We all know the old adage that you can’t fit a square peg into a round hole, and as it relates to our current discussion, if the aspect ratio of the source material is not exactly the same as the aspect ratio of the screen you’re viewing it on, something’s gotta give. In today’s program we’ll discuss something we’ve probably all experienced, but maybe didn’t know exactly what was going on behind the scenes, and that is watching old movies on television.
From our last program you’ll remember we talked about how the wider film aspect ratios don’t quite relate to the taller 4:3 aspect ratio of our traditional televisions. To illustrate, let’s take a look at some examples from the 1966 MGM film, The Good the Bad and the Ugly.
This film was shot in the 2.35 aspect ratio by the master widescreen cinematographer Tonino Delli Colli, and directed of course by Sergio Leone.
The second way is to evenly scale the image until the vertical dimensions are the same, thus filling the entire 4:3 screen with a picture, solving the distortion problem, but cropping parts off the image. This technique was the standard practice to present a movie on television, and is referred to as Pan and Scan.
To show you how it works, we’ll use an example from the next scene, shown here in its original width. It’s a standoff, four guys facing Clint, one draws, cut to Clint drawing faster, letting off three shots, three guys go down, cut to close-up of anti-hero, cut to close-up of gun barrel.
To make a Pan and Scan version, a technician would take the film footage and scan the area of the film to fit the 4:3 aspect ratio. For each shot, he would re-frame the scan to make the most compositional sense. In this opening shot, for instance, the scan would be of this section of film. He would then roll the footage until the next shot, reframe the scan area, roll again until it needed reframing, and so on. Now you’ll note that some of the image of the original film is cut out using this process, but like we said before, when the proportions are different, something’s gotta give.
So here’s how this scene would look modified for television: there’s the standoff - one, two, three shots fired, two guys go down, close-up, was this guy grazed by the bullet? Hard to say. Here is is again, we see and hear three shots, but only two guys fall.
Up until now we’ve been talking about the Scan part of Pan and Scan. This scene is a good example of where the Pan might be used. When the three shots go off, the technician could electronically pan the film as the action occurs, giving us a better sense of what’s going on. When we play this version back in the modified television dimensions, it looks like this. With this in mind, let’s take one more look at the full scene and compare the artificial pan to the original static wide shot.
notes:
Except you might see it sometime at the beginning and end of some old movies during the title or credit roll, as there was no other way to show all of the text, and at least distorted text is more readable than missing text.
Geek Alert: I know I’m not accounting for safety areas with this framing. I’ll get to them later, so for now let’s just keep it simple for this subject. But note that accounting for safety areas makes the viewable area even smaller.
Geek Alert Part 2: You’ve noticed by now that videogrunt is made in 16:9, so my showing of a 4:3 version is pillarboxed and all relative. I plan to point this out in program 5.
Granted, moments before this scene we see the anti-hero being shot off his horse at a full gallop, so we would probably assume the fresh cut came from that fall.
Here’s a clip from Clint Eastwood’s first appearance shown in its full cinematic width. Now, how would you get this wide image to fit into a 4:3 television screen? Well, geometrically, there are three ways: the first of which is to unevenly re-scale the entire image to fit, which, of course creates an unwatchable distortion and is simply never done.
As you might imagine, a lot of film directors and cinematographers are not all that happy about how their films look when they’re converted to a Pan and Scan, but one thing I learned recently is that up until the 1980’s, the Federal Communications Commission here in the US, mandated that all television signals had to fill the entire 4:3 screen with picture information, so up until that time time there was simply no other alternative.
Now with movies being released to DVD, this Pan and Scan process is used to make what is now called the Full Screen version, and the outside packaging for the disc might also make reference to an aspect ratio of 1.33, which we all know from program 2, is the same thing as 4:3. These altered versions will also flash this notorious statement at the beginning of the program that we’ve all come to know and love.
If you haven’t subscribed to videogrunt yet, please do so, it’s all free - and stick around after this program for an important schpeal about copyright. So coming up in program five we’ll talk about the third way that movies get transferred onto television, a bit more about aspect ratios and DVDs, and the meaning of the word letterbox.
I don’t know how this film was actually modified for 4:3, so this forced pan was just for demo purposes. If anyone has an old VHS version of this film, I’d love to find out.
Hello again, one of my major concerns in preparing this program was that I wanted to use an example from a relevant and historical source, but I wasn’t clear whether that use would fall under the Fair Use doctrine of the copyright law.
So in doing my research on this subject, I was directed to the website for the Center for Social Media of the American University in Washington DC. In 2005 the Center had recognized the need to clarify the Fair Use doctrine for documentary filmmakers, and, as a result of an extensive study, created the Documentary Filmmaker's Statement of Best Practices in Fair Use. This document very clearly outlines the scope of the fair use doctrine and specifies the responsibility of the filmmaker's part to ensure they are in compliance with it as well.
My use of the footage of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly in this instance, falls within the guidelines of Fair Use, and I am really grateful because, face it, it was a lot more interesting and relevant to use that than, let’s say, a still image or some of my own footage. The whole spirit of the fair use doctrine is to keep the culture alive by being able to freely reference itself within constraints. And I think a lot of us, especially us small podcasters, have been terrified to venture into this realm because of the litigious nature of a lot of the media companies these days, but if we hold up our end of the bargain, if we stay stay compliant within the laws, I think it will encourage others to exercise this cultural privilege to the benefit of our audiences.
Specifically, class two as noted in the Best Practices document. The historical footage was relevant as I was illustrating a point within popular culture using an example from those times (1960’s movies on television) and also chronologically relevant to the general arc of the videogrunt aspect ratio story.
Splitting hairs, it can be argued that this is more of a legal right than a cultural privilege, but I didn’t feel the urge to get too strident.
One more point, while my use of the footage was clean under copyright laws, my acquisition of it was a completely separate matter. I purchased this copy of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly on DVD. However, the only way to get a high-resolution reproduction of this footage would have necessitated breaking DMCA laws by circumventing the copy-protection schemes applied to this commercial DVD. My way to completely avoid any concerns on this matter, was to play the DVD on my computer screen and then videotape that screen using my own video camera. I then used this legally-acquired footage as the source material for this program.
This also begs the question as to what point the copy-protection ends. Perhaps the taping of the screen was a bit extreme, but I wanted there to be no “hard-wired” connection between the data from the DVD and this program. Would a digital frame-by-frame screen capture also be a legal circumvention? There is an argument that the copy protection ends once the bits have been displayed.
Well it's my hope that there will be some enlightened legislation in the near future that will address this matter and allow media educators such as myself, the ability to acquire this material in a more pristine fashion.
Specifically, H.R. 1201, A.K.A. the Digital Media Consumers’ Rights Act. The only practical way to get access to this footage is through recordings (such as DVDs) in commercial release. No movie studio can afford to take the time to provide a small filmmakers with high-resolution footage, and even if they wanted to, the costs would be prohibitive for the filmmaker. This bill would provide for legal circumvention of copy-protection schemes when the acquired footage is not used in an infringing manner.
Special thanks to Professor Patricia Aufderheide, Director of the Center for Social Media, and Professor Peter Jaszi of the Washington College of Law of American University for their insightful correspondence and encouragement.
