Why are DVD's of TV shows in letterbox format? They're made for television for goodness sake! Are we losing something when studios chop off the top and bottom? Why do studios do that??

Thanks
Tim

Is this a real question?

It's a little known fact that all American broadcast television was set to a 1.85:1 ratio in 1947, but the television manufacturers had already decided on a standard of 1.33:1. Consequently, all televisions made after 1947 have a special device that takes the original widescreen signal and converts it to a picture that utilizes the entire screen.

With the advent of DVDs, some television shows can now be seen in their original ratio, but older series such as I Love Lucy and The Dick Van Dyke Show have been mercilessly hacked to bits by callous and greedy executives.

This will obviously turn into a comedy thread pretty quickly, but I've actually been wondering this about ER. Was the show shot in 4x3 and then matted down for the DVDs or was the show actually shot in 16x9 and then pan and scanned to meet the 4x3 ratio?

if ER hasnt always been shown letterboxed on tv then it has for almost every season.

i think we should have one day a month that lets us freely tell some people exactly what we think of ridiculous posts with no repercussion.

I dont know...maybe so you can see the parts of the show that us with 16:9 tv's see?

Foooooooooooooolscreen.

I'm in a good mood, so I'll be nice.

Tim12345 --

Why are DVD's of TV shows in letterbox format?
Some television shows are produced and presented for broadcast in the 16:9 widescreen format
Some TV shows are produced and presented for broadcast in the 4:3 standard format.
The DVDs present the shows in whatever format they were produced.

Are we losing something when studios chop off the top and bottom?
Nobody is cutting anything off of the picture --either on the DVDs or the broadcasts.
The shows are presented in whatever format they were produced.

They're made for television for goodness sake!
Yes, most of the televisions in use in the United States are still analog sets with a 4:3 screen.
But, as I'm sure you know because you are not living in a cave somewhere, widescreen 16:9 TV sets have become common and popular in the last few years, as more people have invested in home theatre systems for watching DVD movies.
So, I guess you could say that the TV shows being produced in widescreen (today) are being produced with the viewers of tomorrow in mind because as high definition becomes standard, so too will 16:9 screens.

Many of us have widescreen TVs. Welcome to the 21st century.

Thanks Count Dooku for the reply. You've answered my question.

Tim

Not entirely true. TV shows like Alias, Lost, and 24 are produced in widescreen (16x9) format for HDTV, and are then pan & scanned for 4x3 TV. In that case you are missing something when you don't watch it in HD, or on DVD where they are (or will be) in the correct 16x9 ratio.

I think we already have that, except instead of having that day once per month, we have it once per day.

Wholly separate from the issue of widescreen TVs, a show framed for 16:9 has a more cinematic feel than a show framed for 4:3 because decades of widescreen movies and fullscreen TV have made us associate the wider aspect ratio with movies. So if you want your TV show to appear more cinematic, you go with widescreen, and if you want your show to feel more like TV, you go with fullscreen.

Joss Wheedon is the perfect example of this. He wanted his show Buffy to play like a traditional TV show, with a certain level of intimacy, familiarity with the characters, etc., so he ran it at 4:3. With the spin-off, Angel, he was going for a more cinematic feel, so framed it 16:9.

Tim - If you want to view your TV DVD's in full screen I have great news for you, all you have to do is press the zoom button on your remote until the picture fits your screen and that's it!!! Please don't ask me about how to get that awesome shitty television fuzz effect though........I'm not that smart.

Don't worry, I assure you that was a joke.

Vonner wrote
I don't know about those three shows, specifically, and I don't have episodes of them recorded to check, but when I watch other shows that are presented in widescreen, like ER and The West Wing, they appear letterboxed on my 4:3 TV screen.
If it is true that some shows are panned and scanned, I would still feel comfortable that I am not missing anything. It would be insane for the show's producers to put anything important on the sides of the picture, when they knew most of the people watching it would have that stuff cut off.

JasonF wrote
This gets into the issue of aesthetics versus economics.

It is true that it is the quote/unquote higher quality TV shows that have made the switch to widescreen, but I would debate the motives.

The West Wing, for example, was an early adopter of widescreen. It switched to widescreen for its second season, in the year 2000 (as La Bamba would say).
Was that because the producers wanted a more cinematic feel for their show, or because they knew that their show had a greater appeal among wealthier and better educated demographics, and those people are exactly the kind of people who would be the first ones to buy widescreen TVs?

JasonF also wrote
Joss is the one person to who/whom I would give the benefit of the doubt.
He is a true artist, and I would believe that he would make a decision for aesthetic reasons.
But the first season of Angel was not in widescreen.

Babylon 5 was also filmed widescreen (in anticipation of the switch to HDTV), and that was in the mid 90's. It was broadcast pan and scan.

The weird thing is that the SFX on the show were rendered in fullscreen since they were so expensive. So if you watch the show in fullscreen, you get the full effects but pan and scan live shots. If you watch in widescreen (like the DVDs) you get the full live shots but matted SFX.

There are some TV shows on DVD that have been artificially changed to widescreen, though. Kung Fu is one example.

Or where the DVD is "FS" though the show was filmed otherwise; I believe CSI S1 was shot in widescreen, but the DVD is in FS. I could be wrong, however, and I believe it's now going more the other way, if at all--either artificially widescreened, or shot widescreen, and cropped for SDTV.