Hulkamaniac;4282608 said:
You guys are worrying over nothing. Films are meant to be cropped. Almost every film which is in 1080p and 4K is cropped, but it doesn't matter because there's extra information which is irrelevant. Check Thriller 4:3 video on YouTube, you can see the spotlights in the cemetery scene. That's not seen in the 4K remaster. So yeah what I mean is that we are not losing important information, the "cropped" 16:9 video will still look as a true 16:9 HD video.
There's literally nothing to complain about this great news.
In case anyone's interested ;-), here's a bit of an addition (simplyfying the topic a bit): the cropping depends on how the aspect ratio of film was meant to be by the director (also it was influenced by technicalities like projection standards).
The usual standard for silents was 4:3 (fullscreen), as well as for TV productions (e.g. Attenborugh documentaries until the 90s), and basically for sound films until the 50's (think of Casablanca). Then came the wildscreen format (with several aspect ratio variations) and became the norm.
There are of course many possibilities: some silent cinema directors already experimented with wider ARs (the most famous example is perhaps Napoléon (1927) by Abel Gance*), and it can occur today as well that directors chose fullscreen, or even varying ARs (recent example The Assassin (2015) by Hou Hsiao-Hsien: most of the film is fullscreen with some scenes in wildscreen).
So cropping Casablanca or a pre-2000 Attenborough to wildscreen would be a bad idea, as you would lose
important information on top and bottom (also artistic details such as composition), as in analog TV days it was a bad solution to crop wildscreen films left and right to fit the screen for similar reasons.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspect_ratio_(image)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Widescreen
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_matte
*It's called polyvision, it's basically projecting 3 fullscreen reels simultaneously resulting in a
very wide AR. The whole film wasn't shot like this, "Polyvision was only used for the final reel of Napoleon, to create a climactic finale" (from wiki):
And it was meant to look like this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyvision
Electro;4282601 said:
The 35mm film is cropped a little at top and bottom, but it doesn't look like he did that.
It has extra information on the sides, that is cropped in the 4:3 TV version.
Maybe this 35mm film is one of the copies that were made for cinemas.
So what he has there probably isn't THE master film reel.
As for this commercial, both versions can be legitimate, one intended for TV and one for cinemas:
A frame from a 35mm film print. Here, the picture is framed for the intended theatrical aspect ratio (inside the yellow box). Picture outside the yellow box is matted out when the film is shown in widescreen. For 4:3 television versions, a large portion of the picture can be used (inside the red box) with an open matte. (from wiki)