OK, so the credits are obviously in 16x9 squished horizontally into 4x3 - if you watch it in 16x9 Cybertron is spherical instead of egg-shaped in that opening shot, plus everybody else tends to look less weird throughout the rest of the credits (although it's subtle since all the characters have such unusual/unnatural proportions anyway).

 

However, it seems to me that for the rest of the series it seems to vacilate between a squished 16x9 and a true 4x3 picture.

 

I should have just stuck with watching the whole thing in 4x3 mode and I probably would have never noticed. :redface  Unfortunately, that egg-shaped Cybertron in the beginning forced me to mess around and look at it in different aspect ratios.  argh...

the show was "shot" for widescreen but was never rendered for it. So all we have is the series intro to tease us. I really shouldn't be angsty about that since it was never shown in widescreen to begin with (apart from the first episode when it was shown at BotCon).....

 

but I am

 

 

being a huge fan of directorial visions and what not, and especially considering how much I love the direction in Beast Machines........

the show was "shot" for widescreen but was never rendered for it.

Are we 100% sure that's the case?  In some scenes I'd swear everything has been squished horizontally; unfortunately, the hyper-stylized nature of everything in the show makes it super-difficult to determine if this is the case or not.

 

Uhhh, I won't mention how I came to beleive this by standing next to the TV measuring things I was relatively sure were supposed to be circular whilst flipping aspect ratio's back and forth...  Oops... :redface

the show was "shot" for widescreen but was never rendered for it.

Are we 100% sure that's the case?  In some scenes I'd swear everything has been squished horizontally; unfortunately, the hyper-stylized nature of everything in the show makes it super-difficult to determine if this is the case or not.

 

Uhhh, I won't mention how I came to beleive this by standing next to the TV measuring things I was relatively sure were supposed to be circular whilst flipping aspect ratio's back and forth...  Oops...   :redface

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

yeah, this was a big conversation Rhino had with the fans... basically they would have needed to go back and composite/render everything outside the 4x3 window, which was clearly outside the budgetary bounds of a company who specializes in rereleasing old shows.

yeah, this was a big conversation Rhino had with the fans... basically they would have needed to go back and composite/render everything outside the 4x3 window, which was clearly outside the budgetary bounds of a company who specializes in rereleasing old shows.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Sorry, I guess I haven't been very clear - my point wasn't that the whole show got squished, in fact I'd say that the vast majority of it is 4x3, but that but that in a few instances it looks like they were simply squished from a wider rendering.  Maybe on occasion the director liked some aspects (sorry :redface ) of a wider shot and simply had the entire thing rendered and then horizontally compressed (I assume that before the final version is rendered they look at some kind of unfinished versions to set up the final one).