Comedy Central to air Friends in true HD

For a while copies of Friends seasons 1, 2 and 3 in HD have been on the internet, some of which I have - and they are fantastic. Turns out Friends was filmed on 35mm film which also is in 16:9 - sort of. You see, there is a tiny tiny bit of the top and bottom cut off, but it is barely noticeable. It's sort of 16:10. But anyway, there is more on the left and right. Edit (3 Sep 2011): A clarification: The format is Super 35 which has an aspect ratio of 15:9. Hence the small amount of cropping.

Now though we have confirmation that Comedy Central will have copies of Friends in HD - which is great news for those who have yearned for higher quality copies of the earlier series in particular to arrive on Channel 4 - episodes like The One with Mac and C.H.E.E.S.E. look like they have ghosting on them after being repeated so much.

However this Sky Media Sponsorship pack has confirmed that Friends will be in HD on Comedy Central.

If anyone wants screenshots, here's a large bunch I took for the Friends Café forum:

I was hoping this would be the case. Some of the early episodes look like they've been filmed in the 70s.

It's now been clarified to me that the aspect ratio uncropped is 15:9. So that explains why the top and bottom are cut off slightly.

Those pictures look like from TNT Serie Germany?

Amazing caps, wish I could watch them in widescreen,some of the early episodes really are terrible quality.

Found this HD opening on YT

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKYL_zcSfzc

I've never actually watched the earlier ones because the picture looks awful on my TV. Looking forward to this in HD.

I'm glad to hear Comedy Central will be showing some episodes in HD, the earlier series are the best but some episodes look so dated, it'll be nice to see them in good quality at long last.

By the looks of it according to the Sky PDF link there Comedy Central will probably be starting from 8.00am in October to accomate a double bill of Friends.

It's surprising then they weren't available to C4 or Sky in this format - wasn't ER shown in "widescreen" at least from the beginning?

A similar process was applied to syndicated episodes of Seinfeld in the US a few years back. It's fantastic quality and the cropping is minute, but it's also weird seeing a show from the early 1990s in HD!

I'm not sure if it was - isn't the title sequence 4:3 in the earlier series?

Will it being in HD make it funny though?

How did the film thing work then? I always assumed it was multi-camera studio in front of a live audience

It was multi 35mm camera - full-on panaflex heads on dollies - 2 operators per camera.

It wasn't cut until it got into the edit suite, and although there was a shooting script, the cuts were determined by the best shot taken, and whether or not someone drifted out of frame.

One assumes every print was kept so it could be scanned.