sport of sacred spherical cowsApr 14

Huh.

A #MediaHistory question.

Trying to find scholarship discussing the practice of 1970s/1980s television broadcasters compressing film on the horizontal (for instance, kung-fu genre movies) rather than cropping or letterboxing.

Grew up watching impossibly lanky live-action martial artists on screen, and have a sense that this has impacted the aesthetics of media inheriting from that experience of the genre in latter decades.

Yet am only turning up discussions of the much later transition of television production to widescreen formats. My interest is in how those who grew up with already wide-screen film being squeezed to fit then contemporary television screens... have perhaps reflected that technologically-mediated way of seeing in art thereafter.

Boosts appreciated.

Show threadJoe VilasApr 15

@beadsland Please don't ask me to remember how I acquired this information, because I don't. However: There was essentially competition between TV & movies. TV settled on an aspect ratio. Then movies started trying to make their product fit poorly on TV screens because they felt like wider aspect ratios that didn't fit well on TVs were in movies' interest. Some of those formats were as crazy as 2.76:1 for Ben-Hur (1959).

IMO, what movies really had was better resolution.

Show threadJoe VilasApr 15

@beadsland Any effort to map aspect ratio a:b to aspect ratio c:d is going to fail, except in trivial cases. It's like mapping a globe to a map: you're SOL from the get-go. But both movies & TV eventually effectively lost to computers & just became data for corporate overlording.

To return to your original point: just go look at how many aspect ratios there are & your limited options about getting it on a screen. Did it affect content? Absolutely. How? Yeah, that's a deep well.

Show threadJoe Vilas

@beadsland I came back to this later because I hoped you'd gotten better & deeper dives. I hope you eventually get more.

When I look at video now, I see people *leaning into* obscuring the image. But it think (3:4 at 262.5 lines) × 60 frames/sec in black & white was gonna suck no matter what.

My pet theory: we, specifically the U.S., developed TV too early, culturally & technically speaking. It should have been digital from the get-go, but that was impossible.

Apr 15 at 2:32pmWeb
Show threadJoe VilasApr 15

@beadsland The frame rate on a lot of movies was also slow. 24 frames/sec ain't really a lot.

Sorry I horned in so deeply without giving you what you wanted. But the stuff to "improve" broadcast TV since the mid-20th century was also crazy.

Show threadsport of sacred spherical cowsApr 15

@jhv

Yeah, am really interested in the impact on viewers who subsequently made their own visual art.

Movies could be produced for various aspect ratios because a theater projection screen could accommodate that variation. Blow up an analog image large enough, and you can get away with a lot.

Broadcasting those films over television was always going to involve compromises. There are still compromises for digital, just of a different sort. There is no ideal mode of visual representation.

My interest is in how those compromises impact the aesthetic sensibilities of folk who would become visual artists in subsequent generation, using different technologies, with different compromises, but nonetheless having their way of seeing and representing images shaped by the jank of televised Saturday afternoon matinees.

Show threadJoe VilasApr 15

@beadsland I think about this a lot. Every once in a while, the deliberate degrading of images or other data enters. Some of it I hate, especially when it makes the work in question worse: why is this scene so dark or this sound so bad? Your aesthetic choice simply made things bad for me. But sometimes you're just stuck no matter what.

Where I think about this a lot, & sorry if I get too far afield, is memes. Why do some memes look *better* if they're degraded from the source material?

Show threadsport of sacred spherical cowsApr 15

@jhv

Because that degradation is part of the semiotics of how we encounter and remember media. This is the whole point of things like the analog horror genre.

That said, the idea that degradation is unidirectional can be deceptive. Video essayist Noodle recently discussed how pixel art video games rendered for modern displays actually look worse, because the very ways CRT displays degraded the image were part of how those artists achieved unique effects. Another video essay on the same channel explores the history of green coloring in various releases of The Matrix, which casts into question the very notion that there was ever a non-degraded version of that film.

Transformation is part of how art works.

Relatedly, a reactor myself follow recently commented on how often TV shows in the 90s used shadow, casting actors in partial darkness, to powerful effect, a technique of film lighting that has been largely abandoned in later decades. Their having pointed thus out, am noticing same in other shows from the 90s.

Aesthetics are choices. You, personally, may not like a particular choice, but that doesn't mean another choice would have been better. Only different.

Show threadsport of sacred spherical cowsApr 15

@jhv

OTOH, there are times when degradation is proactive. Back in the 90s, myself was part of a team managing one of the first ecommerce sites, for a major cosmetics and personal care company.

Our client began complaining that the product images on the shopping site looked bad. Whole product lines were sent back to the photographer to be re-shot. We reviewed our entire process for how those photos were produced and added to the catalog database, but couldn't identify the issue.

Eventually, we figured out the problem. Most of the folk who worked for our client were visiting the website from home, via the America Online internet service. AOL was helpfully passing all images through a proxy server that compressed them to provide for speedier downloads.

Our team was able to figure out ways to take the photos such as to ensure they'd survive the compression process without being severely garbled, by essentially taking lower quality photos to begin with, and then having our quality control team test each photo via a computer running AOL in a company hallway, before approving those that survived the proxy for inclusion in the online product catalog.