it's not a huge deal but the BR release of High School Musical 2 is widescreen where the SD is foolscreen

As a pretty big fan of Traitor (I would assume most others in this thread to be fans as well or why would an 1.78:1 SD release matter?) I can't say the aspect ratio of the SD is affecting my excitement for this release at all. Pretty sure this movie made it crystal clear Don Cheadle is indeed an action star which I would assume lead to him replacing Terrence Howard in |Iron Man 2... While I am def stoked for TDK this coming week I am almost more excited for the 19th.. especially after I watched clip they had up at IGN last week and was reminded how much I dug this flick in theatres.

Also if the 1.78:1 bothers you that much why not just pick up a BD player, they have them out there for like a $150, bet closer to the Holiday you might even be able to find them cheaper.

But yet they decided to release Righteous Kill as 2.35:1?? So what is their excuse now?

...Are you sitting about an inch away from the screen? That's the only way I could picture someone having to physically turn their head from one side to the other to watch a movie shot in 2.35:1.

All movies (or TV shows) should be released in the original aspect ratio. Period.

the excuse they have was just pure bull in the first place!
anchor bay should just re-release the film in the right format, but of course
they won`t do that. i bet they will just sit this one out and hope that no one but a bunch of film freaks in this forum will notice!
at least righteous kill was left in its theatrical aspect ratio!

DVD Aspergers strikes again

Since the width of the image being displayed on a TV is the same, regardless of the aspect ratio (true also for my projector), the required head-turning will be the same regardless of aspect ratio. This makes me think the person you're responding to is trolling.

Oh I'm positive of that. That what I thought when I first responded.

Here is what I originally said, typo intact:

I then went on to say:

I thought I was being clear that I was talking about watching theatrical presentations, but I can see where some people might have been confused.

I think that movies (and TV shows) should be released in their original aspect ratio (also not colorized and without updated special effects using the newest technology).

I normally don't buy when these types of alterations are made. An example from Anchor Bay is Season of the Witch/There's Always Vanilla , which were altered from their original 1.37:1 to a 1.77:1 AR. I was eager to get that release before I learned of the altered aspect ratio, but have never picked it up. I assume that the alteration is being made to Traitor for the same reason. They believe that most people want a product that fills up their screen, and a growing percentage of households have TVs with a 1.78:1 aspect ratio. They probably also assume that most people who buy Blu-ray want to get as close to the original theatrical experience as possible, and therefore give them the correct aspect ratio.

I've never contacted any company regarding this issue, but I think that the things suggested and done here may (ultimately) result in a corrected release. If Anchor Bay realizes they are losing sales because of this practice, they're likely to rethink it.

There are always exceptions and I tend to disagree with blanket statements. While I prefer OAR I won't avoid a release if it isn't perfect if the content is good.

As far as colorization, again it depends. The colorized "It's a Wonderful Life" is very well done and for a festive occasion as Christmas I prefer it over the b/w. Who is to say it wouldn't have been done in color if the funding allowed at the time.

As far as special effects. If done correctly they also can be a welcome change. I like the adjustments to the original Star Trek series. They didn't stray from the original concept but just made improvements. Again, if the techniques were available then you don't tink they would have used them.

Now many don't like the changes to Star Wars but the bigger issues I believe most had were related to plot changes not special effects. Also, remember Star Wars went through earlier changes to improve the special effects that were well received. In the original movies and VHS copies many of the battle scenes had visible rectangular shapes around the ships that was a result of the blue screen techniques available at the time. The later release removed these issues.

Just my opinion, but some changes can be good if taken on a case by case basis.

I remember how much more clearly visible they were on the laserdisc releases. My friends and I just joked those were their "shields".


...and I agree with your statements. Even in Star Wars, I liked most of the small changes/improvements in effects. It was when they changed the actual content of the story or added whole scenes that it just became ridiculous.

How about, just don't buy the TRAITOR dvd, you don't really need to see it again...

Do you know that Jimmy Stewart wept when they colorized It's a Wonderful Life? Capra himself said that b&w was chosen because it fit the subject matter better than color.

That's good to know about the artistic choices made by Capra, thanks for sharing that. But it doesn't change the fact that some prefer watching it colorized. I wouldn't want the b/w copy to go away by any means but I personally like the option in this case.

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.

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).

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!

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.

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.

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.