Monday, June 20, 2005

DVD Complaint

Last night I finally got around to watching the extended version of "Ray". I've had the DVD for a while but so far had only watched the theatrical cut. While there were some nice extended music scenes, for the most part there wasn't much added by the extended version; still, it was fun to watch of course.

However.... Instead of having two full versions of the film on the DVD, they had the extra scenes stored separately and so when watching that version you would pause and "jump" to the added scene whenever one came up in the film, then jump back to where you left off in the standard cut. I don't mind the jumps all that much, but what was very annoying here was that the film is mastered in 16:9 enhanced mode, but the extra scenes were not! So whenever I jump to an extra scene it isn't widescreen, and so appears squashed flat for the duration of the scene unless I manually adjust the TV out of widescreen mode for each scene.

Hard to believe in this "modern" age of videography that they'd put it together like that, but there it is. The good news again is I probably won't feel the urge to watch the extended version again as it wasn't a significant improvement over the theatrical version.

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