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I know someone who's been working on the sound remastering.

flyonthewall2983 wrote:I also heard that the episodes on Amazon Prime are in widescreen. Can anyone confirm this?

I watched the first four or five episodes of season 1 on Amazon a couple months ago or so and they were standard def.

But, yes, widescreen.

Opened up or cropped?

Noiradelic wrote:But, yes, widescreen.

Oh, sorry. It wasn't widescreen when I watched it, so that must've changed.

It's opened up and cropped on Amazon, to varying degrees. You can see comparisons here.

Entertainment Weekly reports that HBO is remastering the Wire in HD. But it is still in progress - apparently that promo "ran prematurely."

Reminder that at 7:15 EST there will be a Paley panel with a lot of the people involved, and it'll be streaming on Yahoo.

Oh, joy.

Jesus, will the Blu-Ray disc be like this? I guess it's a moot point, it took three years to get back my DVD box set, and it's all scuffed up from the circle of individuals it passed through, so I'm stuck with it anyway.

Yeesh, what a bummer. In Simon's lengthy blog post discussing the decision, he sometimes sounds like a bit of a sucker.

There can be no denying that an ever-greater portion of the television audience has HD widescreen televisions staring at them from across the living room, and that they feel notably oppressed if all of their entertainments do not advantage themselves of the new hardware. It vexes them in the same way that many with color television sets were long ago bothered by the anachronism of black-and-white films, even carefully conceived black-and-white films. For them, The Wire seems frustrating or inaccessible — even more so than we intended it. And, hey, we are always in it to tell people a story, first and foremost. If a new version brings a few more thirsty critters to the water’s edge, then so be it.

"Well, they say it'll get the kids interested, who am I to object?"

If you can't get into the Wire because the screen is squarish, I suspect your problems will not end once it becomes more rectangular

I can see why this is necessary for TV broadcast these days, but if this re-framed version makes it to the Blu-ray as well then I'll be sticking with my DVDs.

It's not at all necessary for broadcast.
I've read quite a few user reviews of The Wire, and most of the complaints about the show itself (as opposed to the packaging/damaged DVDs) were about bad language. I haven't seen any complaints about it being 4:3, so if HBO really wants to listen to the "needs" of the viewers who complain about the show for what it is, they could just edit out all the profanity.

The fact that HBO would begin doing this without Simon's knowledge with the assumption that older series should be changed to fit "new industry standards" is exactly why it seems like he should have opposed this. The precedent that assumption sets is horrible, yet he never calls into question the ignorant belief that some viewers have that all programming will fit the native aspect ratio of their display.

This is such a boring way to travesty a great, sprawling work of art. If they're going to go in and reimagine everything, why not, like, give everyone red hair, CGI in some characters from Treme, or make McNulty always talk like a pirate? (Aren't pirates industry standard now anyway?)

P.S. I know people that demand to have every inch of their screen filled, and they are perfectly happy stretching the image to accomplish this.

So am I reading this right that seasons 4 and 5 were not "future-proofed"?

Individual judgment being warped by bureaucracy and money- this travesty is classic "Wire"!

My default reaction is frustration- I thought film nerds won the aspect ratio battle a decade ago. At the same time, Simon has acquiesced to the changes, he's clearly given them a decent amount of thought, and he's trying to respect his collaborators (Bob Colesberry AND HBO) and his audience. Hopefully care was taken in editing episodes to widen the image without completely corrupting it. It's fair to say this isn't quite the same as "pan and scam", because they're adding information rather than taking it away or distorting it, and they're trying to pay attention to the effects of doing so and compensate for errors.

I hope they make both a 4:3 and a 16:9 Wire available, online and on blu, and I actually prefer the slightly cramped, retro feel of the show, and the SD, but as much as the purist in me is upset, and the precedent is troubling, the decision doesn't seem to have been made with total recklessness.

flyonthewall2983 wrote:So am I reading this right that seasons 4 and 5 were not "future-proofed"?

Right. Simon mentions them discovering set equipment becoming visible in the new image area, and sync problems with actors who were previously not visible.

flyonthewall2983 wrote:So am I reading this right that seasons 4 and 5 were not "future-proofed"?

That's how Insley (the DP) puts it in the Indiewire piece, but Simon's blog post suggests that they stopped protecting for 16:9 as early as the second season.

The most alarming line in all of this, to me, is Simon's casual mention that "the HBO production team had done a metric ton of work painting out C-stands and production assistants" -- which makes it pretty clear that the new transfers will have extensively altered compositions, created by video technicians rather than the original directors and DPs.

Wow, this is ridiculous -- even worse is how quickly and eagerly so many people, elsewhere, have accepted the alterations, including Simon himself. The Wire is and will always be, to me, a 4:3 series. No matter how shiny and clean these transfers look, there is simply something "off" about The Wire in widescreen; its old-fashioned, boxy shape is just as fundamental a part of its aesthetic as its smoothly roving, long-lens camera-work, or its dense and naturalistic sound design. Simply put, I do not understand why they couldn't just do an HD transfer in the proper 4:3 ratio. Or how about give the option of viewing in either original full frame or widescreen.

What makes this especially appalling is that it's not JUST a widening of the frame, a mere changing of the AR, but that certain scenes have been actually zoomed in, and so the compositions COMPLETELY altered, e.g. as Simon says on his blog of the Burgers/Chicken shot with D'Angelo and Wee Bey in the Pilot.

The comments section on that Indiewire piece has turned into a convocation of "make it fit my TV" goobers. It's painful.

On the other hand, some commenters are lobbying Simon quite lucidly on his blog post (and he himself seems ambivalent), so perhaps that will give Simon some ammunition to ask HBO to also offer a 4:3 scan on Blu-ray, at least. Which seems like the last-ditch hope at this point. ("That would be nice," was Simon's reply to this suggestion in the comments section, in which he has been less active than is typical for him.)

You can tell that Simon understood that this is a bad decision, but without his involvement whatsoever it would have only become worse.

HBO has a bad history when it comes to shows and movies' aspect ratios. Unfortunately, this felt inevitable. I would suspect we won't see a 4:3 HD version for, at the very least, a long time, because the people who gave this effort the green light in the first place need to show that their expense was well worth it. Wouldn't do to acknowledge that the very idea was a bad one in the first place--that would mean executives are fallible.

Is it crazy for me to ask why this wasn't a big deal for the Sopranos?

Drucker wrote:Is it crazy for me to ask why this wasn't a big deal for the Sopranos?

Sopranos was shot in and framed for 16x9 from the beginning.