Sky's Branding

The versions I'm thinking of was one I saw on BBC1 earlier this year (pretty sure it was A Close Shave), quite possibly different masters to the ones used on Virgin Media's on demand.



Possibly still less noticable than Cheers though, the old SD versions of Friends don't look anywhere near as poor as the Cheers ones did. Anyone who saw the old showings on Channel 4 & Paramount Comedy can surely remember how bad they used to look!

On the other hand though, presumably Friends will need to crop the old SD footage into 16:9, which would make it noticable and draw attention to it.

I thought Friends had always been shot in 16:9 but cut to 4:3?

Edit: nice post on Reddit with a graphic to explain - https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3525eg/eli5_how_can_the_friends_tv_series_be_shown_in_a/

The comparion shots I've seen between the SD and HD versions of Friends seem to indicate an aspect ratio somewhere around 15:9 on the original film- a lot of extra on the sides, and a small amount cut off the top & bottom. Certainly has to be wider than the 1.37:1 that post claims anyway, which would result in only a slither of extra picture on the sides, but large chunks cut off the top & bottom, which is certainly not the case.

When it comes to HD remastering, more modern shows like Friends, Star Trek TNG and the later seasons of Cheers would actually be more complicated to remaster than older shows, as prior to the mid-late 80s shows shot on film would be edited on film- so you have the completed episodes on film to remaster. Whereas with later shows edited on video, you have to track down the original film (if it even still exists and as in usuable condition) and re-edit the show from scratch (and in the case of such things as Star Trek TNG, there's special effects that need re-doing as well).

Indeed, some of the rescanned Friends episodes have scenes which are clearly taken from a degraded tape

For ST:TNG, this short video from CBS has some good information...

http://youtu.be/DQtWeor58rU

I wouldn't say the tape's degraded, more that they'll have taken 480i NTSC footage, cropped it to 16:9- losing a quarter of the resolution- then upscaling that to HD (so blowing up 360x720 to 1080x1920). Even the best quality footage isn't going to look great after going through that process- especially when it's surrounded by the new HD scans.

With Cheers were they kept the footage in 4:3 the upscaling wouldn't be as detrimental (480x720 to 1080x1440), though with the SD footage not looking that great to begin with it still sticks out- even when watching them in SD (the fact they converted the bits that were shot on 60i video, like the new footage 200th episode special they made, to 24p doesn't help either).

The remastering of F*R*I*E*N*D*S into 16:9 is peturbing some observant superfans.

I seem to remember seeing examples of something similar on the 16:9 versions of Buffy, due to them also using th extra picture at the sides that wasn't intended to be seen- things like crew members, lights and in one case seeing the cables that were making a keyboard appear to be typing by itself.

I think it's quite an achievement that the conversion to 16:9 has only led to a few, mostly unnoticeable, new errors like this. It's much nicer than Seinfeld HD with so much cropped off the picture:

http://oi61.tinypic.com/24fzcj4.jpg

I guess that's because the Seinfeld film doesn't have the extra picture on the sides that the Friends film does. As you can see from that above example the extra amount on the sides is quite small.

Well, yes - they should have remastered it to 4:3 like they did with Cheers.

From what I've read about Seinfeld they did both- apparently the DVDs are downscales of the 4:3 HD versions. Obviously TBS chose to show the cropporama versions- not suprising seeing as when I was in the US I noticed they show 4:3 SD content stretched into 16:9- even on their letterboxed SD feed! So they clearly have no respect for aspect ratios.

As far as Im aware, the only time we've had cropped HD remasters in the UK is (apart from The Simpsons, as mentioned above) is Star Trek TOS on the CBS channels (albeit they only broadcast in SD)- which I can't really understand, especially as the same channels show the remastered TNG in 4:3 (thankfully I have the TOS Blu-rays though, which give me both 4:3, and the original effects rather than the new CGI).

Not entirely true actually, I came across a cropped HD version of an episode of Quantum Leap on ITV4 a couple of years back- but then every other episode I saw on there after was in 4:3.