Insulting!
 

I couldn't believe it when I popped in this disc and saw the dreaded "this film has been formatted to fit your screen" warning!! What a load of crap to try to make us believe that the disc was released this way for technical issues! I've never heard of such a thing!! I hope all true film fans simply boycott the damn title. I, for one, have no plans to go Blu-ray. A great TV with a good DVD player is good enough for me. In fact, I'd put the picture on my 42" Panasonic plasma up against a Blu-ray on all these cheap flat-screens that people are buying for $400!!

I've watched the DVD as well as the theatre version, and the new aspect ratio didn't take away my enjoyment of the film one single bit. In some scenes I actually thought the framing was better. It's very little picture information that's been cropped. I can understand people are against this on principle, but other than that, and certainly not for this title, I don't see what the fuss is about.

Re: traitor wrong aspect ratio!?
 

For anyone that might care, I checked out the Scandinavian R2 DVD and it had the original aspect ratio. It had DTS as well (which the R1 oddly has an icon for on the back but not included on the DVD).

Re: traitor wrong aspect ratio!?
 

I believe they both take up the same amount of space on a disc as far as mega-bytes are concerned.

I have a feeling they did this because some people who bought a 16:9 TV are still pissed off that when they watch a film shot in 2.35:1Scope they still get the black bars on the top and bottom. Many owner's of 4:3 TVs really don't like those thick black bars required for Scope films.

When they "crop" the film to 1.78:1 (16:9) the entire image fills the screen at the proper high resolution (ie. no loss in quality unlike when one tries to zoom in on a 2.35:1 scope film in order to fill their screen).

My take: just watch the damn thing with black bars as the way it was meant to be seen!

I suppose they left the Blu-Ray in 2.35:1 because

A) the high resolution of Blu-Ray allows for zooming in (if one chooses) without losing much in the way of quality.

B) Blu-Ray customers are more movie purists who want the correct 2.35:1 ratio than the average DVD owner.


It's sounds like it's the new version of "Pan & Scan" for 16:9 era, at least for 2.35:1 Scope movies.

PS: People who oppose 2.35:1 Scope are forgetting that movies are really meant for movie theatres, not your TV set. Watching 2.35:1 makes for a great movie-going experience!

Re: traitor wrong aspect ratio!?
 

No, they don't. 2.35:1 is stored with slight black bars in the 4:3 (non-expanded 16:9) image, while 1.78:1 fills the stored image. The black bars, which are basically blank as far as image data is concerned, compresses extremely well. Thus a 2.35:1 image takes up less space than 1.78:1, generally speaking.

On Traitor specifically, the image isn't cropped, neither is it a "pan & scan" version of the original aspect ratio version. For the most part, the image has been opened up to add more information at the top and bottom.

I did some screen shot comparisons in another Traitor thread.

Re: traitor wrong aspect ratio!?
 

True enough but I guess it would depend on how it is encoded whether using a fixed bit rate or a variable bit rate. Using a variable bit rate will free up a few mega-bytes but I imagine it's pretty much splitting hairs as far as image quality goes.

Either way, "space constraints" on the DVD is a pretty flimsy reason to encode it 1.78:1.

I suppose "pan & scan" wasn't the right phrase, more like "Full Screen". The theatrical presentation has been altered to accomodate the 16:9 TV in order to fill the screen.

It's no different than a lot of "Full Screen" VHS tapes and DVDs which gave you the extra picture at the top and bottom including the odd boom mike entering the shot and other unwanted material that alters the original framing of the film.

It's not a huge deal to most viewers but I do prefer to see it as it was shown (correctly) in theatres.

Re: traitor wrong aspect ratio!?
 

Very few DVDs use a fixed bitrate. And even with a fixed bitrate, more black areas in the picture would still make for better compression and require less space. The only way it would use equal amount of space is if there were no compression at all.

The difference between 2.35:1 and 1.78:1 can be quite significant, much more than a few megabytes. If you made a 1.78:1 and a 2.35:1 version of a film on DVD, the only difference between the two being removed picture information at the top and bottom replaced with black bars, the 2.35:1 would take 0-30% less space (depending on what the removed as well as the remaining image contains).

This doesn't really have much to do with image quality per se, unless the video was so large that it would need more space than the DVD offers to keep a reasonable bitrate. Which isn't the case with Traitor at all.