PlayStationPepe
New member
The 4K disc of Project Hail Mary is out and the way it handles aspect ratio is going to annoy a specific group of people here. The Earth-set flashbacks are 2.39:1. The mission scenes, which the reviews say make up most of the film, were shot for IMAX and sit at a screen-filling 16:9, with transitions between the two.
On a flat panel that is a gift, you get the tall frame for the bulk of the runtime. If you are running a scope screen with an anamorphic lens or a memorised zoom, you have the opposite problem, and it is the one that has been getting worse every year since studios started doing this. You either mask for 16:9 and let the 2.39 sections letterbox inside it, or you set up for scope and spill the IMAX scenes off the top and bottom of your screen. Neither is what you paid for.
The other technical note is the photography. Greig Fraser shot digital, transferred the whole film out to analog film, then scanned it back to digital. He has done that before and it is not a gimmick, it puts a real grain structure and a bit of colour density into the image that a straight digital pipeline does not have. Anyone whose projector or TV is set to aggressive noise reduction is going to erase exactly the thing that makes the disc look the way it does.
The reviews are less kind about the pacing, with the second act being the common complaint. Has anyone with a masking system worked out a sane way to handle these IMAX-expanded discs, or have you just given up and run everything at 16:9?
On a flat panel that is a gift, you get the tall frame for the bulk of the runtime. If you are running a scope screen with an anamorphic lens or a memorised zoom, you have the opposite problem, and it is the one that has been getting worse every year since studios started doing this. You either mask for 16:9 and let the 2.39 sections letterbox inside it, or you set up for scope and spill the IMAX scenes off the top and bottom of your screen. Neither is what you paid for.
The other technical note is the photography. Greig Fraser shot digital, transferred the whole film out to analog film, then scanned it back to digital. He has done that before and it is not a gimmick, it puts a real grain structure and a bit of colour density into the image that a straight digital pipeline does not have. Anyone whose projector or TV is set to aggressive noise reduction is going to erase exactly the thing that makes the disc look the way it does.
The reviews are less kind about the pacing, with the second act being the common complaint. Has anyone with a masking system worked out a sane way to handle these IMAX-expanded discs, or have you just given up and run everything at 16:9?
