cd637299 said:
Looks more like vertical pan-and-scan in the promos, with the overscan areas on the sides leveraged to make it not quite so stretchy. Universal's been remastering using their film elements, with some moderate success (depending on your sensitivity, I guess.) This may not apply to Ozzie and Harriet and Burns and Allen, but a lot of Universal's 70's shows were shot on wider stock than they actually used in the 4x3 composition, since they had a tendency to package up edits of multiple episodes of some shows and screen them theatrically overseas. (In one case, Battlestar Galactica, they actually released early episodes in theaters stateside.)
Old videotape can actually be a good candidate for vertical pan-and-scan if it was shot with a reasonably conservative safe area, though not for reasons of resolution. When the full 4x3 frame of that videotape is shown, the unscanned corners of the picture are often displayed (they would have been inside the rounded corners of the screen bezel on old televisions.) Vertical pan-and-scan crops those distractions, while not losing nearly as much picture info as you'd expect, since the expectation was that TV's weren't commonly adjusted to show that portion of the picture. Blowing that rectangle up to 16x9 size will make the remaining scan lines in use pretty visible, though, unless steps are taken to clean them up.
A lot of kinescopes aren't such good candidates, though - they're generally film records *of* the safe area, and probably shouldn't be expanded. That case depends on both the show director/camera people and on the technician responsible for maintaining the kinescope.
