Disney+ Will Slash Your HDTV's Black Bars With IMAX Digital Update (arstechnica.com) 37
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Disney+'s next major app update, coming to all devices later this week, continues the service's latest efforts to please nitpicky A/V obsessors with a new screen ratio format meant to fill more of your HDTV screen in a way that filmmakers originally intended. "IMAX Digital" is coming to all devices that support Disney+ starting this Friday as part of the service's "Disney+ Day" promotion. This "17.1:9" format will land exclusively on 13 Marvel Studios films to start, and the move coincides with the streaming premiere of Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings -- a film that skipped Disney's experiment with simultaneous launches in theaters and on Disney+ earlier this year. When a film switches to an IMAX Digital ratio, the usual black bars that signify a wider-screen 21:9 ratio will be reduced, adding approximately 26 percent more image to your HDTV, all framed as originally intended. The full list of IMAX Digital-compatible films coming to Disney+ later this week include: Ant-Man and the Wasp, Avengers: Endgame, Avengers: Infinity War, Black Panther, Black Widow, Captain America: Civil War, Captain Marvel, Doctor Strange, Guardians of the Galaxy, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, Iron Man, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, and Thor: Ragnarok.
So this is a native ad? (Score:1)
lol Disney+ is finally pushing into Hong Kong. The problem with launching so late is that I already know their shows suck. Also in a place where torrenting is basically permissible, you'd think they would have rushed headlong into a place that had our own bootleg Disney World which pressured Disney to build a real one here.
I get that we are a tiny market but it's the outflow from Hong Kong into the poorer parts of Asia thanks to the maids, which would make you think that they'd do their best to stem the p
Simpsons (Score:3)
Wasn't this the reason people lost their sh*t with The Simpsons on Disney?
https://www.theverge.com/21273... [theverge.com]
Re:Simpsons (Score:4, Informative)
If I understand it correctly, this is more like showing Stargate SG-1 or Babylon 5 in 4:3 aspect ratio even though they were originally shot (and for SG-1, originally aired) in 16:9 and then pan-and-scanned to 4:3 for syndication.
In this case, these are movies that were shot for IMAX at 1.90:1 aspect ratio (about 16:8.42), but were also shown in normal theaters in a wider crop (stuff cut off at the top and bottom). And they're switching to the IMAX aspect ratio by default, showing it as it was originally intended to be seen in IMAX theaters, rather than showing the more cropped version that was originally shown in non-IMAX theaters. Either version is true to the original intent of the director(s) and editor(s), but the general assumption is that the better version is the one that avoids throwing away content.
(As an exception, I think that some 16:9 versions of Buffy actually attempted to keep more content, and as a result, ended up with mic booms visible. So this isn't always the right approach.)
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I think the issue with Babylon 5 is that while it was filmed for 16:9, the special effects were rendered in 4:3, so the 16:9 DVDs were cropped from the 4:3 release, even for the scenes where there were no special effects. In short, they tried to make it HDTV-ready, but failed.
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IIRC somebody lost the backups so the rerenders never got done for 16:9.
It seems astonishing now but JMS said they're truly gone forever.
At least as far as Warner Brothers knows.
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Not quite, and a lot of the source files exist to this day, and many of them have "leaked" to private individuals (you can find people re-rendering original shots in 4K on YouTube, and they often hold up surprisingly well despite the low poly counts). I'm not talking AI upscales, but actual re-renders, though they had to be done using period software since the file formats are incredibly obsolete. No, the problem is that they were doing the VFX on a shoestring budget with barely any time, and they just didn
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To follow up on my own comment, Tom Smith (of B5 scroll) is one of the people who got their hands on some of the original scene files, and did some re-rendering, and you can see the results here: https://www.youtube.com/channe... [youtube.com]
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I think the issue with Babylon 5 is that while it was filmed for 16:9, the special effects were rendered in 4:3, so the 16:9 DVDs were cropped from the 4:3 release, even for the scenes where there were no special effects. In short, they tried to make it HDTV-ready, but failed.
Translation: It wasn't worth the expense to recreate all of the special effects like Paramount did for the original Star Trek. :-(
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For Star Trek TOS, they replaced a bunch of the original optical and physical model SFX with new CGI created from scratch. I don't know how much.
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Your comment is simple and straightforward - thanks. The title and summary were perplexingly lacking in clarity.
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... to such an extent that even I'm not 100% certain that I'm interpreting it correctly. :-D
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Babylon 5 was shot in 16:9 but was intended to be broadcast in 4:3. In the widescreen version you often see the actors crowded together in the middle of the frame, or what looks like excessive close-up, because every shot was framed for 4:3.
Buffy if even more of a screw-up. Like B5 the source material is widescreen, but the photographer and director filmed everything based on a 4:3 frame and essentially ignored everything outside it. That's why you can sometimes see the crew in the widescreen shots. They sc
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If they shot on IMAX for compatibility, but were intending to make all their money from regular theaters and home video, what's the chance that anything important whatsoever exists in those margins? This will result in video that's slightly smaller and a little harder to see for zero real benefit.
Convert it to 9x16 (Score:2)
They missed their big chance in a format change. Going to 9x16 would let them use all the cell phone footage people's moms record n vertical video. A huge market given the overwhelming popularity of this style on you tube . Plus it's probably a more efficient use of wall space to hand screen vertically. You could put screens on every door in the house. Putting them on the bathroom door would probably double the amount of eye balls using their service .
And for hold outs who insist on mounting screens ho
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Part of the artist's job is to choose what not to show and the composition of a shot is one of the important tools of telling the story.
There are many reasons to have extra raw material beyond the final product, but just because it's there doesn't mean it should be used.
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No it's the opposite of this. Simpsons was cropped. In this case they are talking about uncropping.
Oh goodie! More bandwidth! (Score:1)
Because Disney+, which will only ever stream at the highest possible resolution, is now going to stream even more data and help me reach my data cap even quicker.
Re:Oh goodie! More bandwidth! (Score:4, Interesting)
No it doesn't. Disney+ gives me 3 different options in the settings for bandwidth including streaming in SD.
I think the bigger issue here is the fact that it's 2021 and you have a datacap like some relic of the 90s.
More marketing garbage (Score:3, Informative)
I haven't seen Shang-Chi yet, but all of the older Marvel titles that I have seen (& looked up in IMDB) were made & released in an insanely annoying "variable aspect ratio" format - that is, _most_ of the movie is traditional 2.39-ish:1 "Scope" aspect ratio - which would fill a normal commercial cinema theatre screen, but _part_ of the movie jumps to a taller, more square "IMAX-ish" format, then back to wider, then back to taller, then...
If the "IMAX Digital" stuff on Disney+ is shown in that (IMO insanely annoying) format, I would demand a refund. I think it looks like crap.
Serious note to filmmakers (directors mostly, but they are aided & abetted by cinematographers/directors of photography) - pick a fscking aspect ratio and stick with it for the _entire_ feature.
BUT...if new features (like Shang-Chi?) are shot _and presented_ entirely in the 1.90:1 (that's 17.1:9 reduced to the "x:1" ratios that analog film nerds like myself have traditionally used), that might not be such a bad thing. (the "IMAX Digital" name is marketing b.s. - the true IMAX format is around 1.4:1; this "new" 1.90:1 stuff just happens to be the native aspect ratio of the DLP chips in all modern commercial digital cinema projectors - and probably most of the digital cameras, too, except for oddball ones like high-end RED cameras).
Picture-quality wise, the best you can do is maximize the number of usable (and used) pixels in both your shooting media and final display media. In the old analog film days, that meant IMAX 70mm (15 perf) was king of the hill; 70mm 5-perf (conventional "70mm Six-track Stereo!" of the 1960s to 1980s) was next best; 2.33:1 "cinemascope" anamorphic was the third best (used the whole frame of 35mm/4-perf film); the 1.85:1 "wide screen" format was by far the worst, since it uses the same 35mm/4-perf frame, but crops out about 1/3 of the frame at the top & bottom to get the 'wide screen' rectangle.
The modern digital world reverses that analog logic; since the digital cameras & projectors (nearly) all use the 1.90:1 sensor or DLP chips, _that_ is the aspect ratio that gives you the most total pixels. All of the wider screen formats (2.39:1 or 2.40:1 'scope, or Tarantino's 'SuperPanavion70'-formatted Hateful Eight at 2.66:1) require letterboxing the image inside of that 1.90:1 frame (so 2.39:1 'scope-ratio movies on a 2k DLP projector only uses 2048 x 858 pixels out of the 2048x1080 pixels available; double all of the numbers for a 4k system).
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"Serious note to filmmakers (directors mostly, but they are aided & abetted by cinematographers/directors of photography) - pick a fscking aspect ratio and stick with it for the _entire_ feature."
There is a difference between failure to commit to the IMAX aspect ratio and switching aspect ratio for actual artistic effect. For example, in season 4 of The Expanse scenes in space are 16:9 and scenes on the planet are 2.39:1
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They can't, because the feature will show in IMAX and regular screens. Regular screens are suited more for 2.x:1 aspect (2.77-2.35 typical), while IMAX screens are typically 1.9:1 aspect because they're limited by the film projections (remember, IMAX uses a 70mm wide film horizontally so the width of the frame is
Not this again (Score:2)
17.1:9? (Score:2)
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The reason it is called 16:9 is because this is the exact ratio of a full HD screen. There are no decimal points that are rounded off. The actual dimensions of a full HD screen is 1920x1080. If you divide both dimensions by 120 you end up with exactly 16:9 aspect ratio. A screen with an aspect ratio of 17.1:9 would correspond to a screen resolution of 1920x1010 or 2285x1080 depending on which dimension you wish to stay constant (for a monitor/TV you would go with 1920x1010 and black bars since you can't phy
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P.S. I guess to justify your whole number argument they could have gone with 171:90 aspect ratio but they are trying to make an easier comparison to the standard 16:9 aspect ratio.
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Nothing wrong with 19:10 except that it isn't equal to 16:9 or 1920x1080 (it may be close but the other two are actually equal to each other).
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Sorry I thought that AC was just trying to get 1920x 1080 into "nice" numbers. I didn't do the math for 17.1:9. I agree that 19:10 is much better than 171:90 I was just using lazy math (multiplying by 10 is easy) to get a couple of whole numbers.
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P.S. 19:10 is a lot nicer than 17.1:9 as well.
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> you can't physically change the size of the screen
Challenge accepted:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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