This kind of "correcting" and "enhancing" seems to be happening more and more. :facepalm So what's the release to watch if you want to see Buffy as it was on tv in 1997? Are the dvd's untouched?
The DVDs are the way to go, unless you can find recordings of actual broadcasts, I suppose.
I've seen good rematers and bad, but this..? Going widescreen just created too many problems. No wonder the uber-fans are annoyed. I'm irked, and that's only from what I saw in that one video, was there no-one in charge of colour balance and contrast? It's like they ran the whole thing though auto-filters on default settings.
The DVDs are the original episodes as intended. This issue exists because the original episodes were only created for SD, so the only way to create a true HD version is to go back to the original film negatives and redo the entire editing process from scratch. The DVD releases don't require this, because the original versions are sufficient resolution.
And I absolutely hate seeing 4:3 shows forced to 16:9. I want to see shows as they were originally shot and framed, whatever aspect ratio that happens to be. When I see shows like Seinfeld and Cheers in widescreen on TV, I could make a drinking game out of every time there's a cropped off head.
Actually, Joss Whedon is on record as saying that the DVDs are "as good as it gets" but that even those aren't perfect because they stretch at the edges. If you pop your DVD into a modern system and watch it on a 16:9 scree -- like many have nowadays -- what you're going to see is the picture taking up the whole frame. And that's as the raw feed, too. It's not your TV or your player stretching or zooming anything.
Buffy was shot in 4:3, the way the bulk of TV shows in the 90s were. Some were shot in widescreen and in some cases in HD (e.g. Babylon 5), but most weren't. (And Babylon 5 has its own problems with f/x that never made the leap to HD, but that's a separate story.) Put simply, the "true" version of the show is a 4:3, non-zoomed, non-stretched, non-cropped version.
At this point, the old DVDs are about as close as you can get to that. The Complete Series set runs for about $100 on Amazon (and Amazon also has them on Prime, though I haven't watched 'em). Same story with Angel, by the way.
Also, one thing I've noticed is that color timing in the 90s was just...different from what it is nowadays. Things tended to be shot much more "warm," I think, or at least "natural." It's interesting to see how color timing can be affected by the era.
