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Women Talking Letterboxing Issue

L

leo9000

Well-known member
Women Talking seems to be oddly letterboxed. The black bars come down and up, but then there’s a smaller slightly lighter black bar on the top and bottom of the image that complete the letterboxing. I’ve never seen this before and it was a little distracting. Any idea why this was done on this film? Can it be corrected? See images. 28254E05-AFC7-42C9-B6D5-257EDFC1CE9F.jpegE5D185DE-7B39-4E15-A831-B4BEA48411CC.jpeg
 
I've definitely never seen something like that. I've asked the team to take a look. In the meantime if anybody else has this title and can confirm that they see the same thing, that might be useful information.
 
I checked with the team on this, and what we *think* is going on is this: the standard for "black" in video is actually a very, very dark gray. i.e., there's still some luma value in the signal -- it's not zero. A true zero luma is called "blacker-than-black".

In the case of this content, I believe the video file itself is in a 2.40:1 aspect ratio, while the movie is actually 2.76:1. (This is a very unusual ratio; only a few films use it because it's super wide. Examples include The Hateful Eight and Ben-Hur.) Anyway, because the content is in that higher aspect ratio, there are black letterbox bars encoded in the video frame. The area outside the active video image is rendered with a luma of zero (blacker-than-black).

So, what we're seeing here is the blacker-than-black bars at the top and bottom meeting up with the black letterboxing that's part of the encoded video. Now, when a display is calibrated, black and blacker-than-black should appear the same. Otherwise, you have what are referred to as "elevated black levels". So it's likely that a display calibration would resolve this issue.

I've also inquired with the team whether we could have just encoded this file in a 2.76:1 ratio, and whether that would have resulted in the entire unused area being rendered with a zero luma value. That might be desirable, but I'm not sure if the media engine has assumptions built in about what content ratios our files are encoded in.

Hope that helps to explain.
 
MikeKobb said:
I checked with the team on this, and what we *think* is going on is this: the standard for "black" in video is actually a very, very dark gray. i.e., there's still some luma value in the signal -- it's not zero. A true zero luma is called "blacker-than-black".

In the case of this content, I believe the video file itself is in a 2.40:1 aspect ratio, while the movie is actually 2.76:1. (This is a very unusual ratio; only a few films use it because it's super wide. Examples include The Hateful Eight and Ben-Hur.) Anyway, because the content is in that higher aspect ratio, there are black letterbox bars encoded in the video frame. The area outside the active video image is rendered with a luma of zero (blacker-than-black).

So, what we're seeing here is the blacker-than-black bars at the top and bottom meeting up with the black letterboxing that's part of the encoded video. Now, when a display is calibrated, black and blacker-than-black should appear the same. Otherwise, you have what are referred to as "elevated black levels". So it's likely that a display calibration would resolve this issue.

I've also inquired with the team whether we could have just encoded this file in a 2.76:1 ratio, and whether that would have resulted in the entire unused area being rendered with a zero luma value. That might be desirable, but I'm not sure if the media engine has assumptions built in about what content ratios our files are encoded in.

Hope that helps to explain.
Click to expand...
Thank you for looking into this. I figured some compensation was happening to properly letterbox the film in the 2.76:1 ratio. Unfortunately this is a very dark film, color timed in a way that makes it even darker, especially for home theatre projectors. To bring the black levels down so the extra black bars become as black as the blacker-than-black bars at the top and bottom would compromise the film image and make it very dark. Hopefully they will be able to Letterbox the entire image to the 2.76:1 ratio at some point since as you point out, there are other films that are shot in this extra wide aspect ratio and hopefully they all do not have this issue. I watched the trailer and it seems to not have the issue, though I don't know if it is in the full 2.76:1 ratio.
 
Women Talking is now on Amazon Prime. I checked to see if they had the same letterboxing issue and they don’t. It is properly letterboxed with the top and bottom blacker-than-black bars. Hopefully K can get a corrected file from the studio and update.
 
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