Windowboxing / Pictureboxing: Now with a shiny new petition!

[Gregory]

I didn't know that. I understand why overscan existed with CRTs but I don't know of any reason it should have to exist with pixel-based displays. After hearing people talk about correcting overscan on their LCD sets, I thought this was becoming a thing of the past a few years ago. This does change my stance on the matter.

[movielocke]

even with CRTs overscan can usually be corrected if you access the service menu.

[Michael Kerpan]

As CRTs age, the degree of overscan increases. While we could cope with overscan (via the service menu) when our TV was new, after several years there was too much overscan and sacrifices (on one side or the other) were unavoidable.

[Norbie]

I know.

Lets get Criterion to windowbox "all" their releases, not only their 4x3, but widescreen as well.*





* You see, this is a post that would make more sense and be understood if those small faces/emotion thingis were available.
Those that get it - thank you, and pass it on.

[Matt]

Would it be funny, too?

[Michael Kerpan]

I would note that not only do most HD TV reviews ignore the overscan issue, virtually all ignore the quality of the TV tuner itself (and not having cable or satellite service, we would have appreciated some info on this topic).

[Luke M]

Has anyone bothered to make a list of which titles were windowboxed? Even better would be to see which titles were then corrected when released on Blu-ray.

[swo17]

I don't believe any Blu-ray releases have been windowboxed.

[macaca]

i have a spare blu-ray player in my basement hooked up to a normal crt tv, and crumb (blu-ray) was definitely pictureboxed on it.
no idea why?

[knives]

It has to be that way since it is set up for widescreen teevees. Any academy film will have large borders on all sides when shown on an academy teevee.

[alfons416]

Are Criterion still windowboxing their 4:3-titles? even on Eclipse-titles? that would make me avoid this set.

[TMDaines]

Are Criterion still windowboxing their 4:3-titles? even on Eclipse-titles? that would make me avoid this set.

Looking on Beaver at the last few Eclipse sets: only very slightly now. Nothing like the thick black bars that marred the War Trilogy set and so on.

Maybe someone can confirm?

I do have one minor disappointment, though - I can see that the set is conceptually structured around one short and one feature per director (the shorts making up Pearls of the Deep), but this means that the Eclipse edition of Pearls will be inferior to the Czech release, since that included all seven films that were made for the project - and the Ivan Passer and Juraj Herz contributions certainly weren't also-rans. (On the contrary, they were the two films judged strong enough to release separately!).

Perhaps some strong enough campaigning could get Criterion to reconsider? They've changed their mind on a few things before after previous reactions to the announcements.

[zedz]

Are Criterion still windowboxing their 4:3-titles? even on Eclipse-titles? that would make me avoid this set.

This is probably the stupidest comment to be posted on the forum this year. And there's been some stiff competition!

[TMDaines]

Are Criterion still windowboxing their 4:3-titles? even on Eclipse-titles? that would make me avoid this set.

This is probably the stupidest comment to be posted on the forum this year. And there's been some stiff competition!

In fairness, if you have a display with zero overscan - i.e. the ideal display - then the heavy pictureboxing was simply awful. Luckily watching on the PC allows you to get rid of it.

[zedz]

Well, we all know why Criterion favours windowboxing (because its customers ought to see the whole image), and the big counterargument against it that was raised when the practice was first established (namely that HD widescreen televisions, which would become the new standard, did not overscan) turned out to be bullshit, so it's way past time people stopped whining about it.

And if people are going to avoid seeing brilliant films in what's probably the best image quality they'll ever enjoy on home video because of a theoretical, and incredibly marginal 'loss of image quality' (which, let us not forget, has never been substantiated despite six or seven years of people pissing and moaning about it), they're idiots. This is supposed to be a forum for people who like movies.

[domino harvey]

Are Criterion still windowboxing their 4:3-titles? even on Eclipse-titles? that would make me avoid this set.

This is probably the stupidest comment to be posted on the forum this year. And there's been some stiff competition!

And now it's the worst as well!

[mfunk9786]

Thank God, my computer overscans shitty posts

[TMDaines]

Here's a screengrab just taken of Germania anno zero. The pictureboxing is excessive and is actually a significant part of the image when calcuated. I don't understand the trend of catering for inferior equipment and giving those with superior equipment an inferior viewing experience. Those with overscan get the perfect image and those that don't have overscan get thick black bars around theirs. It makes no sense. Those who are seriously concerned about losing the edges of the frame will have, or should have, taken steps to ensure that they won't purchase equipment that may do this. Then of course there's also the likelihood that the director and cinematographer framed their filming with this in mind, as part of the viewing space is regularly not viewable due to lack of care from those who are projecting or transferring it.

It seems Criterion have stopped this practice anyway but, yeh, boycotting a release because of this is just cutting off your nose to spite your face ultimately.

---

I'm sure this will be moved to infighting but the trend of mfunk just posting snarky shit in every thread is getting kind of annoying. The forum has a rule, or indeed rules, against this kind of stuff. If you've got something to add or contribute then say it, but a quick view of your recent posts more than shows the trend of just adding one line of nonsense.

[knives]

You do know that many HD television sets still do overscan, correct?

[zedz]

Then of course there's also the likelihood that the director and cinematographer framed their filming with this in mind, as part of the viewing space is regularly not viewable due to lack of care from those who are projecting or transferring it.

If Criterion is diligent (and I'm sure they are), their framing should imitate the masking in good film projection, and not be too tight or loose (though of course there's always debate about this).

As for black space around the image, I'm pretty sure all directors and cinematographers allow for this when shooting their films. It's called a 'cinema.'

To the best of my knowledge, nobody has ever posted side-by-side comparisons of a letterboxed and non-letterboxed presentation of the same transfer in which there is a perceptible difference in quality (to the detriment of Criterion's letterboxed transfer - there are plenty of comparisons that show the opposite!), which would be the smoking gun of this whole palaver actually having any substance whatsoever.

[Hopscotch]

The English-friendly DVDs of Pearls of the Deep and The Joke were abominably bad

As was the release of Capricious Summer. Shaky, washed out image and garish subs that read like they'd been translated into a language other than English and then machine-translated. Very much looking forward to what will undoubtedly be a warmer and sharper presentation with intelligible subs. The comparisons to Partie de campagne are apt.

[MichaelB]

Of course all this discussion about windowboxing is hypothetical anyway - I've just had a look at my Eclipse discs of the Makavejev films, probably the closest equivalents to these in terms of age and source, and they're not windowboxed, not even the one in plain 4:3.

As was the release of Capricious Summer. Shaky, washed out image and garish subs that read like they'd been translated into a language other than English and then machine-translated. Very much looking forward to what will undoubtedly be a warmer and sharper presentation with intelligible subs. The comparisons to Partie de campagne are apt.

Well, in that case there was a Czech DVD with English subtitles, so I went for that instead - I imagine it's markedly better, but it's still not great: the analogue tape source was all too obvious.

[TMDaines]

You do know that many HD television sets still do overscan, correct?

Yes, I do and I never denied that. I just don't know why you would cater for inferior equipment and give the inferior experience to the superior equipment that doesn't overscan.

To the best of my knowledge, nobody has ever posted side-by-side comparisons of a letterboxed and non-letterboxed presentation of the same transfer in which there is a perceptible difference in quality (to the detriment of Criterion's letterboxed transfer - there are plenty of comparisons that show the opposite!), which would be the smoking gun of this whole palaver actually having any substance whatsoever.

It's not necessarily a loss of quality from the wasted space but the fact it is distracting and looks poor when displayed properly with no overscan. There's thick black space around all four sides of the image, and the frame of the picture is smaller as a result with a significant part of the display wasted. Even though this isn't my main point, it isn't even debatable that there won't be greater picture quality from a transfer with a greater resolution. Whether it is noticable to you on your display is another matter but, you're correct, for most people it won't be. That isn't the main bone of contention here though.

Thankfully, it seems that Criterion have now seen sense on the issue now.

[MichaelB]

I'm normally not bothered by windowboxing - the one time when it really did annoy me was with the Norman McLaren box set, because while I completely appreciate the NFB's laudable desire to ensure that everyone sees every square millimetre of McLaren's original frames, they were so excessively cautious about it that the black bars were unreasonably thick. I tried playing it on my parents' old tube TV which had what was hands down the worst overscan I've ever encountered (it used to cut subtitles off at the bottom!), and the bars were still very prominent.

Now that's something I'd buy again in a heartbeat if it was upgraded to Blu-ray.

[swo17]

I just don't know why you would cater for inferior equipment and give the inferior experience to the superior equipment that doesn't overscan.

But superior equipment (if it is truly superior) will also give you the ability to manually adjust the overscan so that the image itself can fit snugly on your screen without any black bars around it. So the only thing I can see that is left to complain about is the minor annoyance of having to take a few seconds to adjust your screen after popping in a windowboxed DVD.