

Netflix Responds to Crop Controversy - parasubvert
http://www.avsforum.com/t/1482416/netflix-responds-to-crop-controversy

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Afforess
IMO, this was a non-story from day one. Not sure why so many people fell in
love with the conspiracy theories or Netflix-bashing. Netflix shows what they
get.

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myko
> IMO, this was a non-story from day one.

Not quite a non-story though. It's garbage the film studios are giving bad
copies to Netflix to stream. Bringing this up and complaining about it is a
good first step to getting that fixed, right?

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fuzzix
The studios should really have been suspect #1 in this case from the start.
Doing Pan and Scan of 2 hours of film is a chunk of work - not just cropping,
but reframing each and every scene to focus on the action. I don't know if
Netflix have the resources for this, but would they have permission?

I can't find the story now, but there was an instance of a set of "widescreen"
DVD releases (my memory tells me they were from WB) which were 4:3 cropped
releases, cropped yet again to 16:9 aspect - a small chunk of the original
picture left at this stage... but as I say, I can't find this story so I may
be misremembering.

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fuzzix
Replying to myself as the edit window has passed - still haven't tracked down
that double-cropping story. The thought occurs, what happens with source
material which fits no definition of "wide"? Older TV shows or many Kubrick
films?

Horizontal black bars on screen to correct aspect are common, vertical black
bars are less acceptable for whatever reason (Aesthetics? Acclimatisation? Who
knows?). My xbmc setup not only has a hybrid stretch+crop for 4:3 stuff on my
widescreen TV, it also has a setting which stretches more towards the edges
than the centre of the picture. Acceptable presentation for my old TV
recordings and such but if someone handed me a Dr. Strangelove recording
distorted similarly, I'd be less than impressed. I prefer to ruin the
presentation on my own terms!

Another mode I use for presentation of 4:3 material on the wide TV is 14:9 +
crop - this is essentially a halfway-to-fullscreen zoom mode I use for my old
game consoles. This has never, in my experience, cut out any relevant action
or HUD info as these games needed to be designed for ludicrously variable CRT
overscan in the first place.

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jeremymcanally
Not sure why we're linking to a weird forum. Here's the source:
[http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/18/netflix-cropping-
as...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/18/netflix-cropping-aspect-
ratio_n_3616774.html)

~~~
codemac
I'd trust avs forum over huffpo any day..

~~~
danso
My first reaction was to click on the HuffPo link to triumphantly find where
they linked to a primary source that they excerpted heavily from...but in this
case, HuffPo was the primary source:

> _In a statement to The Huffington Post, Netflix categorically denied that it
> intentionally cuts off portions of the picture for movies it streams,
> claiming that any altered aspect ratio is a mistake._

> _" We want to offer the best picture and provide the original aspect ratio
> of any title on Netflix," Netflix spokesman Joris Evers said in an email.
> "However, unfortunately our quality controls sometimes fail and we end up
> offering the wrong version of a title. When we discover this error, we
> replace that title as soon as possible."_

I'll be the first to say... _huhh?_ I thought this was completely a situation
of what arrangements Netflix had with the studios (perhaps to get a cheaper
rate on deals)...but it turns out it was just a mistake that would've gone on
if people hadn't made a good sized ruckus? Good for the Internet.

~~~
gottagetmac
This looked to me like they were trying to say "It's the studios' fault!"
without pissing off the studios.

~~~
jerf
FWIW, I think the evidence that "it's the studio's fault!" is sufficient to
consider it likely. In particular, when they had Starz, I was _flabbergasted_
at the low quality of the Starz video; they were, at times, in _SD_. There is
just no way that Netflix was proudly pushing that out of their own free will.

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pbreit
Yet another example of the mad rush to jump to an incorrect conclusion.

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mark-r
Determining the aspect ratio of a video file seems like a simple process to
automate. Anybody really think they've seriously gone looking for anomalies?

~~~
Terretta
It's not _that_ simple, you can't just look at the source pixel dimensions as
the source file is likely to a hardware standard (e.g., 1920x1080). Web
encoding can and generally should be cropped to the actual content, but
mezzanine files generally are the standard dimensions of the production or
editing workflow.

You scan for black bars, but you'll have to scan the whole movie, as sometimes
content (usually documentaries) is presented in a mix of aspect ratios, parts
with bars on top and bottom, parts with bars on sides, parts in full screen.
So that's an expensive operation, taking you from one or two pass "off the
shelf" encoding to three pass encoding where the first pass is this custom
scan.

Note that the best encoding shops have a human make some judgment calls about
the content, and set encoding parameters individually.

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malkia
To me the bigger question was the "captions" \- and whether it's possibly for
them to be almost always working.

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bborud
Actually, it would be significantly easier to acquire the content outside the
studios, for video streaming sites.

