New Citizen Kane DVD - actually a collector's edition

[jaime marzol]

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nope, window boxed, uncompressed, 2 different things.

when i window box it i get the whole image, slightly rectangular, but mostly square. when i hit the 'mantain original aspect ratio, it gets rid of square, and i get an unmistakably rectangular frame. no mistaking it, it is rectangular. these 2 little clicks took 4 hrs of rendering on 45 minutes of footage.

jeff, you will be able to see this most startling in the discs you are getting, on the RKO logo. just adjusting the frame with your deck the earth will still be kind of long looking. after i uncompress it by hitting the 'maintain original aspect ratio' the earth is round, not long. you don't notice that it's long till after you see it uncompressed, then it's unescapable.

fredric:
wouldn't it ge great? i would buy such a gizmo to watch films, and tv through. if it was a quality looking unit, graphite grey, silver toggle swithes, with a 3 month subscription to netflix, $180, to $220. would make an incredible chrstmas gift for film lovers, classic films or not, even improves the realestate of letter boxed films. it could revolutionize tv watching as much as letterboxing has.

now some one will steal my idea and i'll die a broken down man, face down in the gutter.

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[jaime marzol]

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but again, as jeff said, this could be nit picky stuff to some people. i had no problen with the way films looked till i found out about window boxing. then the 'maintain original aspect ratio' swith was a revelation. now i'm obsessive about it.

to me, beauty and art is where you find it. i find it in rectangular, window boxed images. if you travel to the museum of modern art, you don't want to see the edges of the works of art quished together so they can fit all the paintings on one wall. and you don't want the picture frame to eat up 2 1/2 inches of image all the way around. you want to see it in the right perspective, and you want to see everywhere leonardo's brush touched that canvas. i feel the same way about movies.

i will now ruin people that were not aware of this.

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[Le Chiffre]

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. if you travel to the museum of modern art, you don't want to see the edges of the works of art quished together so they can fit all the paintings on one wall. and you don't want the picture frame to eat up 2 1/2 inches of image all the way around. you want to see it in the right perspective, and you want to see everywhere leonardo's brush touched that canvas. i feel the same way about movies.


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Well said, Jaime.

Jeff, I know we've been over the whole windowboxing thing before (although most of those posts were wiped out). I took your recommendation and bought a Shinsonic DVD player. But I bought the wrong model. Instead of the $300 model you got, I found a $200 model in a store that listed among it's features "unique zoom function", which I assumed was the windowboxing. Took it home and found the zoom had no windowbox feature. I should've taken it back, but was distracted by the player's other features, including MP3, region free capability, and a kareoke function that has proved invaluable for the Ambersons project. I really regret not taking it back now since their claim of the "unique zoom function" is false advertising. When I complained about it recently to the store managers, they all apologized, but looked at me like I was a dweeb to care about such a thing. I should've listened to you. Do you still have that web address for the player you bought in case I can sell this one?

[Jeff Wilson]

The player I have is the Malata N996. I don't believe it's made anymore, and the newer Malata models have some problems, I understand. I really couldn't tell you what player to buy instead. I got mine at avdeals.com, a Toronto store. There are several US based companies that sell region free players now though, so I'd advise checking out sites like nerd-out.com and dvdtalk.com (Intl forum) for more info on what current code-free players are out there that have the zoom out feature. Plan on spending at least $200 for a good player.

[jaime marzol]

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i had same problem mteal had, i bought dvd player with zoom feature , it only zoomed in, and i didn't get around to taking it back. now i have 2 dvd players and neither do what i want.

what the heck is that feature called? is it picture adjust? i've seen this feature listed in a few high priced dvds.

one salesman proudly pushed a deck that could get rid of that peesky letterbox. zooms right in till the black stripes are gone. you should have seen his face when i told him the feature i want allows me to leterbox films that don't come with those pesky black stripes .

[Jeff Wilson]

It's just zoom, but you have to make sure the zoom works both ways. I can't imagine it being called anything else. The Malata players have this, as well as an X-Y scaling feature that allows the picture to be fixed in whatever aspect ratio you desire (primarily good for getting some PAL DVDs to look correct; I've never had to use it), and various other features.

[jaime marzol]

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here is what it's called, so those of you looking for this groovy zoom back feature don't get stuck, like i did, with 2 decks that zoom in but not out:

The Malata DVP520 DVD PLAYER will output video in 4:3, letterbox and 16:9 aspect ratios. Also the expert menu allows xy and pan adjustments to fine tune the picture

i think the operative words are:
"pan adjustments to fine tune the picture"

and of course, all this relates to the CITIZEN KANE thread because we are going to use our Malata decks to watch KANE window boxed!

[Jeff Wilson]

Like I said, I've rarely used the xy scaling, and I have never used the panning feature, whatever it does. The zoom function is enormously useful, and is the feature that will windowbox the picture for you, or give you the extra image on widescreen films.

[jaime marzol]

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so i'm back to explaining to the square-head clerk that i want a deck that zooms back, and he looks at me with the look of a dumb dog that's heard an odd sound and says, "whaaaaa?"

will you fiddle wit that scan adjust doohiky, see what it does?

and could the X-Y scaling unscrunch the image?

[Jeff Wilson]

With the x-y scaling, you could in theory make the image whatever shape you wanted, yes. The one time I had to use it was when a widescreen picture was full screen on my TV, and the x-y feature scaled it to the proper ratio as encoded on the disc.

[Le Chiffre]

Yes Jaime, the clerks in every store I've been to are completely bewildered as to why anyone would want a zoom-out feature. In fact, the reason why many people want a zoom-IN feature is so they can "correct" any letterboxed DVDs! For people like us who care about perfection, it's best to just do some homework on the Net. I found some good info at DVDtalk.com. Thanks Jeff.

The MALATA DVP-520 sounds like a nice model. I guess it goes for about $250. I wonder if it's available in U.S. stores. For those who refuse to spend that much, there is a windowbox/zoom-out feature on the JVC XV-s500BK, which I bought at Best Buy for about $150. Problem is, the window-boxing is too extreme - it cuts the picture size in half. Still, it was thrilling to watch Welles' OTHELLO with all the great visual compositions completely intact. When you're able to see the edges of the frame too, the images seem less claustraphobic and have more 'room to breathe', so to speak. This simply makes the whole movie more compelling. Ditto for my Criterion DVD of Von Sternberg's THE SCARLETT EMPRESS, which I also watched.

Best Buy gives you 30 days to play around with the machine and decide whether you want to keep it or not. During that time I'll have to find out more info about the Malata. It would be nice to be able to purchase it in a store if that's possible.

[jaime marzol]

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yes! they are all thrilled as they explain this great new deck that gets rid of letterboxing! it's incredible. that best buy deck doesn't sound like the one to go with. sounds like you can't adjust the zoom, it gives you one preset.

the x-y scaling thing sounds like a pretty interesting feature. will have to keep searching.

[Le Chiffre]

Here's another example of something not noticed before windowboxing. In THE STRANGER, when Kindler and Mienecke reunite in the woods outside Harper, one can see the highschool boys way in the distance, running across the top of the the frame. Overscan had always eliminated the boys, so one could hear them but not see them. Turns an ordinary looking shot into another superb Wellesian image.

Jaime,
You're right about the JVC, but I would prefer to find a Malata in a store before I buy. I don't especially like ordering something that big thru the mail. About the issue of uncompressing the image, however, I'm a bit confused after playing with the JVC for a couple of days, since the DVDs I've looked at so far all look like they are already the correct 4:3 aspect ratio (that is, slightly rectangular) when windowboxed.

[jaime marzol]

that STRANGER thing, outstanding.

look at the last tape i sent you, the shape of the rectangle of AMBERSONS sleigh scene. see if there is any difference to the amount of rectangulation(!) that you get with the new dvd player. i noticed in the window boxed tape of AMBERSONS jeff sent me, there was a huge difference in the RKO logo. the earth was long! characters looked longer than how they looked in the computer.

also, since it took hours to render when i clicked maintain original aspect ratio, and i had for a while not noticed any difference, it might not have been clicked in the tape you have now, but it definately is clicked in the tape you have coming, and it's clicked on mpeg discs jeff has coming. it's big time rectangular now.

while searching the web for some faster way of uncompressing and window boxing, i found a free player called ZOOM PLAYER. downloaded it, installed it. it has lots of controls, and it plays the stuff wonderfully IN the computer, but still gives me the overscan on the tape. need to fiddle with it a bit more, maybe it can do the trick and i just haven't figured it out yet.

rectangulation?! i think i like this word. will uncompress uncle joe's strangulation to give it more rectangulation.

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[jaime marzol]

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while searching the web for a dvd player that zooms back, i found this at www.dvd.com

"When a widescreen movie is transferred to home video, the black bars at the top and bottom of the picture are usually encoded along with the movie. But when a film is anamorphically transferred, the picture is squeezed to fit into a 4:3 frame, then unsqueezed by your DVD player."

since the picture has to be squeezed to fit a 3x4, frame, what if you are watching it on vhs? the vhs player does not unsqueeze the picture, it remains more square than rectangular. this is what i have been finding. old movies are not so square. they are more rectangular than square, making bogart's face appear longer than it really is, and robinson's face is rounder than it looks on my tape, or laser disc of KEY LARGO. and what if the film was not tranfered SPECIFICALLY 'for' DVD. what if it was tranfered for DVD from the same source that was used for the vhs tape? did they compensate for the SQUEEZING?

recently watching my turner copy of ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST in letterbox, and not only are the titles cut off at the end of the screen, but the image seems like it's been SQUEEZED!

i'm all SQUEEZED out.
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