The Wire
- Roger Ryan
- Joined: Wed Apr 28, 2010 12:04 pm
- Location: A Midland town spread and darkened into a city
Re: The Wire
The visual effects (even including slow-motion and elaborate dissolves) were recreated in HD for the Blu-ray release of TWIN PEAKS as well. I don't think THE WIRE had nearly as many post-production effects as something like PEAKS or STAR TREK, so I suspect more time was spent digitally removing unwanted stuff at the sides of the frame!
- zedz
- Joined: Sun Nov 07, 2004 7:24 pm
The Wire
It could make sense if you're talking about the need to dress larger areas of the set(s) in order to fill a wider shot. Also, shooting in actual locations presumably means more work clearing the space than for tighter shots. If the full matte shots include equipment and crew, as Simon suggests, then it's likely those parts of the image are 'undressed'.Roger Ryan wrote:This doesn't make sense if you're only talking about the filming process....Filming in letter-box was more expensive at the time...
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- Joined: Sun Jan 04, 2009 7:45 pm
Re: The Wire
The show is streaming in 16:9 on Amazon Prime, and I just skimmed through Season 4 Episode 9. It's hardly unwatchable, but many many shots are clearly full of "dead" space, negative space of walls and car upholstery and faint silhouettes that was never meant to be seen and so merely feels awkward and "wrong," not like some deliberate Antonioni-esque flourish. Again, as can't be emphasized enough, these compositions simply look far better in the AR that they were specifically composed for.
However, just speaking as a big fan of the series, I am somewhat interested to watch the entire series in widescreen next time.
However, just speaking as a big fan of the series, I am somewhat interested to watch the entire series in widescreen next time.
- warren oates
- Joined: Fri Mar 02, 2012 12:16 pm
Re: The Wire
Is there any reason to believe the Amazon Prime version of the show isn't the one that Simon approved, but instead either the hack job into which he intervened or some other even lesser intermediate deliverable where nobody was paying much attention to the details? I mean, just out of curiosity, why would HBO give this new content to Amazon first?
- Ribs
- Joined: Fri Jun 13, 2014 1:14 pm
Re: The Wire
I don't recall the exact timetable, but didn't Amazon get all of the HBO stuff in May or June or so? None of the Wire is up in HD, so it was just what was provided to Amazon from the beginning of their involvement.warren oates wrote:Is there any reason to believe the Amazon Prime version of the show isn't the one that Simon approved, but instead either the hack job into which he intervened or some other even lesser intermediate deliverable where nobody was paying much attention to the details? I mean, just out of curiosity, why would HBO give this new content to Amazon first?
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- Joined: Sat Nov 29, 2008 4:35 pm
Re: The Wire
Thanks for watching.. that is the worst-case scenario, especially because most people viewing won't have developed the sensibility that lets them feel the awkwardness, and instead will just feel pleasure at having "widescreen."oh yeah wrote:The show is streaming in 16:9 on Amazon Prime, and I just skimmed through Season 4 Episode 9. It's hardly unwatchable, but many many shots are clearly full of "dead" space, negative space of walls and car upholstery and faint silhouettes that was never meant to be seen and so merely feels awkward and "wrong," not like some deliberate Antonioni-esque flourish. Again, as can't be emphasized enough, these compositions simply look far better in the AR that they were specifically composed for.
However, just speaking as a big fan of the series, I am somewhat interested to watch the entire series in widescreen next time.
- swo17
- Bloodthirsty Butcher
- Joined: Tue Apr 15, 2008 10:25 am
- Location: SLC, UT
Re: The Wire
"One of the most daring dramas in the history of the medium" - The Baltimore Sun
"One of the great achievements in television artistry" - San Francisco Chronicle
THE WIRE: THE COMPLETE SERIES
BLU-RAY WITH DIGITAL HD
Acclaimed Series Available for the First Time on BLU-RAY Disc with Digital HD June 2, 2015
Loaded with Bonus Content Just in Time for Father's Day Gift Giving
All 60 Episodes Beautifully Re-mastered in 16x9 Full Frame HD
New York, NY (March 5, 2015) - In the six years that have passed since the conclusion of the HBO series The Wire, the critically acclaimed drama has turned into a worldwide phenomenon that has been hailed as "the best show in the history of television" by MSNBC. This summer, the series will make its highly anticipated debut on Blu-ray disc for the very first time. The 20-disc box set featuring all 60 episodes of the hit series in a stunningly re-mastered 16x9 full-screen HD format is showcased with newly redesigned box art. The Wire: The Complete Series on Blu-ray with Digital HD ($199.99) is loaded with an exciting slate of bonus materials, including four behind-the-scenes documentaries, three prequels that explore life before The Wire, and an all-new cast and crew Q&A from the Paley Center for Media's The Wire reunion event. The Wire: The Complete Series on Blu-ray with Digital HD will be in stores June 2, 2015 - just in time for Father's Day and summer binge watching - and is a must-have for all TV connoisseurs!
The Wire depicts an American urban dystopia, framed in our time, in which easy distinctions between good and evil and crime and punishment are challenged at every turn. In five successive seasons, the series depicts a Baltimore in which institutional prerogatives, economic inequalities and a brutalizing drug war confound the efforts to advance the city and its people. The series' first season lays out the futility of the drug war, while the second highlights the deindustrialization and the death of the working class. The third season introduces the city's political culture and lays out the forces that stand in the path of actual reform. The fourth season addresses the educational system and the actual opportunities that remain to coming generations. The fifth and final season examines the media culture and its role in perpetuating the status quo. Amid all of this, carefully drawn characters on both sides of the law and from a variety of Baltimore cultures move forward as best they can, human to a flaw, struggling against a system that seems weighted against civic progress.
The Wire: The Complete Series
Blu-ray Disc with Digital HD
Street Date: June 2, 2015
Rating: TVMA
Runtime: Approx. 59 Hours
Price: $199.99
Taken from: http://www.tvshowsondvd.com/news/Wire-T ... z3TYJ7maxv" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
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- Joined: Wed Nov 03, 2004 9:20 am
- Location: Providence, RI
Re: The Wire
My eyes saw "full-screen" and I got really excited about this, thinking they'd preserved the original 4:3 as an option. Then I read more carefully and realized "full-screen" doesn't mean 4:3 anymore. Sad face.
- domino harvey
- Dot Com Dom
- Joined: Wed Jan 11, 2006 2:42 pm
Re: The Wire
Pledge for a Clayton Davis bobblehead (Which as of this posting has already raised almost four times what was being asked)
- Drucker
- Your Future our Drucker
- Joined: Wed May 18, 2011 9:37 am
Re: The Wire
Barack Obama interviews show's creator David Simon. You read that right.
- Caligula
- Carthago delenda est
- Joined: Wed Nov 03, 2004 2:32 am
- Location: George, South Africa
Re: The Wire
Wow, what a great watch. Thanks for posting!Drucker wrote:Barack Obama interviews show's creator David Simon. You read that right.
- Forrest Taft
- Joined: Thu Mar 15, 2007 8:34 pm
- Location: Stavanger, Norway
Re: The Wire
Very surprising that Obama decided to focus on issues such as crime and drugs, when there's a much more relevant and important topic they should have focused on, namely the aspect ratio on the new HD remasters. But that was a good talk, thanks for sharing.
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- Joined: Tue Apr 16, 2013 12:21 am
Re: The Wire
I know The Wire purists probably won't want to see the show in WS, but I think it will be intriguing to see the show in this aspect ratio. Like most of us out there, these days I only have a WS set, and whenever I watch anything full-screen you see those annoying black boxes on the side. Unavoidable, I know.oh yeah wrote:The show is streaming in 16:9 on Amazon Prime, and I just skimmed through Season 4 Episode 9. It's hardly unwatchable, but many many shots are clearly full of "dead" space, negative space of walls and car upholstery and faint silhouettes that was never meant to be seen and so merely feels awkward and "wrong," not like some deliberate Antonioni-esque flourish. Again, as can't be emphasized enough, these compositions simply look far better in the AR that they were specifically composed for.
However, just speaking as a big fan of the series, I am somewhat interested to watch the entire series in widescreen next time.
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- Joined: Sat Sep 22, 2007 2:00 am
Re: The Wire
Why are you annoyed by the black boxes outside the picture when you watch a 4:3 image, but not annoyed by the border of the widescreen TV itself when you watch a 16:9 image?AnamorphicWidescreen wrote:Like most of us out there, these days I only have a WS set, and whenever I watch anything full-screen you see those annoying black boxes on the side. Unavoidable, I know.
It always amazes me that people are distracted by black boxes outside the picture but not distracted by channel logos and IPPs which are on the picture and distract me to the point of insanity!
- Ribs
- Joined: Fri Jun 13, 2014 1:14 pm
Re: The Wire
And, while I'm sure not everybody has kept upgrading their TVs as they've went along, but now black levels are generally so good I have a hard time telling a black bar on the top, bottom, or sides from the border of the TV. It's really helped me with something I too used to find very distracting.
- swo17
- Bloodthirsty Butcher
- Joined: Tue Apr 15, 2008 10:25 am
- Location: SLC, UT
Re: The Wire
If only there were a way to stretch out my internet to avoid having to see those annoying and distracting black bar posts...
- domino harvey
- Dot Com Dom
- Joined: Wed Jan 11, 2006 2:42 pm
Re: The Wire
I installed something like that but all it did was block Black Twitter
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- Joined: Tue Apr 16, 2013 12:21 am
Re: The Wire
To each their own. I don't mind the border on the top & bottom of a widescreen picture, since the picture still takes up the entire screen, length-wise at least.Robin Davies wrote:Why are you annoyed by the black boxes outside the picture when you watch a 4:3 image, but not annoyed by the border of the widescreen TV itself when you watch a 16:9 image?AnamorphicWidescreen wrote:Like most of us out there, these days I only have a WS set, and whenever I watch anything full-screen you see those annoying black boxes on the side. Unavoidable, I know.
Conversely, the black boxes on the each side of a 4:3 image are extremely distracting, and make it look like there is more "blank" space in the image.
Note I was fine with watching 4:3 images on a CRT TV set or computer monitor, since the picture filled up the entire screen -as it was meant to.
- pzadvance
- Joined: Mon Nov 21, 2011 7:24 pm
- Location: Los Angeles, CA
Re: The Wire
This is insane. The 4:3 image is taking up the entire screen height-wise. How is that any different?AnamorphicWidescreen wrote:To each their own. I don't mind the border on the top & bottom of a widescreen picture, since the picture still takes up the entire screen, length-wise at least.Robin Davies wrote:Why are you annoyed by the black boxes outside the picture when you watch a 4:3 image, but not annoyed by the border of the widescreen TV itself when you watch a 16:9 image?AnamorphicWidescreen wrote:Like most of us out there, these days I only have a WS set, and whenever I watch anything full-screen you see those annoying black boxes on the side. Unavoidable, I know.
Conversely, the black boxes on the each side of a 4:3 image are extremely distracting, and make it look like there is more "blank" space in the image.
Note I was fine with watching 4:3 images on a CRT TV set or computer monitor, since the picture filled up the entire screen -as it was meant to.
- jindianajonz
- Jindiana Jonz Abrams
- Joined: Wed Oct 12, 2011 8:11 pm
Re: The Wire
I can understand the frustration of watching a widescreen epic like Lawrence of Arabia with black bars back in the early days of DVD, since the picture is already shrunk for the much smaller tv's of that time. But to see people complaining that something composed for a 27 inch screen looks too small in an era where 50 inch is more the norm does seem a bit ridiculous
- Adam X
- Joined: Thu Apr 16, 2009 5:04 am
Re: The Wire
Not to mention that the physical size of a 4:3 image as displayed on most widescreen sets is generally (unless you've got a really small widescreen TV) larger than when you would've seen the film on an old 4:3 CRT TV. So even in this case, you're still getting more, not less.
- MichaelB
- Joined: Fri Aug 11, 2006 6:20 pm
- Location: Worthing
- Contact:
Re: The Wire
One of my office monitors has a 21:9 aspect ratio, but I don't think that Scope films "look better" on it than they do on the bigger monitor that's next to it.
- swo17
- Bloodthirsty Butcher
- Joined: Tue Apr 15, 2008 10:25 am
- Location: SLC, UT
Re: The Wire
Films shouldn't all be the same width but the same height. Generally, widescreen films are supposed to impress you by expanding the image on the sides, not shrink the image by taking away from the top and bottom. You get this effect on a widescreen TV when you move from 1.33 to 1.78 material but lose it when the image goes wider than that, unless you compensate by moving closer to the screen. The 1.78 ratio is merely a compromise in the middle of the most common ARs. Ideally, screens would all be much wider than they are, so that the widest ratioed films could have their intended effect. I should think that the image for such films not being larger would be more irritating than anything going on outside of the image.
- EddieLarkin
- Joined: Sat Sep 08, 2012 10:25 am
Re: The Wire
I completely agree. The whole point of something like CinemaScope was to offer a bigger image, yet on 16x9 TVs such films are smaller than standard widescreen fare, which I find very bothersome (and I imagine the filmmakers would as well). It's why any future projector set up I have will use a 2.35:1 or wider screen.
- movielocke
- Joined: Fri Jan 18, 2008 12:44 am
Re: The Wire
From what I heard was that shooting three perf 35mm resulted in a "set up and tear down" fee from the film processors for going to the trouble of changing timing to properly make prints and telecines. These fees would wipe out the cost savings of shooting less film by choosing three perf and actually would be a little more expensive in the end, which is partially why features almost always shot 4 perf once wide screen was on the horizon and open matte airings were soon to go extinct.Perkins Cobb wrote:In his blog post, Simon claims it was a budgetary compromise, although that doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me. Was shooting on 35mm really cheaper than shooting in HD in 2002?
EDIT: Specifically, Simon writes that "filming in letter-box was more expensive at the time," but I don't understand from that phrasing what choices were on the table that led to 35mm framed in 4:3 as the cheapest option.
Additionally dps of features liked the vertical latitude to tweak framing shooting 4 perf and dps and editorial of TV like the horizontal latitude to tweak framing. Iirc Friends did not rescan the 35mm 3 perf negatives for Blu because there were so many "opticals" of reframing that it would be very expensive, and they had been delivering 16:9 hd masters for international so they could use that.