[REL] The River Rat (1984)

David32441
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Re: [REL] The River Rat (1984)

Post by David32441 »   0 likes

It'd be good to see 2 screenshots from the same scene - not just 2 random different shots to see how much is lost if the widescreen one is cropped. Can you try and screengrab a few of the same scenes so we can compare?
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Sully23
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Re: [REL] The River Rat (1984)

Post by Sully23 »   0 likes

I remember in the archive of the movie Das Eismeer ruft it had the original format 4:3 but with an excellent image quality 720p so far it is the best archive that has been shared on FLM the same we can expect from River Rat.
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Re: [REL] The River Rat (1984)

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deadman wrote: Mon Apr 17, 2023 9:58 pm
David32441 wrote: Mon Apr 17, 2023 8:30 pm No. More likely the TV version is "open-matte", and the HD version is the correct cinematic ratio. Unless there's something to see in the uncropped version (Pretty Baby springs to mind) then there's going to be little interest in the open-matte version .

The technique used to get movies into the 4:3 aspect for broadcast in pre-HD times (when people lived in caves and hunted with spears) was called pan and scan. What we saw on our TV screens was that portion of the full movie picture that fit in a 4:3 "box". You had to decide which portion of the image was most important for the audience to focus on in each scene because you couldn't show it all.

You'd expect them to remaster from the original theatrical print for the 16:9 aspect. But sometimes they seem to take the pan and scan raw cut and get widescreen by chopping off the top and bottom. It looks like normal letterboxing but it's not. They've deleted parts of the image to get those black bars. I don't know for certain that this is actually what they do, but at least in some cases a VHS Rip does look to be exactly what you'd get by restoring what was in the black bars - and VHS versions of movies were the product of a pan and scan process. If a proper remaster is released at some point and you compare the two, it can be surprising how much was discarded.
Even the LD is pan&scan :(

https://www.lddb.com/laserdisc/26973/LV ... er-Rat-The
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Night457
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Re: [REL] The River Rat (1984)

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David32441 wrote: Tue Apr 18, 2023 1:13 amfew of the same scenes so we can compare?
Ghost's sample single German full-frame image and then deadman's widescreen. (It looks about 1 frame off from each other, but it is a close enough match to compare.)
Nur-der-Tod-ist-umsonst-avi-snapshot-00-08-19-200.jpg
wide.jpg
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deadman
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Re: [REL] The River Rat (1984)

Post by deadman »   1 likes

David32441 wrote: Tue Apr 18, 2023 1:13 am It'd be good to see 2 screenshots from the same scene - not just 2 random different shots to see how much is lost if the widescreen one is cropped. Can you try and screengrab a few of the same scenes so we can compare?


[Image] [Image]
[Image] [Image]
[Image] [Image]



See what they did? They took the image on the left, chopped off the top and bottom and called it 16:9 widescreen. The lefthand photos show the full extent of the image in the vertical direction. But there's more to the left and right that was cut off, just like the top and bottom were cut off the second picture.

Imagine taking any of the images in the left column and stretching them out, revealing more details to either side that you can't see now. It would end up covering half the image next to it. That would be your real 16:9 widescreen. Everything that was in the version people saw in theaters.
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Night457
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Re: [REL] The River Rat (1984)

Post by Night457 »   0 likes

deadman wrote: Tue Apr 18, 2023 11:02 pmBut there's more to the left and right that was cut off, just like the top and bottom were cut off the second picture.
I do not know the history of THIS film, but that is not necessarily so.

The standard way to get a 2.35 image is to shoot with anamorphic lenses for a wider image. IMDB says this film was 1.85. The standard way to get that ratio was to shoot with a spherical (flat) lens and matte out the the top and bottom. The full negative is 1.37 and the theatrical image is a portion of that. This is true for thousands of theatrical releases.

Sometimes a TV or DVD release would be open matte, opening up to 1.33, almost the full negative. And indeed sometimes a 2.35 film would be cropped on the sides to 1.33, and later cropped top and bottom to get really fake and really zoomed in fake widescreen. But is there evidence for that here? Do we have images of a wider version?
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deadman
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Re: [REL] The River Rat (1984)

Post by deadman »   0 likes

Night457 wrote: Wed Apr 19, 2023 1:10 amSometimes a TV or DVD release would be open matte, opening up to 1.33, almost the full negative. And indeed sometimes a 2.35 film would be cropped on the sides to 1.33, and later cropped top and bottom to get really fake and really zoomed in fake widescreen. But is there evidence for that here? Do we have images of a wider version?

No, I don't have any caps of what the original uncut image looked like.

I know a lot more about video formats than I do about physical film. Since movie theaters project a widescreen image I just assumed the print itself (and by extension the negative) must be the same aspect ratio. But you're saying the originals are closer to 4:3 and are routinely cut to get widescreen?
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Night457
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Re: [REL] The River Rat (1984)

Post by Night457 »   0 likes

deadman wrote: Wed Apr 19, 2023 4:51 am I know a lot more about video formats than I do about physical film.
Whereas I know a little bit about a whole lot of things, enough to get me in trouble but not enough to be an expert ... :geek:
Since movie theaters project a widescreen image I just assumed the print itself (and by extension the negative) must be the same aspect ratio. But you're saying the originals are closer to 4:3 and are routinely cut to get widescreen?
Basically sort of yes.
Spoiler:

There are so many different widescreen sizes and techniques that it gets very complicated, so I will not even attempt to detail them all -- because I can not keep them all in my head!!!! But I found one online I can quote. For a CinemaScope 55 image --
The pull-down for the negative was 8 perforations, while for the smaller frame on the print film, it was 6 perforations. In both cases, however, the frame had an aspect ratio of 1.275:1, which when expanded by a 2:1 anamorphic lens resulted in an image of 2.55:1.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CinemaSco ... 02.55%3A1.

In the above instance the image on both the negative and on the printed film is rather narrow. The anamorphic lens in the filming camera captures the wide real-life image and squeezes it narrower to fit on the negative. It is then transferred to the print, also in squeezed form. The anamorphic lens in the projection camera takes the squeezed image on the print and expands it back out to its original width. Panning and scanning takes those 2.20 / 2.35 / 2.55 etc widescreen movies and lops off the sides for TV. (And they look awful that way.)

The wide image was invented mostly to compete with TV, so that the cinema would have a bigger more epic look. However, anamorphic lenses are expensive and Hollywood wanted a cheaper way to make a movie fit the new wide norm. So they shot movies "flat" on a traditional 1.37 negative with traditional less-expensive spherical lenses and projected them at 1.85 with the top and bottom matted off.

Look at it this way: just have the cameraman take a few steps back and he will get the image as wide as the director desires. They can then crop out the sky overhead and the sidewalk below, and have a wider narrower image.

Here is where my knowledge falls apart, never having projected a film. I am unclear exactly if or how often the 1.85 image was printed on the final film, and if or how often it was printed at 1.37 and then matted off in the camera as it was projected. I do know that different territories had different aspect ratios, sometimes adjusted for the same films. 1.85 is typically American, 1.66 European (specifically French). Just do the magic with the projector and everyone gets what they expect.

SOOOO then ... some people like to collect Open Matte versions of films. They get to see the full 1.37 (well, almost with 1.33) negative size of a film that was theatrically shown at 1.85, like "Pretty Baby". The boxier "narrower" image shows more of what was actually filmed.
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Re: [REL] The River Rat (1984)

Post by David32441 »   1 likes

I think this image explains open-matte and aspect ratios well:
https://www.reddit.com/r/imax/comments/ ... sion_of_a/
Sometimes the open-matte is the best version. Cameron has an open-matte 1.78:1 version of Titanic instead of the 2.35:1 cinema version.

It can get more complicated. Back to the Future was shot on Super 35 - something Spielberg shot a lot on (not a Spielberg directed flm - but produced through Amblin I think). That they can open-matte it to about 1.4:1 - but all the special effects shots from ILM were filmed on a giant film format that was 1.78:1 - so they can't be open-matte'd!

Open-matte can show boom mikes and people wearing trainers in a cowboy film for instance - so some checking of the open-matte is required!
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Re: [REL] The River Rat (1984)

Post by David32441 »   0 likes

deadman wrote: Tue Apr 18, 2023 11:02 pm
David32441 wrote: Tue Apr 18, 2023 1:13 am It'd be good to see 2 screenshots from the same scene - not just 2 random different shots to see how much is lost if the widescreen one is cropped. Can you try and screengrab a few of the same scenes so we can compare?
[Image] [Image]



See what they did? They took the image on the left, chopped off the top and bottom and called it 16:9 widescreen. The lefthand photos show the full extent of the image in the vertical direction. But there's more to the left and right that was cut off, just like the top and bottom were cut off the second picture.

Imagine taking any of the images in the left column and stretching them out, revealing more details to either side that you can't see now. It would end up covering half the image next to it. That would be your real 16:9 widescreen. Everything that was in the version people saw in theaters.
which version is that high quality 4:3 one? Yeah, looks better to have that one.
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