ABC-HD Movie Of the Week - Page 2

I peaked at it on ABC. Looked great. Pixar did an amazing job with Sully's fur.

I love this movie and the HD presentation was very good, wifey and I enjoyed this a lot.

I think a fair amount of this was cut for time purposes. For example, the scene toward the beginning where they come across the really tall bird-like monster on the street was missing. That huge monster walking was one of the best subwoofer exercises in the movie.

Monsters, Inc. looked pretty good on WPVI in Philly. Of course I let out a huge groan when the screen came on at the beginning saying it was formatted to fit the screen and cut for time. I figured the latter, but no OAR was disapointing.

Some great bass indeed in that movie, my sub was going nuts.

It was definitely OAR, and in fact was true 1.85:1 with small black bars within the 1.78:1 frame.

That's probably the idea.

They showed it earlier this year. As usual, all the best parts are edited.

I saw it too once, but since I didn't see it in at the movie theater I don't know if it's edited. Even if it is it's still good. If they took out the cursing good, It really ruined another good movie I saw on DVD, The 40 Year Old Virgin. Don't get me wrong I liked the movie, but why did the have to curse on pretty much every sentence, I would have liked it more if they had cursed less.

I can pick up two ABC OTA feeds. Tonight my local channel is showing this in SD while the other station (60 miles away) is showing it in HD. Flipping between the channels, I noticed that the HD feed is simply a 16:9 HD(??) portion of the 4:3 SD feed.

It looks like they took the HD feed, P&S for the down-converted SD 4:3 feed and then "tilt and scanned" the 4:3 HD section to get the 16:9 image.

I noticed this a lot when Applegate is sitting at the desk. In the 4:3 feed, you could see her hands and the desk, in the 16:9 feed, you couldn't see any of the desk and very little of her hands.

Is it normal for ABC to butcher a film like this? The HD feed gets less than 70% of the original movie image!!

@ sivartk

I didn't watch the Movie but while I was changing channels I saw that KVIA, the ABC Station In El Paso, was showing it in 4:3 SD. I had some trouble understanding what you were trying to say, but It seems that the Other ABC Station you get wasn't doing real HD. They took the 4:3 feed they got from the Network, pushed ZOOM 1, upconverted it, and turned on the The Stretch-O-Vision. That's why the bottom and top parts were missing. Yes TV stations Butcher Films all the time, that's why in the begining of the Movie it always says "this film has been modified from the Original, it's been formated to fit your screen and edited for content." The weird thing is that they almost always do it the other way, they cut of the sides, which have less important Information. This is the first time I've heard of a TV Station doing something like this that's screwed up.

Not necessarily.

Some movies are actually filmed full frame (4:3 aspect ratio on the 35mm camera negative) with the intent that they will be cropped to a 1.85:1 aspect ratio in movie theaters.

When those movies are broadcast on standard definition 4:3 television, they are simply broadcast "open frame", showing the part of the film image at the top and bottom of the screen that was cropped in theatrical exhibition. If the same film is cropped to a 16:9 aspect ratio for HD broadcast, the resultant image is actually very close to what was seen in movie theaters, since the 16:9 aspect ratio of HD is very close to the 1.85:1 aspect ratio of the original theatrical showing.

So, yeah, some of the picture is missing compared to the 4:3 standard definition broadcast -- but what's left conforms closely to what was shown in theaters. So it's really not a "butcher job".

I didn't pull out my DVD to compare the scenes to find out. Just an observation.

Hey ABC, Bring that opening sequence back, updated in HD & surround!!

It's an unfortunate event that it's not HD here in Connecticut on channel 8.

Edit: Scratch that - it just went HD...

No way to contact the station to tell the engineer on duty to fix it? I guess on Saturday night you are lucky if you get the B team. It is in HD on WJLA-DT ABC 7 in DC and WMAR-DT in Baltimore.

Interesting night for HD movies on the broadcast nets. CBS has Elf in HD and My Network is, amazingly, is showing The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou in HD.

I edited my post above to reflect that it finally switched over. Someone beat me to the phone call...

I watched it last night as I planned on renting that DVD anyway, but the entire night I kept wondering if it was in true HD or upconverted. Maybe I'm getting spoiled, but for those who saw it from a high definition DVD player in high definition was it sharper than the airing last night?
The image, to me at least, appeared to be about the same as standard definition DVDs image on my Toshiba A2 and my KDSR50XBR1.

Rudy

Of course a high definition disc would look better - it would have roughly double the bit rate. The airing last night was true HD, though. However, Elf on CBS looked a bit better. Of course, Elf is a bright and color movie compared to the bleaker colors of Unfortunate Events.

I understand the colors and actually liked the look and the sets, but the softness of the faces, especially on close ups, was almost unmistakable and the fact that they had that slightly stretched look to them, really made me wonder. Could it have been specific to Los Angeles?

On a separate note why would an OTA transmission not be as good as the DVD? Especially since there is no compression OTA.

Rudy

The HD disc is a higher bitrate than OTA broadcast. The NetworkTV actually stated it was almost double OTA. HD discs are 1080p and ABC's broadcast is 720p. More bits and more lines of resolution makes for a better looking picture. Not to mention your OTA broadcast is a decode to baseband from what ABC sens them and then encode to 19.3 Mbps or less (if there are subchannels).

Yes I certainly understand the difference between 720 and 1080. I guess I was wondering about the difference between a 1080 broadcast and the high definition DVD.

Rudy