Pan and scan again... with a difference.

[rahul]

I was watching Seven Brides for Seven Brothers on 5 USA today.

The cutting of the sides of that movie is well documented -- used as an example by Martin Scorcese here:

and besides, the channel itself has got a bad rep for pan and scan
e.g. http://www.avforums.com/forums/television/1447302-king-kings-c5-showing-pan-scan-mad.html


But what I noticed today was that, beyond the usual slaughter of the film's beautiful wide compositions, there were a lot of scenes where people's hats, or horses' heads, weren't quite there! The top and bottom were cut too. Then I realised I was seeing pan and scan in widescreen!

Does this mean they've taken a 4:3 pan and scanned print and then tilt-and-scanned it too...? Thus producing an image of (roughly) the original aspect ratio, but effectively with an full digital zoom applied?

The result was like watching TV through a narrow tube. All confusing close-ups. Am I right about this? Has anyone noticed this being done before?

 

[Todd Tomorrow]

I'm not sure exactly what you mean, but pan&scan previously has taken a section of the image where the top and bottom is missing as well. I remember this especially with Cinemascope films. I once watched Love Me or Leave Me, a 50s Cinemascope film, where the TV channel cropped some shots to close up by zooming in on the head of an actor. So something like 70% or 80% of the picture was missing.

Doesn't bother me anymore. I very rarely watch films on the main TV channels anymore because there are plenty of alternatives. But when there was a time when your only alternative to see a film was an equally poor VHS transfer, it was very frustrating.

 

[bosque]

Benny Hill used to have a good sketch about films on TV where the camera had to keep swinging from the right hand side of the picture to the left hand side because if you had two stars aiming guns at each other in a two-shot widescreen framing, you would miss one half of the picture if watching on a 4:3 TV set.

(You have to see it to see the "humour" of it )

 

[ukbootlegs]

Benny Hill used to have a good sketch about films on TV where the camera had to keep swinging from the right hand side of the picture to the left hand side because if you had two stars aiming guns at each other in a two-shot widescreen framing, you would miss one half of the picture if watching on a 4:3 TV set.

(You have to see it to see the "humour" of it )

Blimey, I remember that. It was very funny in it's day and probably more so now as we all understand it better.

 

[KungFuPro]

So 5 USA were playing an already panned & scanned 4:3 version, cropped again to 16:9 to fill the frame, it wouldn't surprise me.

I caught an episode of King of the Hill on one of the freeview channels, it should've been 4:3 but the channel had zoomed in cropping the top and bottom off to make it 16:9. King of the Hill's picture quality was never that great to begin but it made it look like an nth gen vhs copy, the tops of heads were missing too.