 16:9, I'd probably be furious. A lot of thought goes into framing a shot just right, making sure it has the right balance and composition.

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.

bananamerica5• 5 years ago

As a film major, you give 90s live audience sitcom cinematography too much credit. From a cinematography standpoint directing something like Seinfeld is quite standard. They don't even move the cameras and lights between episodes. The operators are instructed to keep whoever is speaking in the frame. I love Seinfeld to death, but this is no Citizen Kane. We're here for the performances, not for the camera work. Settle down a bit.

dada786412• 5 years ago

It sounds to me like you just personally don't care about cinematography. Which is fine, but that makes it surprising to me you open with "I'm a film major", as if that means your view is the "correct" one and everyone else just doesn't know what they're talking about. I'd figure someone who studied film would care about things like this even if we're talking about an ostensibly "bad" TV show.

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.

‘Seinfeld’ fans upset that Netflix’s aspect ratio cuts out jokes

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