This Spencer Tracy / Katharine Hepburn rom-com has them playing a married couple where he is an Assistant District Attorney and she is a defense attorney who takes on the case of noodle-brained housewife who follows her cheating husband to a rendezvous with his girlfriend, where she shoots at them both, hitting and wounding her husband. Of course, he is the prosecuting DA.
She takes the case, to his dismay, to try to get justice for her client through the progressive but illogical theory that Womenās Rights demand that her client be found āNot Guiltyā of attempted murder, allegedly as would a man if he shot at his cheating wife(!?).
Hepburn shows her comedic chops, while Tracy mopes his way through the movie as the publicly embarrassed husband. David Wayne provides cringeworthy camp as the playwright neighbor dandy who constantly hits on Hepburn and insults Tracey, even in front of their friends.
It depends on whether you value watching in full screen vs. pillar boxed. On an HDTV the proper display of the aspect ratio used then is pillar boxed (sides have black bars). On an old TV DVDs would play full screen (probably up to 2K TVs).
Most major titles from back then were restored, so most already have good quality. The pro tip is to buy a 4K disc that includes a DVD of an earlier release and compare the viewing experience on your particular TV. Some old movies have been restored to 4K but Iāve never watched how they handle the aspect ratio. They could do the Seinfeld effect which is not generally advised.
Iām a technical dummy and I donāt know the how and why, but as a physical media collector I can say it varies quite a bit from one to the next. Some 4K discs look absolutely stunning. Some donāt. Training Day is randomly just off-the-charts sharp in its resolution. Thelma & Louise is another. The Godfather trilogy as well. Iām sure more would come to mind. Other 4Ks, you may as well have a blu-ray and save the money. I do think the steps from DVD to blu-ray to 4K tend to be noticeable, but the extent to which they are varies quite a bit.
I need to give my Lawrence of Arabia 4K some run. I bought it a few months ago and havenāt been able to get to it yet. But even there youāre in the 1960s; Iām not sure which 40s/50s movies necessarily stand out from a resolution standpoint.
DVD resolution is really low imo, your TV would need to be really old (i.e. not flat) or super small for you to not see the difference.
I have a hard time watching anything in that quality now, even old movies. A couple months ago I started watching Yojimbo which I had laying around in DVD, 10mins in I couldnāt take it and dlād a hd torrent. It was really not a comparable experience (but the DVD copy may have been of particularly bad quality).
IMO people obsess way too much on the screen and way too little on the sound. Upgrades to the resolution or screen quality will often be largely unnoticeable to all but the biggest geeks. Changes to audio quality will be noticed by almost every viewer.
Iād take a dvd with a really good sound setup any day over an 8k with a shitty dual channel sound system.
As a kid in the 70s we had like a 19 inch black and white TV on a cart then later a color console that might have been 25 inches. Resolution is hard to compare because the technology was different but was ~480i (interlaced) at 30 Hz for a full frame. Weād sit on the floor ~6 feet away. Maybe thatās why 480p 60 Hz on a 55 inch screen 8-10 feet away looks ok to me.
In grad school (electrical engineering), my advisorās group worked on a display technology that briefly seemed promising but didnāt pan out. My memory is not good. I have to look stuff up to sound like I know what Iām talking about.
I donāt want to do the math but I think people overestimate how good they are at perceiving differences in resolution and other specs. On the other hand expectations matter, and mine are not high. As a sound professional, youād be an exception in that you can perceive differences and have high expectations.
The best resolution test probably is to get really close to the TV. You see how pixelated everything is. Keep stepping back until the image is clear and thatās probably the ideal distance.
In the days before HD in the 90s, weād generally have a high end 27-inch monitor in our rooms. This was when VHS was still a big thing pre-DVD. The highest end format for videotape at that time was D1 and its main ultimately mostly failed competitor was DCT. These were both digital but not considered HD (D2 and Digibeta were the broadcast digital formats at the time though Digibeta won out in the 2000s). If youāve ever seen a DAT for audio, thatās what D1s and D2s looked like. D1s were probably 2ā thick and were the size of a suitcase. A D2 was thicker I think but more about the size of a large hardcover book. We had one of the best movie colorists in the business (he did the film transfers for Titanic) and how he made those D1s look in SD was stunning. All of his VHS transfers looked great.
I remember in those days asking the chief engineer what size TV to get. At that time, I still had a 19-inch mono Magnavox from the early 80s with the type of channel you had to turn with a knob if you didnāt have cable. Even though I was a sound mixer Iād never prioritized sound in my home environment. I preferred to listen at the worst consumer level to hear what most people would be getting. He said not to buy a TV over 27ā because the image fell apart bigger than that.
The difference in quality of DVD to VHS was like D1 to DVD. It was amazing. When I began working on DVDs, I was forced into a nice 50ā projection type TV that I kept until 2013. I liked the sound on it too. Iāve never had a surround system at home or in my mixing studio at home. I donāt do enough surround work to justify the cost and basically know how a 5.1 mix will translate while mixing in stereo. I have very nice soundbars for our 3 TVs so my consumer sound experience is pretty good these days.
Michael Mann said an 80ā TV is all you need to approximate the feel of a movie theater. His screening room is relatively small but set up to capture how wants the feel of his movies to come across. Itās larger than my room by quite a bit but nothing like a dub stage which is usually the size of at least a small movie theater.
@LKJ Are you planning on seeing the Gone with the Wind Fathom Event? It might be worth it if youāre interested because itās a brand new 4K restoration from the original Technicolor negative. It will probably be by far the best itās ever looked if you care to see the movie.
Iām a definite maybe. Itās Sunday/Monday/Tuesday screenings, which means Iād either get a matinee in the middle of an NFL Sunday or be locked in for a four-hour epic on a weeknight.
Iām a fan of the movie and Iām sure it would be cool.
So was Ben-Hur, and yet gametime came and I couldnāt find the energy.
I will say that, unlike Ben-Hur, Gone With the Wind does tend to come back around to theaters more than once every 25 years. But Iāll definitely consider it when October rolls around. It wonāt sell out in the meantime. The only way Iād go on NFL Sunday is if the Seahawks were in a night game or on bye week, so itās probably the Monday/Tuesday option for me.
This distance would depend on how good your eyesight is generally, the overall light level in the room, and maybe how long youāve been watching. I think in practice people are sitting further away than this distance. Thatās good because those variables become less important, but it also means that most of the time, for a typical/casual observer, the difference between 4k and 1080p is small if noticeable at all. The apparent difference between 1080p and 480p is bigger, so I might notice if I want to, say, read the book titles on the shelf behind a character in a scene, but still mostly not.
If I ask Gemini, it says I should sit 7ā from my 55" TV to watch 4k video and I actually sit close to that. But for 480p DVDs, because of upscaling to fill the screen, it says 14-18ā. So I should watch from the doorway to my kitchen or bathroom. Not going to happen. For me, practical considerations outweigh the annoyance of visual artifacts Iām not usually aware of anyway.
The DAT I remember were cassettes, same size, I think, as analog. In my aerospace job, I worked with instrumentation tape recorders for analog data. They looked like this
Big, heavy suckers. They were more reliable than our digitizers but mostly used for redundancy.
People still buy VHS video tapes and they seem like a popular item at thrift stores. I donāt understand that. It must look terrible on a modern TV. Maybe theyāre watching these on CRT TVs, IDK. Maybe my memory is bad but I recall these degraded quickly and were easily damaged.
Knowing the context that Spencer Tracy was dying (died 17 days after filming wrapped), and everyoneāincluding longtime romantic partner Katharine Hepburnāknew he was, sure does make his final speech hit hard.
āThe only thing that matters is what they feel, and how much they feel for each other, for each other. And if itās half of what we feltā¦thatās everything.ā
