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This topic comprises 2 pages: 1 2
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Topic: Netflix Crops Movies like Crap
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Michael Coate
Phenomenal Film Handler
Posts: 1904
From: Los Angeles, California
Registered: Feb 2001
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posted 08-08-2013 02:48 PM
Here's the article's text...
quote:
Netflix Has Been Cropping The Hell Out Of Your Movies
Written by Dan Seitz / 07.18.13
One of the most important film innovations in the last twenty years was the DVD. Before DVDs, it was really hard to find a movie in the proper aspect ratio: Most VHS transfers cut the movie in half, essentially, because it was cheaper, and much of the movie was lost. So the fact that everything is in widescreen now means Netflix is just streaming the proper image when you fire up a movie, right?
Nope. Not at all. In fact they are going out of their way not to.
The recently launched blog What Netflix Does offers some examples of what amounts to some truly awful cropping. Here are just two examples:
Netflix hasn’t explained why this is happening, but I can hazard a guess. Video and electronics store employees have all dealt with the guy who tries to return his “broken” DVD, and when he’s told the black bars are supposed to be there, he gets ragingly angry because “I WANT TO USE ALL MY TEE VEE!” I’ve literally seen people pitch screaming fits over this. One imagines Netflix customer service hasn’t been exempt from these clowns, either.
So why should you care? First of all, Netflix hasn’t been telling anybody about this, or giving people an option to see the movie as it was intended to be seen. That’s not a starving-children grade problem, but it’s pretty lousy. Secondly, it means you’re not seeing the film like you’re supposed to. Imagine going to, say, the Louvre and seeing this:
Yeah, it’s some of the Mona Lisa. You can get the idea that it’s the Mona Lisa. But it’s not all of it. A lot of detail is missing and some of that is important.
Now imagine that, but twenty four times per second. Yeah, cropping out the guy in the foreground in The Transporter may not seem to be the biggest of deals, but the director put that guy there for a reason; cutting him out wrecks the composition of the shot. It’s essentially the equivalent of a bookstore deciding to hire Danielle Steele to rewrite works of classic literature because the customers are complaining about all that hoity-toity language, and they don’t need those fancy words.
If you’d like to let Netflix know this isn’t acceptable, you can do that right here. Hopefully Netflix reverses this position; movies deserve to be seen properly.
I doubt Netflix is the one making these modifications. I mean, they're just the retailer. I imagine it's the studios who are creating and supplying these cropped/modified transfers.
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Joe Redifer
You need a beating today
Posts: 12859
From: Denver, Colorado
Registered: May 99
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posted 08-08-2013 05:30 PM
Netflix doesn't have TIME to crop the movies. Even if they did, they'd get in big trouble for modifying the content that they were given by the studios. So therefore it can only be the studios who do the cropping. Why would anyone think differently? Netflix just streams what they are given by the studios to stream. Stuff from STARZ is usually the worst. Also, cropping a 2.35/9 movie to 16:9 is going to increase the bandwidth, not reduce it. Or just using the same bandwidth it'll just make the picture look worse at 16:9.
Dan Seitz is obviously an idiot. Let's look at some of the stuff he said:
quote: Dan Seitz
Most VHS transfers cut the movie in half, essentially, because it was cheaper, and much of the movie was lost.
IT WAS NOT CHEAPER! Actually, it was more expensive because you'd have to hire some asshole to re-edit the entire movie to keep the important things in frame. They did it because consumers at the time would freak out if they saw a letterboxed movie. TVs were pretty small at the time.
quote: Dan Seitz
Video and electronics store employees have all dealt with the guy who tries to return his “broken” DVD, and when he’s told the black bars are supposed to be there, he gets ragingly angry because “I WANT TO USE ALL MY TEE VEE!” I’ve literally seen people pitch screaming fits over this. One imagines Netflix customer service hasn’t been exempt from these clowns, either.
There are still some movies on Netflix that are full 2.39:1, idiot.
quote: Dan Seitz
Secondly, it means you’re not seeing the film like you’re supposed to.
Watching the movie at a maximum of 3 to 5 megabits per second on your phone also isn't seeing a movie like you're supposed to, ape.
quote: Dan Seitz
Imagine going to, say, the Louvre and seeing this: Yeah, it’s some of the Mona Lisa. You can get the idea that it’s the Mona Lisa. But it’s not all of it. A lot of detail is missing and some of that is important.
I'd rather shoot myself in the face. I've already seen pictures of the Mono Lisa. What difference would seeing it from 15 feet away behind ropes in real life be? Probably a worse experience, in fact. And what would make MY picture of the Mona Lisa any different at all than anyone else's picture of the Mona Lisa? There's nothing about the picture that would be mine or make it special in any way.
quote: Dan Seitz
If you’d like to let Netflix know this isn’t acceptable, you can do that right here. Hopefully Netflix reverses this position; movies deserve to be seen properly.
Netflix can't and won't do shit. And they shouldn't. It's up to the studios. Did you even research at all, Dan?
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Leo Enticknap
Film God
Posts: 7474
From: Loma Linda, CA
Registered: Jul 2000
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posted 10-13-2013 08:09 PM
I've just seen the 2010 restoration of The African Queen on Netflix, streamed to my wife's Wii (and thence to a 32" flatscreen TV via HDMI), and was expecting the worst. We just fancied a Sunday afternoon movie, none of our DVDs or BDs jumped out of the shelf as a must view, and neither did anything that was on at any theatre within easy driving distance. So we decided to give streaming Netflix a try, and I was pleasantly surprised by the picture quality. Of course I've got no way of knowing what the bitrate was, but it displayed correctly in the Academy ratio, the opening titles didn't look cropped, the detail and contrast seemed as good as could reasonably be expected on a domestic TV and I couldn't see any digital artefacts at all. There were no pauses or stutters at any point during the movie, so their servers must be pretty solid, too: the middle of Sunday afternoon must be quite a high demand time, I'd have thought.
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Marcel Birgelen
Film God
Posts: 3357
From: Maastricht, Limburg, Netherlands
Registered: Feb 2012
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posted 10-14-2013 06:09 PM
You’ve never tried to shave off a few barley corns* off the edges of your DVDs to save a few cents on shipping?**
quote: Joe Redifer
Netflix doesn't have TIME to crop the movies. Even if they did, they'd get in big trouble for modifying the content that they were given by the studios. So therefore it can only be the studios who do the cropping.
That might be a very true case. I’ve had my personal experiences with “content owners” in the past, they absolutely freak out when you touch it in any way. In this particular case we had to compress the raw stream to fit over crappy DSLs. We ended up using a horrible compressed MPEG2 stream provided by them. Our own compression was way more sophisticated (H.264 using the same bit-rate as the MPEG2 stream), but they didn’t care. Also, the Law was on their side: manipulating that content in any way was regarded as a "second publication" which is way beyond the Dark Side in most Western copyright laws. Some of those "content owners" even required DRM on content that was otherwise free-to-air (and totally unencrypted)...
Now, being really really big and thus somewhat important, I’m sure that Netflix has their own, very special deal with most "content owners", so they’re probably allowed to do their own encoding and DRM, but I doubt they’re allowed to alter the aspect ratio of the content they receive.
* I was looking for a unit smaller than an inch, being infected with the Metric System, I was inclined to say "millimeters".
** I’m actually not really bullshitting you. You can actually take some of the edges off of many of your DVDs or CDs (and maybe even Blu Rays) and still have it working in many players. As long as you do not cut where the data starts (or rather ends).
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