ratinox wrote the following as part of a post:
Quote:
Originally Posted by ratinox
But you're not wrong about bad pan and scan conversions. The most egregious for me is the original VHS release of "Ghostbusters" when the trio are in the elevator (the "Switch me on" scene). The cropping shows only two of them: the switched on proton pack and its wearer are almost entirely off screen. That scene convinced me that I'd rather have letter boxed video than bad cropping.
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There are a lot of bad pan-and-scan issues. As an example, there's a scene in one of my favorite movies,
Doctor Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine. What we see in the pan-and-scan version is a character walks off the screen, then another character walks into a door and knocks himself out. The scene as presented made no sense. When I finally saw it in widescreen, the first character walks through the door like it wasn't there, and the other character runs into the door.
Added to that are the films of Robert Altman. In his movies it is not unusual for him to have several separate scenes running at the same time, but when they are panned and scanned some of the scenes are cut off. An example of this is in the movie
Popeye, where there's a scene with the characters on a large boat. All over the boat there are many things happening at the same time but much of it is cut off in pan-and-scan. To me, he is one of those directors who work must be seen in widescreen to the point that if you've only seen his movie in pan-and-scan you haven't actually seen the movie.
That's why I was a big proponent of laserdisc. Due to its resolution it could show movies in widescreen. With VHS the resolution was so low that if they letterboxed a movie it became difficult to make out what was going on. I saw the movie "The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover" on VHS in letterbox and it was so fuzzy that I couldn't make what was going on. The image was about a quarter of the total screen space, with large blank space at the top and bottom.