Larry and I had had a friendly disagreement about how the widescreen aspect of the original Kung Fu series DVDs was achieved. I felt that the series had to be filmed in widescreen mode. After all, the widescreen DVDs look great! They don't suffer from the hokey "blow-up" scaling TNT uses on their HD channel(s). (Don't they have any Q&A people over there?) Larry maintained that, until recently, no TV shows were filmed in widescreen mode. What I was seeing was just a great telecine transfer and some smart "cropping." (He confirmed this with a friend who works more directly in this area.) Of course, I should have known Larry was right... This is his field after all.

Not much of a blind faith type of guy, I struck out to compare things for myself. What I found surprised me - and leads to a few more questions! Yes, they crop approximately 12% of the video from the bottom and maybe 1-2% from the top. (I was surprised at how much of the bottom they crop.) However, the DVD shows about 3% more video on the left and about 6% more on the right. (This is easiest to see by the amount of space/candles behind Master Po in the third set of stills.) Is this because DVDs - and the latest equipment - don't overscan the video (to prevent seeing the "ragged edges") as in the days of VCRs and old TVs?... or is there some other explanation? (Larry?!)

These stills are all taken from the episode "Alethea" (original airdate 3/22/73), which stars a young Jody Foster, who is seen in the first set of stills. If nothing else, the stills on this page are a good demonstration of how much more vibrant and sharp DVD video is compared to VHS video. Well, actually, this isn't really a fair apples-to-apples comparison. My VHS tape was obviously recorded from TV (you can see the TNT logo), not from a master tape. My VHS tape has also sat in my closet for 8.5 years! (And yes, that's a reflection from my window on the right side of the DVD stills. I captured these stills by taking a picture of my plasma TV (for the DVD) and 18" monitor (for TV) with a digital camera.) Sorry, I digress...

Conclusion - While I'm disappointed with the amount of cropping done on the bottom of the screen, I like the DVDs the way they are. That's despite the fact that I'm normally a video purist. That is, I want to see all the video that was originally shot... whether I have side bars on my plasma or not. I know a lot of people that watch standard definition programs or movies on their widescreen/HD TV with some form of "zoom" to make it widescreen. (Sports bars did this all the time - some still do.) That, of course, requires some cropping, distortion of the aspect ratio, or both. Since we're talking about consumer electronics with no fine-tuning of the algorithms available, this normally makes the video "difficult" to watch - at least by me. My eyes are very sensitive to when the aspect ratio is off, so I normally watch everything in original format (with side bars). But with these DVDs, I guess my love of the widescreen format wins out. Plus, they've done such a fantastic job finding that perfect balance between preserving the aspect ratio and cropping certain "unimportant" material, it's easy to forget all about the technical details. And that's the whole point of the exercise. Now if only TNT and the other DVD conversion companies could do the same.

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