criterionforum.org

AnamorphicWidescreen wrote:Sure, I understand purists don't want this to go to WS since that's not the way it was originally intended, but as far as I could tell you're not losing any of the picture in the WS format:

http://www.avclub.com/article/hbo-finis ... -is-212510" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

In some shots you are losing some of the picture, as I explained above, citing the post from Simon's site where he explained the process, in some cases deciding to zoom in rather than just open up the sides in order to "maintain some of the previous composition."
Also, I don't particularly appreciate the tendency to position the compromised widescreen "alternate version" as the norm by repeatedly using the term "purists" to refer to those who prefer the original show as already aired and released. Am I also a "purist" if I don't want black and white cinematography replaced with colorized versions?

Yeah, sometime in the last decade "purist" somehow became this derrogatory word to use when talking about cases like this or retaining original (mono) soundtracks. Not sure how wanting something to be, at the least, presented how it was originally, came to be seen as pedantic and unnecessary.

Gregory wrote:In some shots you are losing some of the picture, as I explained above, citing the post from Simon's site where he explained the process, in some cases deciding to zoom in rather than just open up the sides in order to "maintain some of the previous composition."

Also, I don't particularly appreciate the tendency to position the compromised widescreen "alternate version" as the norm by repeatedly using the term "purists" to refer to those who prefer the original show as already aired and released. Am I also a "purist" if I don't want black and white cinematography replaced with colorized versions?

Thanks for the clarification. I will wait until I see the entire series on Blu (after it's released next month) before I post any more comments re: The Wire in WS. Though I liked S1, E1 in WS, I understand seeing one episode is not indicative of what the whole series will look in that format.

And, for what it's worth, replacing black and white cinematography with colorized versions of films is cinematic sacrilege.

AnamorphicWidescreen wrote:And, for what it's worth, replacing black and white cinematography with colorized versions of films is cinematic sacrilege.

While it's not cool to say this, I've always cherished my Ambersons Laserdisc for its colorized version. Something about the snow really gets me.

Blu-ray.com review. He's quite impressed with the results of the new transfers (for the most part, he has some minor quibbles), so some of us may breathe a sigh of relief over this.

It'll be the DVDs for me whenever I can find them for a good price.

It's so depressing that I called this.

Blu-ray.com wrote:There's a fullness and expansiveness to the remastered image that wasn't necessarily present before, at least by way of the 1.33:1 visuals. The city is bigger. The crime more widespread.

If it's just the price, I've seen their Blu sets go as far down as 50-60 bucks on Amazon.

I hope they don't do this for the first two seasons of Six Feet Under, assuming that's in HBO's sights next. It's one thing for what they did for this show, but the shift from 4:3 to widescreen felt almost organic to the show.

flyonthewall2983 wrote:If it's just the price, I've seen their Blu sets go as far down as 50-60 bucks on Amazon.

I'm looking to get the DVDs because they're 4:3--but I'm also expecting the DVD box to drop in price below the 90-odd dollars it currently is on Amazon.

swo17 wrote:It's so depressing that I called this.

Blu-ray.com wrote:There's a fullness and expansiveness to the remastered image that wasn't necessarily present before, at least by way of the 1.33:1 visuals. The city is bigger. The crime more widespread.

Literally. I didn't realize there were so many stabbings and muggings taking place just outside the margins if the academy frame.

That's sound logic on the reviewer's part, but really crime is so widespread in those areas of Baltimore that the aspect ratio should be more like 17:1, with a fisheye lens effect applied. HBO, please get on this and redo the HD remastering.

StevenJ0001 wrote:I'm looking to get the DVDs because they're 4:3--but I'm also expecting the DVD box to drop in price below the 90-odd dollars it currently is on Amazon.

The French set has dropped to 30€, so I guess it should drop soon on all markets.
This being said, I recall the DVDs being quite mediocre in terms of PQ.

Rewatching the series on DVD is the least-bad option for me as well, but I've read so many complaints of damaged or faulty DVDs in the Complete Series set that I plan to pick up the individual season sets, which works out less expensively than the 23-disc set anyway, as the individual seasons are often as little as $14.99 each.

As much as I disagree with the widescreen butchering of the series, I'm almost interested in watching it the next time in this version just to see how it is. My initial impression, though (just from watching parts of one episode in WS), is that there's something fundamentally "off" or wrong about The Wire not being in 4:3 and it just doesn't feel right. Not to mention all the dead space and zoomed-in or cropped shots... I don't see how anybody can justify this thing, but people's idiocy never ceases to surprise me

oh yeah wrote:As much as I disagree with the widescreen butchering of the series, I'm almost interested in watching it the next time in this version just to see how it is. My initial impression, though (just from watching parts of one episode in WS), is that there's something fundamentally "off" or wrong about The Wire not being in 4:3 and it just doesn't feel right. Not to mention all the dead space and zoomed-in or cropped shots... I don't see how anybody can justify this thing, but people's idiocy never ceases to surprise me

Well, I'm currently near the end of S1, watching on HBOGo in the new remastered 16:9 version, and honestly it's fine. I haven't noticed any glaring problems or shots that look really bad, though perhaps there's a lack of headroom at times. Basically, though, I haven't been paying attention to the AR as I've been watching -- it doesn't really make much of a difference.

That said, I still consider it a 4:3 show, and it does look best and most "right" in that ratio, not just because it was intended but because it gives it a certain distinctive look which I can't quite articulate but which is dead-on and necessary for the show's visual style to really sing. I'll happily watch the show in 16:9 HD, but I'll always keep my standard-def 4:3 DVDs of the series... unless they actually go back and do a full-frame restoration (about as likely as me voting for Trump).

Of course the mentality behind this retrofitting has further reaching effects than just the aesthetics of this one show. For instance, it would seem that one of the reasons Russ Meyer's estate refuses to license their films to Arrow for Blu-ray release is that they think it would take something like the effort that HBO put into this version of The Wire.

Russ Meyer's estate 5 years ago wrote:The 4:3 aspect ratio that Russ used is not conducive to conversion to Blu-ray format.

Tellingly, the BD that they recently put out of Faster Pussycat reimagines the film as 16:9.

Oh, I agree it's a big problem. You'd think we would be past this "black bars" shit by 2016! But no, it's just gone in the opposite direction, filling up widescreen TVs instead of full-frame ones. Buffy is another fully 4:3 show that hasn't yet been released on blu but the first two seasons (I think) were given an HD remaster and of course stretched/cropped to 16:9 widescreen (in addition to fiddling with the color correction). And I'm not really looking forward to whenever Six Feet Under gets a blu release, as I can almost ensure that they'll botch the first 2 seasons, shot for 4:3 before they changed to widescreen for Season 3.

Bear in mind that the first few seasons were composed for widescreen as well as academy to future proof those episodes. It was a pain, which is why they ditched composing for widescreen when the option was offered to them. Wait until you get to season four and five. (Maybe even three - forgot when they switched gears exactly.)

When Arrow first asked me to oversee their edition of Dekalog, I made it clear that if the new restoration wasn't available in 4:3, I'd recommend scrapping the project.

It took some time to get the necessary confirmation, but thankfully the now-notorious 16:9 cropping on the Polish BD was applied at the very end of the process rather than the beginning (as I'd initially feared).

hearthesilence wrote:Bear in mind that the first few seasons were composed for widescreen as well as academy to future proof those episodes. It was a pain, which is why they ditched composing for widescreen when the option was offered to them. Wait until you get to season four and five. (Maybe even three - forgot when they switched gears exactly.)

Oops, I forgot about this. I think it may be S4 when they ditched the future-proofing, but not sure. Actually I did post earlier in the thread how, after watching a random episode from S4 in the new AR, I noticed quite a bit of dead space and just generally "off" compositions which clearly were meant for 4:3.

[Season 4 must be cursed, then, considering how cruddy it looks on the DVDs, I'm talking interlacing and stuff, I wanna say it almost looks like VHS in some scenes -- overall it's not unwatchably bad, but very unexpected from a major HBO release and certainly noticeably inferior to S1-3 and 5's transfers. Too many episodes packed into each disc might be the cause.]

hearthesilence wrote:Bear in mind that the first few seasons were composed for widescreen as well as academy to future proof those episodes. It was a pain, which is why they ditched composing for widescreen when the option was offered to them. Wait until you get to season four and five. (Maybe even three - forgot when they switched gears exactly.)

It was season 3 when they stopped protecting for possible widescreen presentation, not composing for widescreen, which they never did (the best summary I've seen of how much it meant that they embraced the 4:3 ratio is here):

Because we knew the show would be broadcast in 4:3, Bob chose to maximize the storytelling within that construct. As full wide shots in 4:3 rendered protagonists smaller, they couldn’t be sustained for quite as long as in a feature film, but neither did we go running too quickly to close-ups as a consequence. Instead, mid-shots became an essential weapon for Bob, and on those rare occasions when he was obliged to leave the set, he would remind me to ensure that the director covered scenes with mid-sized shots that allowed us to effectively keep the story in the wider world, and to resist playing too much of the story in close shots.

Similarly, Bob further embraced the 4:3 limitation by favoring gentle camera movements and a combination of track shots and hand-held work, implying a documentarian construct. If we weren’t going to be panoramic and omniscient in 4:3, then we were going to approach scenes with a camera that was intelligent and observant, but intimate. Crane shots didn’t often help, and anticipating a movement or a line of dialogue often revealed the filmmaking artifice. Better to have the camera react and acquire, coming late on a line now and then. Better to have the camera in the flow of a housing-project courtyard or squad room, calling less attention to itself as it nonetheless acquired the tale.

Well before this happened, Simon himself offered some confusing comments that seemed to reinforce the association of HD with widescreen ("No blu-ray. It was not shot in high-def or letter box. No point.") This is interesting reading, because when attempting to clarify he suggests that the "documentarian feel" was crucial.

The DVD Active review also conflated aspect ratio with resolution when trying to deny that the widescreen conversion of the series was controversial. Regardless of whether one approves or not, it seems simply accurate to say that this kind of thing is controversial, but the DVD Active review instead just claims that the show was filmed in the "more cramped" (sic) ratio because the industry change from 4:3 to 16:9 was ongoing and they stuck with 4:3, which "saved both time and money" (a claim that doesn't seem to make any sense, and those were not the actual reasons according to David Simon).
The reviewer adds, "I’ve heard some people reason that The Wire was ‘supposed’ to be presented in 4:3/SD because it was meant to evoke the lower resolution image of a surveillance camera. As far as I’m concerned, there’s no evidence to support this theory."
The "surveillance camera" thing is a red herring because in readily available statements such as the above, David Simon has explained that the aspect ratio was a conscious choice and that it felt "more like real life and real television and not like a movie” and that the whole thing was done on a shoestring with expectations far more modest than something like The Sopranos.
Yet when it's remastered in a way that makes it seem far more "cinematic," many will go for that, even if it goes against the basic original concept of the series and composition of the shots, but I'm probably mainly preaching to the converted here (if anyone read this far down!). The part of the DVD Active review that was funniest/most bizarre to me, though was this:

Some viewers have reported crewmembers and equipment drifting into the edges of the shot. I didn’t notice any during my quick run-through, but it was a comparatively small sampling. It’s easy to believe that mistakes were made.

Simon on where the show would have gone past season five, from his Reddit AMA

David Mills suggested immigration, but to research it upon his argument, we would have had to halt production on season four and five, which would have kept us off the air for too long after season three. He was right though. It would have been worthy. It could only have come before the concluding arc of seasons four and five, which were linked by the Marlo investigation. And five -- the critique of why we don't attend to anything that matters as a people -- had to end the entire arc, so....

If we could move from technical aspects, I would like to know if the series was recorded on site. Recently a friend and me compared this series with Cabrini Green in the film Candyman. There were scenes in Candyman actually recorded in Cabrini Green itself, when it was the centre of criminality in Chicago. Some of the scenes were shot onsite, which led to the performers being at risk, Vanessa Williams being shot during the recording, or at least that's how the legend goes.

I wonder if the producers really recorded on the slums and the ghettos of Baltimore for days without end. The place looked even worse that some of the war zones that I can see on any news program! Does anybody know that?

KrystelClaire wrote:If we could move from technical aspects, I would like to know if the series was recorded on site. Recently a friend and me compared this series with Cabrini Green in the film Candyman. There were scenes in Candyman actually recorded in Cabrini Green itself, when it was the centre of criminality in Chicago. Some of the scenes were shot onsite, which led to the performers being at risk, Vanessa Williams being shot during the recording, or at least that's how the legend goes.

I wonder if the producers really recorded on the slums and the ghettos of Baltimore for days without end. The place looked even worse that some of the war zones that I can see on any news program! Does anybody know that?

Yep, I know people who worked on it, and the locations were definitely authentic.

Did that create any security issues as it did in Candyman, (that you are aware of)?