The "Mad Men" in 4K on HBO Max Debacle

Fun fact: The X-Files production team foresaw the coming of 16:9 home entertainment, so they made some effort (increasing with later seasons) to try and "protect" a 16:9 frame, which allowed for an unusually good 16:9 Blu-ray restoration. [https://www.tweaktown.com/reviews/7499/look-inside-the-files...]

I learned this from the older X-files DVDs, which have some unusually good special features.

A side story on the techniques for restoration:

I'm guessing about 10-15 years ago I was watching a documentary on the re-release of Ken Burns Civil War.

They were highlighting the digital tools they were using to restore and enhance the original film capture for new streaming services etc.

They showed one of the restorers using a fascinating tool where one window was a video feed of the original film's "first pass" to digital. One of the landscape scenes had a small smudge in the upper right hand corner so the restorer pauses the feed, goes back frame by frame and then was able to drag and drop the frame into another window where he used Photoshop like tools to fix everything and then drag and drop it back into the "feed". Seemed VERY efficient and shows how good tools can really accelerate a workflow.

I'm not sure if the above scene is in the below quick documentary but there are a lot of other cool "behind the scenes of restoration" moments: https://www.pbs.org/video/civil-war-restoring-civil-war/

Stories like this regularly make the rounds when movies or shows that the original creators put a lot of love and thought into are "remastered" on the cheap. The last one I saw was the story about the garish colors in digital versions of old Pixar movies - amongst others, they intentionally exaggerated green hues in the digital original to compensate for the transfer process to analog film stock which was less sensitive to green. When Disney transferred the movies to digital formats and streaming, they took the digital original 1:1, so the colors now look off (https://animationobsessive.substack.com/p/the-toy-story-you-...)

That reminds me of House of Bamboo, which kind of had the opposite problem[0]:

    For many years after its initial release, the film was seen only on television in pan-and-scan prints, leading people to believe that DeForest Kelley has a small role near the end of the film. When Fox finally struck a new 35mm CinemaScope print for a film festival in the 1990s, viewers were surprised to see that Kelley is in the film all the way through; he was just always off to one side and thus had been panned out of the frame.

The did something similar to Buffy The Vampire Slayer when "upgrading" it to HD. It lost all/most of the color grading and was cropped to 16:9.

Some night scenes now take place during daytime and you can see booms and camera operators in many shots.

It never even got a blu ray release. The only way to watch it at home without egregious errors is still DVD as far as I know.

personally, I started re-watching Mad Men JUST because of these errors!

I love audio commentary, behind the scenes, and other looks behind the veil. I would love the ability to see more of unedited, 'raw', or 'mistakes' in older tv shows. Hell, I would even pay for it.

Whats really interesting to me is that no one 'decided' what's worthy of inclusion like they do with behind the scenes stuff

100% chance I would have never noticed the "puke hose" tech in the background. I never saw the Gorilla in that classic "basketball video".

Great article, I really thought it was a recropping like friends (and many others). So weird that they just forgot about CGI.

Prerelease about 4K remaster premiere will please shareholders and push the stock price up, while actually doing a good job will only hurt the bottom line.

Great article.

Can someone explain what was wrong with that _Friends_ screenshot? I can't tell.

I think this is just another case of "over-optimization to make shareholders happy in the end ruins everything". I.e., the normal enshittification problem.

Pretty sure all of that does make financial sense: - Being able to write 4k will bring people in to re-watching/watching the show for the first time. - Redoing the CGI, etc., would have cost a lot of money. - Very few people will cancel their subscription or stop watching because of stuff like that - So in the end, no one cares

I.e., it makes financial sense to do the minimum possible. Sure, if this were a project you care about, if it were your company that you are also emotionally invested in and maybe proud of, etc., things might look different. But your actual customers are shareholders, which in the end are predominantly giant ETF brokers and pension funds, that don't care about anything else but what your stock price looks like and whether you are in the S&P500. They probably don't even know what your company is doing.

Sorry, rant over ;P

Unrelated: does anyone else experience huge lag with HBO streaming app? It’s easily the slowest I regularly use on Samsung smart tv.

This could be an EXCELLENT marketing opportunity.

Set up a site for fans to point out errors and vote on them.

Then have HBO have just one editor interact with fans on the site, fix the most popular errors, and talk about them, maybe stream a little of the editing process.

Damn, that's terrible. Reminds me of The Simpsons being cropped into 16:9 for Disney and obscuring the joke that all the Duff brews come from one pipe.

It's weird that they'd have the crew in the frame anyway. Was it really not possible to have them out of frame? I guess being able to "do it in post" makes people lazy?