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How the West Was WonRating:
Release Date: 12 September, 2000 Retail Price: $14.98 OUR Price: $12.99 You SAVE: $1.99! Cast: Complete Cast (20 total) |
How the West Was Won Reviews
Great actors, good story, distracting wide-screen-cinema technology
I know there were advances in wide screen cinema technology in the late 50s and early 60s with Cinemascope and Panavision. This "How the West Was Won" picture looks like it had three lenses taking the wide shot, leaving seams that divide the picture up into thirds. The picture looks like three pictures seemed together, each with a hot spot in the center with dark corners. It does not look very clean, at all, and it is a big distraction on brighter outdoor scenes.
However, I love seeing Jimmy Stewart in pictures and he is very good in this one. This film is also a historic spectacle to watch.
I posted a jpeg image under this product listing showing the problems of three simultaneous camera takes seamed together without any digital repair done before mastering the DVD for duplication.
Perhaps the right way to transfer this film to digital is to digitize the three reals separately and then pose them together in post production, allowing the edges to feather-together to make the seams virtually invisible. Then, a clean DVD master can be achieved.
Perhaps to save money, the DVD publisher used a copy seamed together by analog methods for previous television releases. This method is probably cost effective for the first DVD release where we don't know how successful sales will be for this movie. If this movie becomes more successful in DVD sales overtime, maybe the publisher will make a more serious digital transfer effort.
A great film; an odd filming process
This film was meant to be seen in Cinerama on the big screen. Period! When it was made, no one really thought of how it would look on a television screen. That is why it was one of the few films films shot in the 3 camera format. Like a few great films, it just doesn't transfer well to the small screen. Don't let the 2 seams from the 3 cameras distract you. This is a great film. (Although I agree with the other reviewer who mentioned that in this day and age the seams could be digitally removed)
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