Originally Posted by MoFoHo:
“Yes it was shown in full 2.55:1 widescreen. THICK black bars! Exactly like the Blu-ray.
I've never known Ch5 show a Cinemascope film as such!”
Excellent. I don't have C5 HD (the are arses for not having a Freeview HD channel. Will Viacom change that?)
Originally Posted by lotrjw:
“Wow maybe the studio told them to or they didn't check it and they expected the studio to send a cropped to 16:9 version? Or maybe just maybe Viacom have decided that they want to do things properly! Like BBC and channel 4 have been doing for a while!”
The trouble with the BBC is that they've got a lot of old prints which they won't replace wholesale, whereas C4 replaced almost all of the cropped prints with OAR ones.
Originally Posted by MoFoHo:
“Probably a mistake like you said! I was very surprised at the thickness of the letterbox bars! (Overscan switched off, obviously)Looks exactly the same aspect ratio of the current Blu-ray disc. Slightly OT question, but can TV studies use a Blu-ray disc or transfer for a TV transmission? Obviously it would need speeding up to 25fps.”
I think they'd be in deep doo-doo for doing so. I expect they'd be sent a print by the studio, they'd upload it onto their system for playback and then play that. Otherwise, you'd have to stop/start a Blu-ray player, which will lead to all sorts of problems.
Originally Posted by lotrjw:
“I would like to see what a broadcaster would do with the Grand Budapest Hotel! Being in 3 different aspect ratios for different parts of the film! It would need a tremendous amount of work to get a copy that always has a 16:9 full frame picture on top of the fact it would be an absolute mess!
I can imagine that only broadcasters that are happy to show it as is would bother! Broadcasters like ITV and channel 5 would leave it alone!”
In the cinema, and on Blu-ray (and DVD presumably), it revolves around 16:9. The Blu-ray tells you to set your TV to 16:9 so nothing gets cropped. Would've been nice if, in the cinema, it had been across the full 2.35:1 width for those scenes. That said, the majority of it was 4:3, so it would've been a hell of a juxtaposition if it had.