Blackbeard's Ghost DVD, not just P+S but very weird!

[ichabod]

I have been trying to decide whether or not to get the UK DVD of Blackbeard's Ghost, after being put of by Luke's review of the R1 DVD saying that it has terrible P+S and looks awful.

Anyway here in the UK today on TV Blackbeard's Ghost was shown and as it came on it was fullscreen. I immediately thought this was odd as most UK Tv is now broadcast as 16X9 and on 4:3 TVs the image is simply zoomed in on, however this still leaves ever so slightly small black lines at the top of the screen. This has happened with That Darn Cat which had been broadcast before BBG and as usual the widescreen presentation of TDC had been zoomed in on to leave slight black lines. So when BBG appeared and it filled the whole screen I immediately thought hmm... maybe BBG was full screen and was open matte. Also the framing was absolutely fine, no problems whatsoever and there seemed to be a bit of empty space at the top and bottom of the picture which again led me to think hmm... perhaps it should be fullscreen or was open matte.

So I again thought of Luke's review and his mention of weird framing and compared the screen caps from the DVD to what I was seeing on the TV broadcast.

And I was shocked! not only because of extra material that had been cut off from the side, but also from all over the place!

DVD screen cap:



What was shown in the TV broadcast (excuse crude drawing done in paint):



weird huh!

I am no expert in these things but I'd guess that Blackbeard's Ghost was originallt filmed in fullscreen as open matte and was cropped for theatrical showings and that the DVD is a pan and scan version of the cropped widescreen version.

weird!

anyhoo slightly vearing off course

Does anyone own the UK DVD of Blackbeard's Ghost?

If you do which version is on the UK print? Is it the same as the US?

Anyhoo, I thought some of you might like to know the stupid things Disney does when releasing a DVD. Although we knew that already.

[ichabod]

This shot was the same too

DVD cap:



On my TV

[Luke]

That's weird, but it would make some sense of the disastrous R1 transfer. Nice illustrations!

[ichabod]

Well I've thought I might as well do the third pic as well while I was at it.

so here it is:

DVD cap:



What was in TV broadcast:



Also another point to make in those caps the colour is really dull and washed out but on the TV broadcast it was really vibrant. Take the bed curtain in the cap on TV it was really a vibrant red and gold fringing.

Also aprt from the odd bit of grain in the opening credits (which were not boxed of squeezed in any way, but there were spaces at top and bottom of credits another reason that made me think this was open matte) the film was flawless! I did not see a single speck or grain!

What are Disney playing at?!

Nice illustrations!

4 years at art college to get that good

[karlsen]

Does anybody know if this problem is on the forign editions as well?

The photos here are from the US edition (wich I have) and it would be interesting to know if other editions were better.

P.s. Just for comparition I found my old US edition on this on VHS and it is framed exactly as the DVD. I dont have any Norwegian edition of this on VHS so I don't know how those were framed.

[Poppins#1]

Let me add my 2 cents about the horrendous DVD transfer of Blackbeards Ghost. I first purchased this movie in the late 1980's on VHS. It was horribly cropped due to being zoomed in on the original camera negative, as you speculate and I agree the transfer was probably done from a matted widescreen print and was further cropped to fit the tv. Sometime in the early 1990s I saw a new tranfer on TV (probably the same transfer that you are seeing on tv) that was much improved, though not up to today's standards. It was an open matte transfer that didn't have the horrible cropping effects of the vhs version. The colors were also improved somewhat.
So when a laserdisc version came out a little later, I purchased it assuming it would be the newer transfer. WRONG! It was the same ugly 1980's transfer of the VHS.
Now jump ahead 10 years, I eagerly purchased the DVD feeling that for sure it would be the newer transfer. BURNED AGAIN! It was the same bad transfer. Needless to say, I have never watched the laserdisc or the DVD, I consider that transfer to be utterly unwatchable.

[deathie mouse]

A thread about Widescreen/open-matte/Academy



Well it seems the US DVD (and VHS and Laserdisc) as everybody has noted is a 1.33 pan/scan job from the 1.75 widescreen image, and the "TV" version some of you have seen is using a different transfer made showing part of the open matte shot area so it's much less cropped.

Tho somehow it looks to not have used the whole 1.375 open matte area and gives me the impression to be slighly cropped still from what ichabod drew on his diagrams.

On ichabod's viewing experience, just as he says, I've read that British TV uses a somewhat unconventional scheme in their widescreen/fullscreen variations (maybe 2099net might have more accurate info on this) where as he mentions they transmit widescreen images on 4:3 tvs slighly cropping the sides while at the same time leaving a little of the letterbox bands (so a 16:9 image on a 4:3 broadcast ends up like lets say a 1.55 wide (or something similar) letterboxed/cropped image instead of a 1.78 lettebox or a 1.33 crop)

So i don't know if the TV broadcast is from a transfer made for 4:3 using part of the open matte source and selectively zooming into that, leaving some of the open matte areas on top and bottom and cropping slightly on the sides and that's the way the image is burned on the transfer, not being neither 1.75 Widescreen nor 1.375 Open matte; or that they used the aformentioned hybrid letterbox/crop broadcast practice which then would give a similar looking variation of something neither being 1.75 Widescreen nor 1.375 Open matte.

Anyway, since the DVD is a pan/scan job, probably made from a hard matte widescreen element as everybody has noted (a print? that also might explain the color and stuff not being as good as it should be too), this is maybe what the true image would look like on the Widescreen OAR:


Bad looking DVD pan scan jobs demostrate why most 4:3 Video made from standart Widescreen movies (1.66-1.85) tends to transfered from the Open matte 1.375 image area instead of the correct Widescreen area cus the later would be a pan/scan on the 4:3 and give bad results. Like the Blackbeard's Ghost DVD.

Now as to why didn't they use the better openmattely transfer already done or why didn't they do a TRUE 16:9 Widescreen one for the DVD, as always, you'll have to ask the bean counters at Burbank

[ichabod]

Well Lordy Lou!

Look at the transfer of the UK DVD!





Look how Good! Look how much brighter it is than the R1

[Luke]

Well that certainly looks better, Ichabod!

And how did you reconstruct the rest of that scene, deathie? That post would have been worthy of #1,000 in my eyes!

[Poppins#1]

Thanks so much for those region 2 screencaps ichabod! It proves the point that we have all been making that a better less-cropped transfer does exist!

[karlsen]

Thanks a lot ichabod, I will order the UK one imidiatly

Edit: It has now been ordered. I can't waite to see it properly.

[Sunset Girl]

Well that certainly looks better, Ichabod!

And how did you reconstruct the rest of that scene, deathie? That post would have been worthy of #1,000 in my eyes!

It looks like he took existing parts of the images, copied them, and flipped them over and attatched them to the appropriate places outside of the frame.

Am I right, deathie?

[Luke]

Well that certainly looks better, Ichabod!

And how did you reconstruct the rest of that scene, deathie? That post would have been worthy of #1,000 in my eyes!

It looks like he took existing parts of the images, copied them, and flipped them over and attatched them to the appropriate places outside of the frame.

Am I right, deathie?

Oh, he probably won't answer you, but you are indeed right. Quite convincing!

[MickeyMouseboy]

the frames look anamorphicly squeezed into a 1.33:1 frame. that's why the characters look like sticks

[Luke]

the frames look anamorphicly squeezed into a 1.33:1 frame. that's why the characters look like sticks

I don't see that happening in any of the captures in this thread. Ichabod's screencaps are 1.33:1 squeezed to 1.25:1 (the dimensions in which PAL material is encoded), whereas deathie's simply concocted a hypothetical 1.75:1 frame by adding material to the sides in a convincing way. Unless you were just referring to Ichabod's caps, which I guess could be a way of stating that. The passenger in Dean Jones' car appears to have a skinny face naturally, too.

[Poppins#1]

Does this look better? I stretched it out to 1.33:1.

[deathie mouse]

Since there is not gonna be any deathithousand post cus people on UD hate High Definition so much and are so afraid of loosing their wasted money that they're gonna run it to the ground, I can make other kind of posts.

----o----



Screen caprtures should be stretched to 1.37 cus Pal 576 x 702 is 1.33. Pal 576 x 720 = 1.37.

Maybe MMb was refering to the ntsc "4:3" cap (also the middle section of my "reconstruction")? Which apparently is not only pan/scanned but also much more squished horizontally than the PAL transfer. That's one reason my reconstruction has more extra sea space at the sides. If the humans had been less squished they'd been farther apart originally from each other, and nearer the edges in the reconstruction too which i made straight "by the numbers" from it.

Yes Sunset, as you figured out and Luke said that's basically what i did but i massaged it a little further.
For example the passenger originally looked like one of the Reptilians that live under that airport in the US.
I also asumed the center of the car was the center of the frame.



The Pal transfer is indeed very acceptable. Tho it still has minor "errors". The first obvious thing is the open-matte (and widesceen matted) image should extend to the full capture width but it's covered by the 1.33 broadcast standards limit by the black pillar box bars. As i've said,Academy/open matte is 1.375 wide, NOT 1.33 wide. There also seems to be a weird distortion in the image: the left part seems more squished than the right (or actually it's the opposite: the right side is widened). The image proportions widen as you go from left to right (Ya can see further proof of that by noticing the right pillar box bar is wider than the left one. Maybe the scanning beam at the telecine deaccelerated as it scanned from left to right?) The girl and guy on the left look fine on the correctly derived by the numbers widescreen images but the people at the right look slightly "wideish".

And I still think the image is a little further slighly zoomed in/cropped from the full 0.825" 35mm Projector Aperture width but that's usually the case in many video transfers and unless we saw a real film frame or RP-40 test alignment image we can never be 100% sure. (The characters are kind of almost bumping to the edges so mmm.. it's nice to admire the theater curtains when that happens. But who knows it may be intentional). It's all probably near SMPTE cropping tolerance allowances anyway, and fine for an old Video broadcast standards transfer.

So fire up your zoom function on your widescreen display or bring on the masking tape for your 4:3 TV and enjoy your new Widescreen 1.75 edition of Blackbeard