[Rocco and His Brothers aspect ratio]

Re: the variety of formats received from distributors, interesting but unfortunate. Though in the case of In Vanda's Room TCM could have fixed the stretch in broadcast. But it's not the case here? Possibly the blow-up/HD up-res requires a bit of lost image area? What's that called, underscan? Overscan?

 

As for watching it on the SD channel, because I have an HD TV, it's small within a black field. I used to be able to take the S-video out of the cable box and record to DVD or VCR, then watch that in full screen pillarbox. It was a reasonable solution but my new cable box doesn't have S-video out, just component and HDMI. There's a solution from monoprice.com that downscales the component, but it still includes the entire HD signal to start with, so you get all of the black area around the SD broadcast. With every step forward, 2 steps back. Sigh.

 

Come to think of it, if they're broadcasting the properly formatted 4:3 version on the TCM SD channel, then it probably is TCM's fault. They've been able to take other SD movies and blow them up properly with pillarboxing, so why not this?

 

Thanks, folks.

[Rocco and His Brothers aspect ratio]

This is my first post, and sadly it's a gripe. I'm a huge fan of TCM, but last night's screening on TCM HD of Rocco and his Brothers (1960) was zoomed to 16:9 (1.78) for God only knows what reason. I'm assuming in SD. What is so perplexing is that it was originally shot in 1.66 (according to IMdB) and clearly transferred as 1.66 or 4:3 since the lower half of the subtitles were cropped off, making them difficult to read. There is a slight amount of pillarboxing still there, but not much, as if they thought this was a reasonable compromise.

 

This, on top of the recent showings of In Vanda's Room and The Murderer Lives at Number 21 stretched to 16:9 when they weren't, makes me concerned for the future of technical quality on TCM. These are surprisingly huge and easy-to-catch errors, NOT in the original source material. With the previously mentioned films one might simply change the aspect ration of your television, but with Rocco there was picture area and part of the subtitles cropped from the broadcast, plus resolution loss. All 3 of these films should have been pillarboxed. Very sad.

 

Apologies for not posting this in a support forum, but I couldn't find it.

 

Scott