Cropped Cartoons on DVD

[Mac]

With all the recent (and justified) complaints about DVNR being used on cartoons, I'm kinda surprised that there has been little mention about the number of cropped cartoons on DVD. I first noticed this problem on the Silly Symphonies Treasures DVD, as on some cartoons important parts of the image seem to get lost on all sides of the picture. Since then I've had the same problem from other cartoon DVDs including the Golden Collections. The Clampett cartoons in particular don't just fill the frame with action, but pour right off the edges to the point that I really feel I'm missing something. Even Mickey in B&W, which showed some cartoons uncropped for the first time, had some cropped cartoons (e.g 'Musical Farmer'). One annoying thing is that on some shorts on classic cartoon DVDs the titles are framed, so that nothing is lost, but the actual animated is not - as if the titles are the more impotant than the rest of the cartoon.

Maybe I just have a crappy TV or DVD player which crops stuff too much, but I kinda doubt it. Has anyone else noticed, and been bothered by, cropped cartoons?

[Chow Hound]

Yes, it's bothered me too on the LTGC sets. :(

[Larry T]

My big beef was with the Bosko releases by Bosko video. :bosko: I had made a post before explaining why these cropping jobs were so evil, and with examples. They weren't cropped to force the entire image into viewing range, they were in fact matted (windowboxed over top of the existing images) to remove at least three viewing fields from the final scene.

Totally unnecessary, in my opinion- I feel like I was watching those cartoons through a keyhole. And what for?

Select your answer:

a) to make it resemble an old-time Nickleodeon
b) to force an 'ownership' of sorts for other video company pirates who could rip off those prints for their own PD releases
c) to compromise the prints, because we all know there's no 'perfect' versions of the Bosko cartoons out there anyway
d) the same guy who operates nowadays DVNR switches was at the helm when the "cover up almost half the image with a black frame" switch was flicked on.

[Saranczuk]

Let me set the record straight. (At least for the Golden Collection) The images on the DVD are indeed not cropped. Ever try viewing the DVDs on your computer? They have the black frame around the titles, thus the entire scene is intact. It is either a DVD player of the TV, I am not very sure. So if you want to watch the DVD without the image cropped, put it in your computer. (Assuming you have a DVD player on your computer)

[Ray Pointer]

What type are "cropping" are you talking about? There are some DVD players that will convert to an HDTV aspect ratio, or technically "16x9" which will crop and squeeze down the picture to a "wide screen" format. I discovered this as a possbility much to my horror a year ago when we came out with a companion DVD to one of our award-winning documentaries, FIRST SOUND OF MOVIES. There was a mistake made in the encoding which cased the picture to be squeezed down in height with black masking on top and bottom. This happened on my expensive Sony DVD player, but not on the cheap $40 Zenith player. But from what I'm reading, this may not be the case.

I believe the cropping issues you refer to are the results of many factors that may be unique to themselves. There are some collections I have seen that were simply transferred too tight in the frame. In my experiences working with older 16mm reduction materials, the reductions may not have been done carefully, or aligned properly in the optical printer, so much information such as dialog balloons hit the frame line, with the top line of type at the top or past the top of the screen on the telecine. We have made every effort to try to include all of the information that is in the frame. But if the film source is already cropped, there is nothing more that can be done other than to pull back the image and place a video boarder around the actual image to avoid showing the frame lines with the botton and top of the incomming and outgoing frames.

So along with what's on the film already, and the new digital technology, we have not exactly found the perfect solution, but in most cases, it is the best we can do given what we have to work with.

[Tom41]

What I find really annoying on many DVDs (and also on TV) is the fact that they crop to 16:9 format. Rather than showing old (classic era and even up to 1980s) cartoons in their original 4:3 aspect ratio, they crop off the top and bottom of the picture to make it widescreen! This leads to framing errors, people's names getting cropped off the credits etc.

A Pink Panther DVD I have has all the cartoons cropped to 16:9 in this way :mad:

[Ray Pointer]

What I find really annoying on many DVDs (and also on TV) is the fact that they crop to 16:9 format. Rather than showing old (classic era and even up to 1980s) cartoons in their original 4:3 aspect ratio, they crop off the top and bottom of the picture to make it widescreen! This leads to framing errors, people's names getting cropped off the credits etc.

A Pink Panther DVD I have has all the cartoons cropped to 16:9 in this way :mad:

This is that age-old controversy that entered into the reiusses of classic films such as GONE WITH THE WIND. Also, theatrical reiusses of fil classics already suffered due to the use of the 1:85 to 1 aperature plate in the projection machines. This was a necessity since the screen were no longer 1:33 to 1, and to project the entire picture area would have parts of the top and botton on the black masking or ceiling and floor. Because of the materminds who decided we had to have Cinemascope 50 years ago to avoid competition with television, this is what we have to contend with today.

[dillon]

Its quite possible the cartoons are cropped. But it may also be your TV. CRT TVs lose about 10-20% of the picture behind the plastic bezel around the screen.

As was said above, check it on a computer (or LCD or Plasma TV should you be so lucky!)

[corey3rd]

sounds like an overscan problem. Next time you buy a DVD player, get one that "shrinks" the screen and you'll get to see a nice chunk of space on the sides. You get to see the tops of heads and feet in classic films.

[Mac]

The DVDs I'm talking about are ones from big corporations (ie Disney Treasures and Looney Tunes Golden collections) and I don't mean every single cartoon on these sets. Although maybe it is just a case of me having a crappy DVD palyer! There are definitely some "cropped" cartoons on the earlier Treasures - the presentation of early shorts on Mickey in B&W 2 shows that some shorts on Volume One and on Silly Symphonies must be cropped (also check out the clips of SKELETON DANCE shown in Leonard Maltin's in the intro to the shorts comparred to the presentation of the short itself).

As I said, maybe it's just my player as it doesn't seem to bug many other people, but some cartoons really feel cropped on DVD in that it really looks like there should be more image. There were a lot on Silly Symphonies (e.g FARMYARD SYMPHONY, LULLABY LAND) and there were some on Looney Tune 2 (e.g BOOK REVUE where a lot of the cartoon seemed cramped and parts of actions were happenning off screen). On a set like Mickey in Colour 1 though, all the cartoons seemed O.K and I can even see a slight black border which suggests the whole frame is there (BAND CONCERT certainly showed more image on DVD than my video, e.g the Christmas Tree gag near the end was much more obvious).

If I get a chance I'll try the DVDs on a computer as has been suggested. Has no one else ever had that feeling that they're not seeing everything in frame and that things seem cramped and cropped?

[Tom41]

Here's an example of the 16:9 cropping I'm talking about.

http://tomsonic.dyndns.org:90/temp/sonicxpics/

I took several sets of captures from the same episode, one from a Fox Kids broadcast (original 4:3 format) and the other from a CITV broadcast (16:9 cropped). I tried my best to get the exact same frame on both sets so you can see the comparison.
It just shows you how much of the original picture is missed off when TV networks and DVD producers crop cartoons to 16:9 format like this!

Note that although I'm using Sonic X as an example here, classic cartoons also suffer from this problem. For instance, when BBC show theatrical cartoons, they're also cropped to 16:9 like this.