Firefly is NOT Widescreen, nor is it Full Screen but FULL FRAME who hoo!
Mr Who
be presented in FULL FRAME.
Got this info from www.dvdplanet.com
(Thanks Ian for you help, I found it from www.digitalbits.com.)
For those who don't know, There are 3 formats that are available for
DVDs.
Full Screen, Wide Screen, and FULL Frame
The Differences are as follows:
Full Screen is what most everyone is used to. On a normal TV the
Aspect Ration is 4:3 and the DVD uses the entire TV screen to view the
picture. The draw back is that you do not get to see the entire film
as it was shot. Instead the picture is panned left and right
constantly to view the important parts of the sceen. (refered to as
Pan and Scan). To view a Wide screen movie you will see the Black
bars on both the top and bottom (refered to as letterbox)
In the Wide Screen format, the Aspect ration of the picture is 16X9.
The wider screen is able to show the film as it was ment to be viewed
obviously.
So what the heck is FULL FRAME?
Full Frame is the combination of Full Screen and WIDE Screen. The
first implementation of this feature is Pixar's "Bug's Life" The
movie was digitally filmed in 16:9 Wide screen format. However, Pixar
didn't want the annoying black (letterbox) bars to show up on
everyone's TV. So what Pixar did was to refilm the entire movie with
the black bars filled in. In other words, you saw the film exactly
the way it was meant to be seen without the Pan and Scan drawbacks,
but at the same time you saw more picture than what you saw in the
movies!
Santa Joss is releasing the Firefly DVD in the FULL FRAME format just
in time for Christmas. There is a God in the Shiny 'verse!
Got to go and pre-order my copy now.
mrwho
Hank Tiffany
>
> Full Screen is what most everyone is used to. On a normal TV the
> Aspect Ration is 4:3 and the DVD uses the entire TV screen to view the
> picture. The draw back is that you do not get to see the entire film
> as it was shot. Instead the picture is panned left and right
> constantly to view the important parts of the sceen. (refered to as
> Pan and Scan). To view a Wide screen movie you will see the Black
> bars on both the top and bottom (refered to as letterbox)
Actually, Pan & Scan refers only to the process used to make movies
fit onto the tv screen. It has nothing to do with things originally
filmed to be on the tv screen which, IMHO, should be presented as
originally shown, just like movies should be in widescreen
(letterbox).
Hank
--
Hitler, he only had one ball/Goering, had two but they were small
Himmler, was very simmlar/But poor old Goebbels had no balls at all
Bob Bell
[snip]
> Santa Joss is releasing the Firefly DVD in the FULL FRAME format just
> in time for Christmas. There is a God in the Shiny 'verse!
Full frame is not the boon you make it out to be.
When a movie is shot in a wide screen format, the entire frame of film
is exposed. By the time the movie is delivered, the unused portions of
the frame will have been blacked out (either on the print itself or
simply by blocking it in the projector).
Because they know they will do this, when they're shooting they don't
worry about things like the sound boom, stage hands, set rigging,
etc., showing up in these regions of the frame; after all, it will be
blocked out later, so why should they care?
Thus, when you see the movie full frame, you get to see all these
things you were never meant to see. As you can imagine, it is quite
annoying and distracting.
Obviously this is not an issue with Pixar's movies, but it is with
live action productions.
I have no idea if this will be an issue with Firefly, but your message
seems to imply that full frame is a good blend of full screen and wide
screen; it is not.
Personally, I will be disappointed if it is not wide screen, but
that's just my taste. On the other hand, I'll take whatever they give
me; one thing I'm sure that everyone here can agree on (certain trolls
excepted) is that the show's great in any format.
Bob
R Wilkin III
> After much research, I have found out that the Firefly DVD is going to
> be presented in FULL FRAME.
>
> Got this info from www.dvdplanet.com
>
The Mutant Enenmy CEO, Chris Buchanan posted the following on the Fox
Formum:
To give you a quick response to a complicated subject...
The Firefly DVD will be in the 16:9 format (1.78:1).
I know that there are a multitude of issues surrounding the definitions
of "letterbox" "widescreen" & "anamorphic" etc, but I'll be real
practical here:
We shot the show on 35mm film in an aspect ration of 1.78:1 with a 1.33:1
(or 4:3) box to enable us to deliver both a "regular" TV version and a
"widescreen" TV version to Fox Broadcasting. (Firefly was always
conceived as a 16:9 show, but Fox, as a policy, does not broadcast any
letterboxed shows. That being said, their HDTV broadcasts do go out
widescreen.)
As for any differences in what you've already seen, we might have
rendered some of the title work in 1.85:1 (anamorphic) but I really can't
remember.
The bottom line is: What you are getting on DVD is what Joss intended:
16:9. No fake letterbox bars on a 4:3 show, no "panned and scanned"
anything, just Serenity and her crew in glorious widescreen!
Hope that clarifies things.
Best,
Buchanan
George W. Harris
:Mr Who <mr....@comcast.net> wrote in message news:<s7t4nv0vls83mog4n...@4ax.com>...
:
:[snip]
:
:> Santa Joss is releasing the Firefly DVD in the FULL FRAME format just
:> in time for Christmas. There is a God in the Shiny 'verse!
:
:Full frame is not the boon you make it out to be.
:
:When a movie is shot in a wide screen format, the entire frame of film
:is exposed. By the time the movie is delivered, the unused portions of
:the frame will have been blacked out (either on the print itself or
:simply by blocking it in the projector).
Well, *usually*. Some films are shot
anamorphically; they are shot with a lens which can
put a widescreen shot in a full 35mm frame, so that
everything that is on the film ends up on the screen,
but in widescreen format. If the projector uses the
wrong lens, everybody looks really tall. John
Carpenter prefers to shoot anamorphically, for
instance (too bad his movies have been crap for
two decades).
--
e^(i*pi)+1=0
George W. Harris For actual email address, replace each 'u' with an 'i'.
lurkinghorror
III <rwil...@nospam.com> wrote:
>
> The Mutant Enenmy CEO, Chris Buchanan posted the following on the Fox
> Formum:
>
> To give you a quick response to a complicated subject...
> The Firefly DVD will be in the 16:9 format (1.78:1).
>
> I know that there are a multitude of issues surrounding the definitions
> of "letterbox" "widescreen" & "anamorphic" etc, but I'll be real
> practical here:
>
> We shot the show on 35mm film in an aspect ration of 1.78:1 with a 1.33:1
> (or 4:3) box to enable us to deliver both a "regular" TV version and a
> "widescreen" TV version to Fox Broadcasting. (Firefly was always
> conceived as a 16:9 show, but Fox, as a policy, does not broadcast any
> letterboxed shows. That being said, their HDTV broadcasts do go out
> widescreen.)
>
> As for any differences in what you've already seen, we might have
> rendered some of the title work in 1.85:1 (anamorphic) but I really can't
> remember.
>
> The bottom line is: What you are getting on DVD is what Joss intended:
> 16:9. No fake letterbox bars on a 4:3 show, no "panned and scanned"
> anything, just Serenity and her crew in glorious widescreen!
>
> Hope that clarifies things.
>
> Best,
> Buchanan
>
Now, THAT'S what I wanted to hear. I wonder why there is so much
confusion and conflicting information about this subject?
LH
--
In times like these, it helps to recall that there have always been times like
these.
-- Paul Harvey
jayembee
> After much research, I have found out that the Firefly
> DVD is going to be presented in FULL FRAME.
No, it isn't. It's going to be in anamorphic widescreen.
> For those who don't know, There are 3 formats that are
> available for DVDs.
>
> Full Screen, Wide Screen, and FULL Frame
The first and third are pretty much the same thing. It depends
on who uses them, and there's no real consensus on which means
what.
> The Differences are as follows:
OK, it's obvious that you researched this, but unfortunately,
you haven't quite grasped it fully.
> Full Screen is what most everyone is used to. On a normal
> TV the Aspect Ration is 4:3 and the DVD uses the entire
> TV screen to view the picture. The draw back is that you
> do not get to see the entire film as it was shot. Instead
> the picture is panned left and right constantly to view
> the important parts of the sceen. (refered to as Pan and
> Scan). To view a Wide screen movie you will see the Black
> bars on both the top and bottom (refered to as letterbox)
Whether a DVD is pan-&-scanned depends on how the film was
shot in the first place. There are several different ways,
and each can be treated differently on DVD.
First, some basic history. From the beginnings of film up
until the end of 1953, all films (with some small number of
notable exceptions) were shot in what's called Academy Ratio,
which is 1.37:1. When TV was being developed, that ratio was
adopted for the shape of the picture tube, and the format of
the video signal. Or close enough to it -- the TV ratio is
4:3 or 1.33:1. Films shot in Academy Ratio, which is (as I
said) most films up to the end of 1953, plus a number of
films through the rest of the 50s into the 60s, when
transferred to DVD, are left as is (except for the very
slight trimming needed to fit 1.37:1 into 1.33:1). This
also applies to made-for-TV movies and TV series until
well into the 90s.
In 1953, in a move to try and recapture the audience that
was being eroded by the growing popularity of TV, the movie
industry experimented with several different processes to
yield a widescreen picture. Most of the processes were
variations on two basic themes: anamorphic and matted
widescreen. (For this argument, I'm ignoring 70mm processes
and Cinerama.)
With anamorphic widescreen, a fish-eye lens is used to squeeze
a much wider image onto a normal film negative. The film is
then printed like that, and a corresponding fish-eye lens
on the theater's projector un-squeezes the image back out to
it's original ratio, which is typically 2.35:1.
When anamorphically photographed films (the two most common
processes used are CinemaScope and Panavision) are transferred
to DVD, they must be either letterboxed or pan-&-scanned. The
former maintains the 2.35:1 ratio, but trades off image size.
The latter crops off a considerable amount (close to 40% of
the original picture) to fit the frame to the TV screen.
With matted widescreen films, the film is actually *shot*
in Academy Ratio, and printed that way as well. When these
are shown in the theater, there's an aperture plate called
a mask, that's fitted onto the projector, and which mattes
off the top and bottom of that full-frame picture, yielding
a wider ratio projected image.
But even though the film is shot full-frame, the director
and cinematographer *compose* the shots to be in the wider
ratio. Monitors on the set display what is seen through the
cameras, and the monitor screens have lines marked on them
to show the director and cinematographer what parts of the
frame will be matted off. They compose the shot so that all
essential elements of the shot are within the wider framing
area.
With matted widescreen films, there are several possible
ratios, with the most common being 1.66:1, 1.78:1, and 1.85:1.
When these are transferred to video, they can be pan-&-scanned,
but usually aren't. Sometimes, the sides are just cropped off,
but most of the time, they are simply transferred un-matted
(this is referred to as "open matte"). The result is that you
actually end up with more picture than was seen in the theater.
To some people this sounds like an improvement, but in most
cases, the extra picture was never intended to be seen: it
may simply be empty space, or in some cases, you might see
boom mikes or lights in those parts of the screen. In other
cases (a particular scene in A FISH CALLED WANDA, for example),
a character who is supposed to be naked is revealed to actually
be wearing pants.
Since the late 80s, there's a third major process that's come
into popularity, known as Super-35. It's essentially a combo
of anamorphic and matted widescreen. The entire film negative
is used (including the area normally reserved for the optical
soundtracks), and the picture is composed for 2.35:1. Like
other matted films, these can be transferred open matte, or
with relatively minimal panning & scanning.
The problem with open matte transfers, however, is with films
that use a lot of CGI. While live-action is shot full-frame,
CGI shots are done only at the wider ratio. If a certain
amount of the picture is going to be matted off, it's more
cost-effective to composit and render the CGI only for the
part of the frame that will be seen. So, even when such films
are transferred open matte, there's still some panning &
scanning being done during CGI-heavy shots. TITANIC is a
notable example.
> In the Wide Screen format, the Aspect ration of the picture
> is 16X9. The wider screen is able to show the film as it
> was ment to be viewed obviously.
This isn't quite true. 16:9 -- a.k.a. 1.78:1 -- is the aspect
ratio (nota bene: "ratio", not "ration") of widescreen TVs,
but the ratio of a widescreen film can be anywhere from
1.66:1 (the low end of matted widescreen) to 2.76:1 (Ultra
Panavision -- the most notable example being BEN-HUR).
Obviously, even on a widescreen TV, there will be black bars
if the film in question is wider than 16:9 ratio of the TV
screen.
Now, there's still the issue of widescreen TV shows to deal
with. These are essentially done the opposite way as widescreen
films. Instead of shooting in 4:3, and matting off the top
and bottom to achieve the 16:9 ratio for widescreen broadcast,
they are shot in 16:9, and then the sides are cropped to create
the 4:3 "center extraction" picture for normal broadcast. They
are composed so that nothing essential is on the sides of the
frame, and thereby get cropped off.
> So what the heck is FULL FRAME?
>
> Full Frame is the combination of Full Screen and WIDE Screen.
> The first implementation of this feature is Pixar's "Bug's
> Life" The movie was digitally filmed in 16:9 Wide screen
> format. However, Pixar didn't want the annoying black
> (letterbox) bars to show up on everyone's TV. So what Pixar
> did was to refilm the entire movie with the black bars
> filled in. In other words, you saw the film exactly the way
> it was meant to be seen without the Pan and Scan drawbacks,
> but at the same time you saw more picture than what you saw
> in the movies!
This is wrong is almost every way.
First of all, "full frame" doesn't refer to specifically what
Pixar did with A BUG'S LIFE. While there is, as I said way
back at the top, no consensus, on the differences in terms,
most people tend to use "full frame" for any film that was
composed for the 4:3 ratio. That includes older, Academy Ratio
films, made-for-TV movies, and TV shows.
Secondly, when Pixar filmed A BUG'S LIFE, they composed it in
the 2.35:1 ratio, not 16:9. This wide framing is the way they
intended the film to be seen.
When it came time to release it on DVD, instead of panning &
scanning it to create the full-screen, they recomposed the
entire, moving the various elements of the scenes around to
create an entirely new 4:3 framing. Contrary to what you
said, (a) you did *not* see "the film exactly the way it was
meant to be seen without the Pan and Scan drawbacks", because
it was never originally meant to be seen in 4:3, and (b) you
did *not* see "more picture than what you saw in the movies",
you saw the exact same amount of picture, but it was shuffled
around into a differently shaped frame.
And, more to the point, this has nothing to do with FIREFLY,
because the reason why Pixar was able to do this with A BUG'S
LIFE is because the entire film was completely within the
digital realm. The same could *not* be done with a live-action
film or TV show.
> Santa Joss is releasing the Firefly DVD in the FULL FRAME
> format just in time for Christmas.
Nope. The DVDs will be 16:9 widescreen, as God and Joss intended.
If they were released full screen, they'd be cropped. There
would be no additional picture.
-- jayembee
Lokari
>The bottom line is: What you are getting on DVD is what Joss intended:
All technical details aside, that's the important thing. I want to see
Firefly the way Joss intended it to be seen.
--
Exodus 22:18 can kiss my pagan ass
www.lokari.net
Jay Hova
<lokari@_nospam_lokari.net> wrote:
> R Wilkin III <rwil...@nospam.com> wrote:
>
> >The bottom line is: What you are getting on DVD is what Joss intended:
>
> All technical details aside, that's the important thing. I want to see
> Firefly the way Joss intended it to be seen.
>
Amen to that!
JayHova ;)
--
Conceit is God's gift to little men.
-- Bruce Barton
ToolPackinMama
> With matted widescreen films, there are several possible
> ratios, with the most common being 1.66:1, 1.78:1, and 1.85:1.
Etc., etc., etc.
::Boggle::
Bo Rosen
> OK, it's obvious that you researched this, but unfortunately,
> you haven't quite grasped it fully.
This was so good I'm going to keep it.
Thanks,
Bo
Steve T
news:d3aeee5b.03092...@posting.google.com...
> (a lengthy and interesting explanation on aspect ratios)
Thanks for a very informative message! Like Bo, I've saved it for future reference.
Jay G
"jayembee" <jayembe...@snurcher.com> wrote
> First of all, "full frame" doesn't refer to specifically what
> Pixar did with A BUG'S LIFE. While there is, as I said way
> back at the top, no consensus, on the differences in terms,
> most people tend to use "full frame" for any film that was
> composed for the 4:3 ratio. That includes older, Academy Ratio
> films, made-for-TV movies, and TV shows.
>
> Secondly, when Pixar filmed A BUG'S LIFE, they composed it in
> the 2.35:1 ratio, not 16:9. This wide framing is the way they
> intended the film to be seen.
>
> When it came time to release it on DVD, instead of panning &
> scanning it to create the full-screen, they recomposed the
> entire, moving the various elements of the scenes around to
> create an entirely new 4:3 framing. Contrary to what you
> said, (a) you did *not* see "the film exactly the way it was
> meant to be seen without the Pan and Scan drawbacks", because
> it was never originally meant to be seen in 4:3, and (b) you
> did *not* see "more picture than what you saw in the movies",
> you saw the exact same amount of picture, but it was shuffled
> around into a differently shaped frame.
Just a nitpick here, the Pixar used various methods to reframe it's
films in 4:3. One method they used was rendering additional
image information on the top and bottom of the frame. The
effect is similar to "open-matting" a live action film. No image
information was lost with this method, and actually more was
added.
The second method they used was to restage the characters into
a 4:3 frame. The background and setting is typically cropped,
but you didn't lose any characters to the sides since they were
all moved to fit inside the new frame.
The third method they used was simple Pan&Scan. With this
method, information *is* lost.
With A Bug's Life, Pixar used the first two methods for about
50% of the film, and P&S the for rest of the movie. So that
means for half the film you are losing image on the 4:3 version.
All of this is gone into great detail in an extra on the Collector's
Edition of A Bug's Life.
Of course, what's important to remember is.....
> And, more to the point, this has nothing to do with FIREFLY,
> because the reason why Pixar was able to do this with A BUG'S
> LIFE is because the entire film was completely within the
> digital realm. The same could *not* be done with a live-action
> film or TV show.
-Jay
Mr Who
More for just posting a message to keep the board alive somewhat.
I don't want to beat a very dead horse, but Amazon just updated thier
Firefly DVD information to state that it is Widescreen.
who
Beth Smarr
> I don't want to beat a very dead horse, but Amazon just updated thier
> Firefly DVD information to state that it is Widescreen.
>
> who
Yay!
On a different note, sometimes when my ninth graders become rowdy, I
find myself wondering what Mal would do with this crew.
I know what Jayne would do, but Vera isn't allowed in school <vbeg>
(Just kidding - I love my students, but sometimes they have more energy
than I can stand.)
--
Beth
Smarr's Beanery http://members.verizon.net/~vze4cfzz/
Beth's Wallpapers http://members.verizon.net/%7Evze4cfzz/bwalls.htm
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Mr Who
>On a different note, sometimes when my ninth graders become rowdy, I
>find myself wondering what Mal would do with this crew.
Maybe you can find some insight from these quotes.
Mal: Jayne, your mouth is talking. You might want to see to that.
Mal: Ah, the pitter-patter of little feet in combat boots...SHUT UP!
Mal: You know, they tell ya to never hit a man with a closed fist but
it is, on occasion, hilarious.
lurkinghorror
<beth....@verizon.net> wrote:
> Mr Who wrote:
>
> > I don't want to beat a very dead horse, but Amazon just updated thier
> > Firefly DVD information to state that it is Widescreen.
> >
> > who
>
> Yay!
>
> On a different note, sometimes when my ninth graders become rowdy, I
> find myself wondering what Mal would do with this crew.
>
> I know what Jayne would do, but Vera isn't allowed in school <vbeg>
>
> (Just kidding - I love my students, but sometimes they have more energy
> than I can stand.)
I was just remembering one of the old comedy shows. SNL or whatever,
where they had an Off-Ray, or some such. Anyway, wou had someone who
was "overtalking" you pointed it at them, zap, and they "went off."
Perhaps, in the future something like that will be standard issue for
teachers!
LH (who, after thinking about it, realizes that that IS what Jayne
would do)