TNT's Leverage is the latest stretch-o-vision victim
By Richard Lawler 
posted Jan 15th 2009 4:21PM
posted Jan 15th 2009 4:21PM
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posted Jan 15th 2009 4:21PM
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I dont understand it either....They still do it with movies on TNT & TBS.....at least ABC Family just wont stretch it and leave the bars........but I think you meant 2009 not 2008.......
doh! fixed.
no worries :-)
It was not only strech-o-vision of a full 4:3 image, but of a letterboxed one. This mean, they took the 16:9 picture, extended it with letterbox bars to 4:3 and then stretched the sides to "fill" the 1080i frame. It looked horrible, distortion on the sides and letterbox bars.
I just hope the re-run later this week will have the error fixed.
I encounter this on the broadcast networks from time to time here in Boston, especially the Fox affiliate: I'll tune in a program that should be in HD, but is being broadcast in pillarboxed SD instead. Sometimes it's a whole episode, while other times it'll last for half the episode before someone at the station realizes the mistake and switches over to the HD feed. It's incredibly irritating in that it's caused usually by little more than human carelessness.
TNT doesn't use pure stretch-o-vision, but a part-chop and part-stretch thing that cannot be undone by any set.
They still do this because a lot of SD viewers hate letterbox (on tiny screens) and when they move to HD they complain about pillarbox.
One of the reasons, pillar boxes happen to network HD shows is because the local affiliate does not pass through HD or the local station does not have a way to overlay news items, weather bugs, etc on HD feed. So, they downconvert to SD, overlay their stuff and transmit it back in HD. What a waste! Our local Fox affiliate does that. Our local ABC and NBC afffiliates do weather bugs over HD. This is in Kansas City, MO.
I don't understand why they do their strech-o-vision on show like Bones that have been shot in HD since day 1.
I just thought it was a weird copy that I downloaded.
I managed to fix it by changing the aspect ratio of my tv and the display ratio of my popcorn hour. But it's good to know that I won't have to resort to such measures in the future.
TNT broadcasts in 1080i, not 720p.
I noticed this stretch-o-crap right away! The fact that someone transmitted the wrong image just shows how little TNT really cares about the viewers. How careless can you be? BTW, what you said about The Closer is correct! I will be pissed off it is broadcast incorrectly.
Makes sense now as to why there were no available torrents of it until earlier today (demonoid is the only place that I know of, and even then there aren't many seeders/leeches). But the one I got was excellent. Absolutely love this show and can't wait to see how the season plays out. Hopefully a DVD/Blu-Ray release will have some great features.
Here's the reply I received to my complaint about the episode.
"Thank you for contacting us. You are exactly right. We had a scheduling problem on our end that caused the SD version of Leverage to be scheduled on the HD channel. This is regrettable and we apologize for the trouble. We caught this error and this will not be reoccurring for the weekends re-airing.
We appreciate your alerting us to the issue and for giving us the opportunity to communicate our efforts.
Best,
TNT Web Staff"
Here's the e-mail I wrote:
Date Created: 1/14/2009
Details: There was a problem with last night's (1/13) broadcast of Leverage on TNT-HD. It appears that a 4:3 letterboxed version of the show was broadcast and then stretched horizontally to a 16:9 aspect ratio.
The show was utterly impossible to watch with everyone stretched and squashed that way. I'm hoping this is a one-time thing and will be corrected in this weekend's showing.
Note: I've confirmed this with several forums. I ultimately had to set my set to a 4:3 mode and then I ended up watching the program inside 4 black borders, but at least at the right aspect ratio. Please check with your engineers and have them pull the correct "switches" next time. There is no excuse for displaying an HD program in a 4:3 format but then stretched horizontally (only) to 16:9. Even your everyday viewer will notice that it is wrong. I at least knew how to workaround the problem, but most people wouldn't.
P.S. Your TNT-HD logo was overlaid in the correct aspect ratio, so it definitely points to a problem with the underlying aspect ratio, not any TV settings.
I hate when I'm missing out on my HD content more than anyone, Blaine, but it seems like you went through a lot of trouble when you probably could have just flipped over to the SD version of TNT. I'm hoping you just wrote that for TNT's benefit and didn't really go through with changing the aspect - just to get a smaller picture than what TNT had on the other channel.
I don't believe it was a mistake, I just don't think they care. TBS and TNT are the most hateful channels towards viewers in all of cable/sat/whatever television. Not only do they stretch, these jerks are leading the way in on-screen graphics too. The entire 1/4 of the screen is constantly covered in "comming soon" announcements and station identifers during the entire broadcast and I'm sick of it. They don't give a sh*t if you can even see the movie or episode they are showing, they just want to advertise you to death. They need to go on a black list until they learn their lesson. They're both owned by the same company and they suck for doing stretch-o-vision and on screen graphics. They only do it because they think they can get away with it. TBS and TNT are the same stations that invented the moving pop-up's with the characters waving at you while you're trying watch. JUST STOP!!!!
TNT and TBS (same company) contact link:
http://support.tbs.com/ics/support/default.asp?deptID=5475
lol, glad I watched the Saturday one.