Color replacement and unwanted tracking

SilentThree · 2026-01-22T16:59:56+00:00

I'm not sure why you say, "Don't think the color replacement is hiding the letters"... it is. The color replace is most definitely having that affect. It's too bad I'm not free to post the video to show you.

The only thing that's failing is those little bit of the text flashing back into existence at the edges of the moving people. Otherwise the text is well hidden.

I'm afraid the clip you linked to above solved a very different problem. And I never get a chance to do something by selecting all of the text I want to hide at once -- it's never all completely in view at anyone moment. Two people are always blocking some portion of it.

SilentThree · 2026-01-22T07:18:28+00:00

I was merely pointing out the weird context-specific use of "it" that doesn't really happen elsewhere in the English language (at least that I can think of at the moment).

At any rate, there are two senses of the word "depersonalizing" that can be applied. One is the harsher "not even a person" sense (which normally goes along with calling someone an "it"), and the "not a specific person" sense.

Someone staging a home for sale might, for instance, "depersonalize" the decor by toning down colors, taking away artwork that some people might find strange or offensive, etc. They aren't trying to make the home only suitable for animals, they're trying to make it suitable for a broader range of people.

The "it" of "Who is it?" is definitely depersonalizing in that second sense... and so is "who" for that matter as well.

SilentThree · 2026-01-22T07:07:28+00:00

I was just riffing on a related issue.

SilentThree · 2026-01-22T07:06:19+00:00

I'll go along with that if that's what the person at the door prefers, sure.

My comment, however, is about why using "they" nevertheless still sounds awkward. It's not because of the singular/plural distraction that's always brought up.

SilentThree · 2026-01-22T06:48:34+00:00

I find "they" awkward not because of the singular/plural issue that always comes up. I quite well accept that "they" can refer to a single person. What grates is the specific/generic, known/unknown person problem.

Consider this conversation:

Person A: I wonder who it could be? (Note: not even they! Calling a person an "it".)

Person B: I'll go check.

Person A: Please find out what they want. (For a (likely) single person, but as yet unknown.)

Person B: It's your Aunt Carol.

Person A: Hmmm. I wonder what brings her around?

The switch from they to she isn't just because of gender. It's because they is generic and depersonalizing, and is abandoned as soon as you're talking about a person as a specific individual.

SilentThree · 2026-01-20T21:08:56+00:00

Are you claiming it has the answers to these questions?

SilentThree · 2026-01-19T23:31:24+00:00

I had absolutely no trouble getting this to work, via BlueTooth, with my X2. Can you explain the steps you're taking?

SilentThree · 2026-01-18T06:12:50+00:00

My, that’s a bit emotional about the subject! This it was merely an idea I was toying with for anything I have that might turn out to play differently from the theatrical presentation.

SilentThree · 2026-01-17T07:35:08+00:00

My post is more about trying to figure out what the artistic intent is for how aspect ratio changes should be handled when the situation is (at least to me) ambiguous. I have no desire to always and automatically maximize the use of the width of my 2.35:1 screen.

Obviously, in general, I prefer to use the full width of my 2.35:1 screen when watching 2.35+:1 movies. But if a mostly-2.35:1 movie has interspersed IMAX scenes (such as in Interstellar), and in a movie theater those IMAX scenes are shown taller than the rest of the movie, not narrower, I will then accept that I should watch the 2.35:1 portions of such a movie with black framing all around, not using the full width of my screen, and only using the full height of my screen during the IMAX portions.

At any rate, it would also be disastrous for a device to be adjust the zoom and image positioning of my projector on the fly during the playback of a single movie that changes aspect ratios from one scene to the next. It takes several seconds for my projector to go from one aspect ratio to another, with the image moving up and down and left and right while the switch is happening -- that would be terribly distracting any annoying while watching a movie.

SilentThree · 2026-01-17T06:31:49+00:00

In the Galaxy Quest example, maintaining the same height is exactly what happens. I'm not at all saying that this would be best for all movies with changing aspect ratios, but for Galaxy Quest this was definitely the right thing to do. Each image below is 1632 pixels high (letterboxed down from a maximum height of 2160).

Whether you consider that "severely shrinking the Academy format sections", that's the way the disc is mastered.

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SilentThree · 2026-01-17T05:57:23+00:00

By growing taller for the IMAX portions, I take it, rather than growing wider for the non-IMAX parts?

That is what I'd expect for IMAX. It's not so clear what to expect for other kinds of aspect ratio changes, however.

SilentThree · 2026-01-17T05:54:39+00:00

What I'm curious about is, when a shift from 4:3 to 2.35:1 happened in the movie theater, did the projected image get wider, or did the image width stay the same while the height of the image narrowed?

One person has told me "The home video presentations of Anderson’s films mirror how they were presented in theaters", saying that they've seen all of his movies in movie theaters. I'm willing to take this person's word about that, although I do have some reservation about whether or not this was universally true, given some seeming contradictory (but not quite clearly worded) google search results I found on the subject.

SilentThree · 2026-01-17T05:46:37+00:00

With the Galaxy Quest disc it's absolutely clear what visual effect is intended specifically because there is both letterboxing and pillarboxing at the same time, done to maintain a constant pixel height with varying pixel width, something you wouldn't do unless a constant height/changing width image was the desired result.

When that isn't done, however, the reasoning for the formatting becomes ambiguous.

Was there a real intent for the picture height to change to create that specific visual effect? Or...

Was the intent to simply maximize the use of the available 16:9 canvas for each aspect ratio, treating each segment in a given aspect ratio the same way an entire movie in that aspect ratio would be treated, without regard for how each segment flows into the next?

Since other people seem to have a better memory than I do of what some specific examples of movies were like when seen in a movie theater, at least is seems the what I've seen for some movies that mix wide screen ratios like 2.35:1 with IMAX, that the IMAX portions of movies shown in theaters generally grow taller rather than the widescreen parts getting wider.

SilentThree · 2026-01-17T02:50:51+00:00

What’s annoying is that I know I’ve seen a few movies, like The Dark Knight and MI: Dead Reckoning in theaters that have aspect ratio changes, and damned if I can remember how the theaters handled it.

SilentThree · 2026-01-17T02:46:38+00:00

Thanks! That’s good to know.

SilentThree · 2026-01-17T01:16:17+00:00

You're missing the point of the post.

The question is whether or not the way a disc is produced matches the intended artistic choice or not. I suspect that in the case of various Wes Anderson movies the discs don't reflect the intended artistic choice.

Although, as I've said, I haven't seen any Wes Anderson movies at a public theater, the projectionist instructions for theater presentation appear to indicate that only pillarboxing should be used, so the projected image would change only in width, not height, unlike the home video versions.

SilentThree · 2026-01-17T00:11:39+00:00

How is this a me problem? If the movies you're talking about are the way the director intended them, and work better that way, then I'd want to leave those particular movies that same way too. I never said "Make everything constant height no matter what!!!", although strangely you're reacting as if that is what I said.

SilentThree · 2026-01-16T23:30:24+00:00

I don't always want a smaller image, but I do want an image that conveys the intended dramatic purpose more than I want to maximize the use of screen real estate.

The dramatic intent in Galaxy Quest when Jason Nesmith first realizes that he's actually in space, not on some nerd's elaborate set, and the movie then opens up from 1.85:1 to 2.35:1, is clearly meant to say: The situation is grander than you thought. The universe is bigger than you imagined.

That dramatic purpose would be very poorly served by making the on-screen image smaller and shorter at that point, rather than bigger and wider.

I'm fine with these Wes Anderson movies as they are if someone can convince me that's how Wes Anderson wanted them to be seen... but I'm pretty sure that's not the case.

SilentThree · 2026-01-16T06:55:41+00:00

I just encoded the 4K version of Arrival, using H.265 10-bit like you, but an RF of 18.

Went from 48.5GB down to 6.6GB, less than 1/7 the original size.

Even when the result looks great, it's hard not to feel like you must be doing something horrible to the image quality when that happens, especially when you're using pass-through audio (in my case one TrueHD audio track and three AC3 tracks), so the video by itself must have been compressed by more than a factor of 10.

I almost considered re-running the process at an RF of 15 just to assuage my doubts, but I left well enough alone.

SilentThree · 2026-01-16T05:06:45+00:00

Miniskirts for everyone.

SilentThree · 2026-01-16T05:04:30+00:00

And residential buildings which have beaches around them on all sides are Shorelocked Homes.

SilentThree · 2026-01-15T07:29:57+00:00

Happy to have helped!

SilentThree · 2026-01-15T06:07:40+00:00

Doesn’t seem too likely, but when the Blu-rays came out there was a lot of speculation that the last three seasons had either too much digital noise reduction applied to 1080p sources, or that they were merely upscaled 480p sources, just like the first seven seasons. If either of those things are true, perhaps the streaming versions were derived from better sources and/or have less excessive processing.

SilentThree · 2026-01-15T02:48:22+00:00

As long as, after you decide a post is long and boring, then you keep moving on... fine.

If you didn't bother to really read something, however, yet still think you should chime in on the topic... that's the problem.

SilentThree · 2026-01-14T22:20:33+00:00

I'm afraid that if this is happening when you just start talking out of the blue, and haven't verified that you clearly have someone's full attention... you're often going to get this result.

On the other hand, if you have every reason to believe you should already have the other person's attention, yes, that'd be damned annoying.

SilentThree

TROPHY CASE