PBS does not force archival material to be cropped to 16:9, as far as I know. (I have delivered many shows to PBS.) It can be pillarboxed. However, blowing it up to fit the frame is typically the choice of most producers.
On May 22, 2012, at 2:28 PM, Jeff Kreines wrote:
> This has been an ongoing problem in Alabama. While Alabama Public Television sends 16x9 to our cable company most of the time, some shows, like Lawrence Welk (!) are 4x3, so the cable company has decided everything gets sent out 4x3 on the SD feed. (On the rare occasions I watch PBS I usually DVR it, and HD eats up too much disk space.) Lawrence Welk rules us from the grave!
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> That's bad enough, but the PBS's idiotic insistence on forcing archival material to be cropped to 16:9 (rather than being pillarboxed) leads to double cropping of old footage. This is unacceptable.
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> It is especially bad in programs about artists. My favorite example is an execrable American Masters show by one of the Burns Brothers. Whatever you think of Warhol, he knew what a frame was -- if your films often have 33-minute takes the frame is significant. But this Burns fellow decided he had a better sense of framing than his subject, and cropped all of the Warhol film clips (originally 4x3) to 16x9. This worked especially well in a film that had three characters, each placed in a corner of the frame -- one of them was lost on PBS.
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> American Masters indeed.
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