http://www.blu-ray.com/search/?quicksearch=1&quicksearch_country=all&quicksearch_keyword=magnum+pi§ion=bluraymovies
The UK version is said to be released on October, from this thread: http://forum.blu-ray.com/showthread.php?t=280905&page=8
This would look and sound great on Blu-ray. It will more certainly be in it's original aspect ratio 4:3, not 16:9 widescreen.
I hope they do a better job mastering the Blu-ray release than they did mastering the DVD release. Season 1 was nicely mastered and encoded, but some of the other seasons were all over the place.
It's interesting that it says the Region A release will be encoded with MPEG-2, while the Region B release will be encoded with MPEG-4 AVC. Why would a Blu-ray video stream be encoded with MPEG-2? MPEG-2 is ancient (it is what DVDs use; it was introduced about 20 years ago), and it is very inefficient compared to more modern codecs such as MPEG-4 AVC. You can get the same quality with either one, but the MPEG-2 stream will have a much larger file size. MPEG-2, at DVD resolution (720×480 NTSC), requires about a 6,000 KBPS bitrate for ~transparently good quality. MPEG-4 AVC can give the same quality with less than half that bitrate.
MPEG-2 Blu-rays made sense when Blu-rays first came out, because it softened the transition period from DVDs, i.e., companies could still use their old MPEG-2 encoding hardware to produce Blu-rays. An MPEG-2 Blu-ray from a major studio (Universal Studios in this case) in 2016 is bizarre though. Ironically, the company making the Region B release with the more modern MPEG-4 AVC codec is "Fabulous Films", which I've never even heard of.
It says that both of them will be 4:3, which is a very good thing. The current trend of changing 4:3 source material to 16:9 to fit people's TVs is just as stupid as the former trend of changing widescreen source material to 4:3, which was also done to fit the TVs of the time.
I don't dance, tell jokes or wear my pants too tight, but I do know about a thousand songs.
The MPEG-2 is a mistake. I fixed that error on the site. It should appear soon. Universal doesn't use MPEG-2 on Blu-ray. I don't believe they ever did. When they started they used VC-1.
Yes, i would be very surpised if this was in widescreen. According to wikipedia, it has already aired in 1080i on some channel:
Remastered:
4:3 1080i (HDTV)
I thought Magnum was shot on 35mm. Why couldn’t they re-master it for widescreen?
It was shot on 35mm. They could make it to widescreen, but they have to crop it to do it.
shareI have an update. It comes out in December in the UK: http://www.fabulousfilms.com/products/387
shareAfter researching this topic a little, I think I see what you mean. If the show was photographed with widescreen in mind, like most movies, then the intent is to crop and no important aspects of the shot would be lost. I would venture to guess that Magnum, even though filmed on 35mm, is irrelevant for widescreen since the director, most likely, shot the scenes with 4:3 ratio in mind. If that’s the case then cropping to fit widescreen would lose data that the director probably wanted in the shot. I think I understand now.
shareThat's about right.
There are various methods of filming with 35mm. Typical 35mm film has a negative size of 22×16mm, which is an aspect ratio of 1.375:1 (very close to 4:3 [1.33:1]). A 1980s TV show shot on 35mm film would have used a spherical lens and the cameraman would have framed the shots with viewing on a 4:3 TV screen in mind, i.e., taking advantage of the whole frame.
When shooting for widescreen viewing in mind, there are two main methods of doing it. One is to use a spherical lens and to frame the shots with widescreen in mind (there is usually a wide rectangular outline in the viewfinder for a guide), and then the projectionist at the theater uses an aperture plate with a wide rectangular opening over the projector lens which only lets the intended portion of the film display on the screen (i.e., it gets cropped). James Cameron likes this method, which is why the 4:3 versions of his movies have more picture than the widescreen versions, i.e., they have everything that the widescreen version has, plus more picture on top and bottom.
The other method is to make use of the entire 1.375:1 negative, but use an anamorphic lens to squeeze a widescreen image onto it, which looks like this:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cc/Anamorphic-digital_sound.jpg
This gives greater "resolution" than the spherical lens + cropping method, because it takes advantage of the whole negative area. The projectionist at the theater then uses an appropriate anamorphic projector lens to "unsqueeze" the projected image into a widescreen image.
It is with movies filmed with this method that you lose picture (from the sides) when making a 4:3 version. Converting such a film to 4:3 is known as "pan & scan", because you can't just crop a set amount off each side and call it good. Well, you could, but the results would be particularly bad. For example, imagine a widescreen shot through the front windshield of a car which shows the driver and passenger at the same time, having a conversation. If you just crop a set amount off each side, you end up with the driver and passenger both having half their faces cropped off. So the person converting the film to 4:3 has to simulate camera movement, i.e., when the passenger is speaking, he has to crop everything on the right (removing the driver from the frame), and nothing on the left, and vice versa when the driver is speaking. This makes it look like the camera has moved, when in reality, it didn't, hence the term: "pan & scan".
So if you were to make Magnum, P.I. widescreen, it would be like the first method I described, except you would be doing it to negatives that weren't shot with widescreen cropping in mind, which means you'd lose parts of the picture that were intended to be there. Pan & scan techniques would have to be used too (top-to-bottom in this case rather than side-to-side), else you would end up with a lot of cropped-off foreheads in closeup shots. In other words, it's a bad idea. A 4:3 video release is always the right way to go for material which was originally filmed with 4:3 in mind.
I don't dance, tell jokes or wear my pants too tight, but I do know about a thousand songs.
Thank you for the reply, it was very informative.
I found this part particularly interesting; “Typical 35mm film has a negative size of 22×16mm, which is an aspect ratio of 1.375:1 (very close to 4:3 [1.33:1]).”
The differential in width is 1.04” on a 50 inch diagonal screen (I believe). Do you think the Magnum Blu-ray would give us the extra inch+ in width since that is the natural ratio? On my 50 inch widescreen, 1.04” is discernable enough for my perception.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspect_ratio_(image)
First, some more details:
A "4:3" (4:3 = 1.33:1) DVD is actually 1.36:1. NTSC DVD has a resolution of 720×480, which = 1.5:1 with square pixels. But for 4:3 DVDs, the pixels aren't square, they have a pixel aspect ratio (PAR) of 10:11. So 720×480, with a 10:11 PAR, results in a 1.36:1 display aspect ratio (DAR). Standard NTSC TVs overscan, so whoever authors the DVD often compensates for this by putting all of the picture into a 704×480 area. 704×480 with a 10:11 DAR comes to exactly 1.33:1 (4:3). Even though such compensation is considered the proper way of authoring a DVD, not everyone does it. For example, the Magnum, P.I. DVDs don't have any compensation, which you can see here in the upper screen shot:
http://i.imgur.com/U5FqtxN.png
There is picture in that entire 720×480 frame (keep in mind that that screenshot is in square pixel form, so it looks horizontally stretched; DVD playback hardware or software applies the 10:11 PAR in real time to make it look correct).
Had they compensated for TV overscan, it would look like the lower screenshot; note the slight pillarboxing on the sides. Also note that none of the picture has actually been lost. In the lower screenshot, the picture is simply squeezed, rather than cropped, from 720 to 704 pixels wide, and then the empty 8×480 areas of pixels on either side are filled with black, which won't be seen on a standard TV because they will be in the overscan area (offscreen). This results in the correct 1.33:1 DAR for the actual picture content. The reason that a lot of companies that author DVDs don't bother doing it the proper way is that the difference between 1.36:1 and 1.33:1 is so small that most people would never notice it.
In any event, with regard to your question, there's nothing missing from the original 35mm negatives in a 4:3 video transfer, nothing that's intended to be there anyway. They were filmed with 4:3 playback in mind, so whatever picture content is in those thin slivers on the sides that doesn't get transferred; not only was it never meant to be seen, but it would also look bad if it were included, because of the fuzzy edges of film, along with the possibility of production crew members and/or equipment showing up here and there. Blu-ray vs. DVD doesn't make a difference in this regard, i.e., the whole 1.375:1 35mm negative could have been transferred to DVD had they wanted to. It just isn't a very good idea.
I don't dance, tell jokes or wear my pants too tight, but I do know about a thousand songs.
They were filmed with 4:3 playback in mind, so whatever picture content is in those thin slivers on the sides that doesn't get transferred; not only was it never meant to be seen, but it would also look bad if it were included, because of the fuzzy edges of film, along with the possibility of production crew members and/or equipment showing up here and there.
I agree the show should be left in its 4:3 aspect ratio which is how the shots are framed. They need to use just black pillar bars not gray not white just black. I have the entire run on standard DVD. The problem with many Blu-ray players played back via HDMI on 1080p screens is the players upscale the 480i mpg2 streams to 1080p without truly upconverting the signal which in video editing means recreating each frame into a 1080p frame. At 24 frames per second that's a lot of conversion time.
share