Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE: Netflix Crops Movies like Crap

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Posted by Michael Putlack (Member # 6523) on 08-08-2013, 01:31 PM:

Apparently, netflix has been taking movies and, without explanation, been cropping them in really crappy ways. I haven't quoted the article because there are a lot of pictures that wouldn't work on the forum, but it is worth checking out the link below.

http://www.uproxx.com/technology/2013/07/netflix-has-been-cropping-the-ever-loving-hell-out-of-your-movies/

Posted by Michael Coate (Member # 757) on 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.

Posted by Bobby Henderson (Member # 840) on 08-08-2013, 04:41 PM:

I have a theory they are doing this, among other tricks, to reduce data bandwidth required for streaming the movie.

Posted by Joe Redifer (Member # 3) on 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?

Posted by Manny Knowles (Member # 1171) on 08-14-2013, 02:21 PM:

quote:
Secondly, it means you’re not seeing the film like you’re supposed to.

If you're gonna get on a soap box about "seeing the film like you're supposed to" then I have to point out the obvious:

You're supposed to see it in a cinema.

Posted by Mike Blakesley (Member # 26) on 08-14-2013, 03:09 PM:

This reminds me of the time when Disney was re-issuing Fantasia back in about 1982. They were not going to allow it in any theaters that didn't have stereo/surround sound. (Of course back then only the "big" auditoriums in big cities had full 5.1 sound.)

At one of our conventions, one of my favorite "old time" theater owners, Dione Smith (now retired), asked why smaller places with mono sound couldn't play the film. The Disney rep said, "We want people to experience the movie the way it was intended to be seen." Then Dione said, "but in a few months you're going to release it on video and some people will be watching it on 12-inch TVs...is that how it's intended to be seen?"

The Disney rep was completely flat-footed and Dione got a round of applause. That was a great moment.

Posted by Leo Enticknap (Member # 534) on 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.

Posted by Joe Redifer (Member # 3) on 10-13-2013, 09:16 PM:

How the eff are you hooking a Wii to your HDTV through HDMI? It has component, s-video and composite only. Max resolution is 480p. The WiiU can do 1080p over HDMI, though.

Posted by Marcel Birgelen (Member # 6801) on 10-13-2013, 10:37 PM:

There are several 3rd party HDMI converters/scalers available for the Wii. The source remains just 480p stretched to either 720p or 1080p.

It's OK for the average Wii game, as most of them aren't graphic miracles, but I don't think I will watch movies this way.

Posted by Steve Guttag (Member # 268) on 10-14-2013, 05:42 AM:

quote: Mike Blakesley
The Disney rep said, "We want people to experience the movie the way it was intended to be seen." Then Dione said, "but in a few months you're going to release it on video and some people will be watching it on 12-inch TVs...is that how it's intended to be seen?"

The Disney rep was completely flat-footed and Dione got a round of applause. That was a great moment.

The Disney guy was not fast on his feet then. The answer should be...Because you are a theatre, you are SUPPOSED to be better than what one can get in the home.

Posted by Mike Blakesley (Member # 26) on 10-14-2013, 11:07 AM:

At that time, any theater (with or without digital sound) WAS better than anything 99.9% of people had in their homes.

Posted by Claude S. Ayakawa (Member # 1401) on 10-14-2013, 03:39 PM:

I have no problem with Netflix because I get movies from them the old fashioned way - Blu Ray and DVD

-Claude

Posted by Marcel Birgelen (Member # 6801) on 10-14-2013, 04:41 PM:

Wait until they start physically cropping your DVDs and Blu-Rays to cheap out on shipping costs.

Posted by Claude S. Ayakawa (Member # 1401) on 10-14-2013, 05:19 PM:

That makes no sense at all, Marcel

[Confused]

-Claude

Posted by Marcel Birgelen (Member # 6801) on 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).

Posted by Jesse Skeen (Member # 586) on 10-16-2013, 02:25 AM:

Fantasia didn't come out on home video until 1991, and the 1982 version had a newly-recorded soundtrack that was quite controversial. (I have a Columbia House 8-track of its soundtrack album, quite possibly the only 8-track to have the word "Digital" on its label! [Smile]

)

My stereo CED videodisc player was made in 1982, I always found it inexcusable for theaters to not be equipped for stereo by then. Wasn't til the end of the 1990s that mono theaters in this area either upgraded or closed.

Netflix just takes whatever masters the studios give them- some are pretty good, others are near MPEG-1 VideoCD quality.

Posted by William Kucharski (Member # 7246) on 12-02-2013, 11:31 PM:

Note HBO has been doing this for years; their stated position is actually "our customers prefer the full-screen HD experience."

The only letterboxed 2:35:1 content you'll see either predates their "zoom all content to 16:9" policy or is from film makers who have the power to explicitly state in their contracts that studios are only allowed to distribute their content to cable/pay TV in the proper aspect ratio.

Posted by Jesse Skeen (Member # 586) on 12-17-2013, 03:35 AM:

Which is why I will never subscribe to HBO (just as in the standard-def era, I didn't subscribe to it because they showed everything in 4x3 pan and scan, when laserdiscs were letterboxed.) If I pick a movie on Netflix and it turns out to be a crap transfer, I can stop it and pick another one that will usually be better. If HBO shows a crap transfer, you're pretty much stuck with it and your money is directly supporting it.