Post

Jeremy Williams
@jerware.org

Is there any practical reason besides pure laziness that companies like @netflix.com render their trailers for YouTube with black bars? It's not VHS anymore, guys. Modern players maintain aspect ratio, and all it does is shrink the video on ultra widescreen displays and add noisy gray bars.

0 reposts10 likes

Trixter
@oldskool.org

They cut the trailers for their own platform first (it's what plays when you hover on something), then just take that export and upload it on YouTube.

Jeremy Williams
@jerware.org

The same trailer on their own site does not have black bars and plays full height, and the YouTube one is watermarked so it's not the same render. Can you think of a reason you'd want to include black bars today, in the digital world, on YouTube or elsewhere?

Trixter
@oldskool.org

Letterboxing and pillarboxing was originally for preventing players and devices from stretching the content incorrectly. The public mindset for stopping that roughly coincides with the rise of Instagram. So it's been only a decade, I think? Sometimes bad practices take longer than that to disappear.

Trixter
@oldskool.org

What I originally wrote and then erased is that it might simply be a matter of ignorance: They give these tasks to people with less experience, who just use an export preset.

Trixter
@oldskool.org

Sometimes people never question things they were told. I have lobbied for years for one media archival organization to de-interlace their analog video to 60p at public showings so that the original art is presented properly. They cite outdated info for their 30p behavior and never question it.