Monday, June 8, 2009

Geri's Game weirdness

12:08 AM / Blu-ray / Comments2 Comments

Blu-ray

Thanks to Land of Whimsy reader Parotaku for pointing out a strange anomaly in the version of Jan Pinkava's 1998 short Geri's Game that is included on the recently released Blu-ray Disc of A Bug's Life. For some reason, the entire image is surrounded by a thick black border, almost as if it had been treated as 1.33:1 content. Excluding the left and right bars, the image ends up with a horizontal resolution of 1536 pixels, which is still more than the 1440 pixel width that would be expected for true 1.33:1 content.

I can't really come up with a plausible explanation as to why the short looks like this...

Geri's Game

...particularly given that, on the Pixar Short Films Collection BD, the film is presented correctly, filling the screen vertically and with horizontal pillarboxing to maintain the intended 1.66:1 aspect ratio:

Geri's Game

What gives?

 
2 Comments

1. Christopher D. Jacobson said:

Maybe it's the same crapola that Bandai/Honneamise does with their anime BDs, putting black borders on all sides to ensure no image gets lost in overscan--which is an utterly useless practice considering most TVs today have the ability to turn off overscan, and they end up wasting valuable pixels.

But then, the top and bottom borders on that image are rather thick, so that's probably not the case.

(Posted on Monday, June 8, 2009 at 7:56 AM)

2. Author Profile Page Michael said:

Yeah, I thought that was a possibility as well, but as you say the borders are much thicker than you would expect if that was what was going on. Also, to the best of my knowledge, windowboxing to prevent overscan isn't something Pixar has ever done.

Something that did occur to me is that a few of the earlier Pixar titles were initially rendered at a resolution lower than 1920x1080, Toy Story being one of them (the whole thing is being re-rendered at 4k for the upcoming 3D re-release). Perhaps Geri's Game was one of them, and what we're seeing here is the film in its native resolution without any upscaling? Just a theory.

(Posted on Monday, June 8, 2009 at 2:20 PM)

 
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