They want you to forget what a film looks like

I'm not a film expert, but I like to think I have taste? And yet, somehow the recent Beatles projects reduced me to tears on several occasions. Am I secretly a chud in denial, or are my tastes just offensive?

Look, everyone has the right to be an elitist on their own film blog. The author didn't ask us to read what he said. However, his entire thesis is dramatically undermined by the simple fact that he didn't attempt to grab even a single comparison frame from the original releases so that a reader can A/B them and make up their minds for themselves.

As to his distaste for those upscaled and colorized vintage shorts, I'm happy to go on record and say that I love them. In fact, watching these clips is the closest thing my family has to a Christmas tradition at this point. My personal favorite is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQs5VxNPhzk and frankly, I don't have the time of day for anyone who is upset that I think it's wonderful.

The Beatles project was a pretty good transfer, I'd say. It's the needless use of the same tech to create these horrific transfers of Cameron's work that are creating controversy.

The Matrix was also destroyed in its 4k transfer by ridiculously bad color correction.

In my opinion, the original was cartoonishly green. Theatergoers also commented the home release was way more apparently green than the original theatrical version - mainly due to the limitations of home media. Now with 4K, we’re finally closer to the original intent.

The question is should we be going for "original intent" or "original effect"? Regardless of the filmmakers' intention, the "cartoonishly green" original theatrical version is what became a smash hit. Once the public has seen it, and embraced it, shouldn't that be considered the canonical version? The proof of the pudding is in the eating, after all. To tinker with it afterwards risks ruining the effect, regardless of the intention.

No, you’re missing my point.

The theatrical film had very little green tint compared to the home releases. The home releases are “cartoonishly green” when the theatrical version was not.

The 4K simply goes back to what it was originally. It is, quite literally, undoing the tampering that’s been happening since the first (edit: second, 2004 release) DVD.

Ah, when you said “the original” I assumed that was referring to the theatrical release.

The Matrix new transfer made me really sad. It is one of my favorite movies of all time, and this new version had the colors done all wrong and in some scenes, I had the impression that the framerate was wrong, especially the bullet time and other action scenes, like they don't match the rest of the movie.

Curiously, if you look into it, it was the original home release that had the colors done all wrong. The original theatrical release was, according to observers, hardly green.

The 4K version, ironically, is more correct to the original theatrical film.

The original dvd release was fine. It was every release after the second movie that “fixed” the first by making its color grading as smash-you-in-the-face green as the sequels (except the newest 4k I’m aware of, which put it back to something resembling the original color grading)

Ah that makes sense.

I had the original release and watched it first in DVD - it was the first DVD I ever watched, and it blew me away.

I struggle to believe that the 4K restoration matches the theatrical, but I never saw it. But the Colors in it are so digital and garish, I don’t see how that would been how the 35mm film stock would have looked. Now I’m interested in finding out.

That “ridiculously bad color correction” is actually… the original theatrical film!

I’m not kidding. To quote AVForum:

Now The Matrix has been an odd fish in terms of releases on home formats, with a reasonably natural tone to its original almost flagship DVD release back in 1999 (it was one of the first titles that many DVD adopters bought), but - years later - a very different look to its 2004 re-release on DVD. Everything in 'The Matrix' suddenly became really green. This green-tinged 'style' carried on to its Blu-ray release in 2008, where things were dialled back a little, but some sequences were still almost monochromatic in their green bent.

It's a stylised look which, for many, doesn't really capture the original vision of The Matrix that was in theatres back in 1999, so it's a massive relief that this new native 4K remaster - culled from the Super 35 negatives with 2K VFX shots and supervised by the original director of photography - has been completely regraded to give an all-new look which suits not only the modern sensibilities of HDR10 and Dolby Vision, but also the original theatrical vision of the piece.

https://www.avforums.com/reviews/the-matrix-4k-blu-ray-revie...

That’s interesting.

I only watched the first Matrix on DVD I was too young for theatrical. It was an amazing experience to watch it projected in our living room.

I can’t say anything about what the theatrical Matrix looked like since I didn’t watch it, but the Color’s are so garish and over the top on the 4k, I really struggle to believe that was 100% the original look.

35mm film just doesn’t look like that in my experience.

Ah so you’re wrong. I watched the first release of the Matriz, which was correct.

It was the second release which was green. This was after the sequels.

So it depends which release you watched.

So since I watched the first DVD release I’m assuming that was close to the theatrical. And it Didn’t look at all like the 4k “remaster”.

>The Matrix was also destroyed in its 4k transfer by ridiculously bad color correction.

Which of the color corrections destroyed it? The one where they made everything green? Or the one where they made the colors 'normal'?

Probably both.

Seems like the first release of the Matrix on DVD had it right. I watched that one and fell in love with the movie.

After the sequels it appears they “greened up” the DVD.

Now on 4k they’ve done an abysmal and horrific job. Apparently Bill Pope was involved but I never know anymore.

4k formats are ridiculous anyway. At an average healthy distance from a TV that’s not giant you should be barely able to tell the difference between 4k and a great high bit rate 1080p/2k.

The real and dramatic issue with True Lies is that the original high-resolution negative is available and that there's also a recent 4K-scan.

In other words, why should I run your comment through GTP to summarize it and then expand it to its original length again, when I can read it verbatim, just as it is? What is gained? What may be missed? Why should I quote you using the GTP-transfer version and not in your own words? Should every comment on HN be replaced by its respective GTP-transfer version?

what is gained?

Removing film grain makes compression far more efficient. This reduces costs of streaming.

So, here ist your comment with the grain removed (quote -> GTP summary -> GTP re-expanded to original length):

Removing film grain significantly improves compression efficiency, resulting in reduced streaming costs.

Why didn't you word it like this in the first place? (Mind the compression efficiency: 18 bytes improvement over the original, 109 bytes versus 117 bytes gzipped.)

;-)

Do you mabye mean "GPT"?

Yes.

Anyway, what is more important to preserve: artistic choices made according to the medium (which importantly includes the kind of film stock for any movie) or bandwidth?

And, if it's all about bandwidth, why do a high definition version, in the first place, and not stick to the low-bandwidth, but high fidelity 2K transfer?

I find it hilarious that HBO's classic "snow" static dissolve is literally the worst clip for digital compression.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=P_Oh7HizY5I

Which I guess is why Max has a boring gradient.

I could be worse if it had chroma information.

It barely makes a difference in reality. I've done final online conform tests for major distributors and the differences in savings vs perceptual cost (if delivering to a targeted bitrate) are negligible. It's also entirely moot for blu-ray delivery.

You can't "just" scan the original negative or use the "4K-scan" (which will be of the negative I think, as any "print" done they could have scanned will have only been 2K) that easily though for films that have digital VFX / bluescreen/greenscreen or heavy grading being done on them: the "negative" is almost certainly only going to consist of raw film plate footage, without any of the post production work: you'd then have to either re-create all that work at 4K (original VFX was done at 2K by Digital Domain, as would be initial grading DI onto 2K print), or just keep the original work in those areas at 2K (and you'd still have to grade the new 4K plate-only footage to blend in and match the original grade).

uhm... we have neural style transfer these days.

you can grab the postproduction color grading and even VFX from the low-res one, and apply them to the high-res one. Without messing around with other aspects.

Have any Hollywood level movies done this? I know they did it with ST:TNG.

True Lies is a 1994 release. On what assumptions do you base the idea that the theatrical release cut has been already lost and that there is only "raw film plate footage, without any of the post production work"? True Lies was printed in 70mm and was especially known for its image quality, compare the quote below. (Where do you get the 2K from?) Also, 70mm film should have more information than 4K digital video.

Both Cameron and Carpenter maintain that those prints — struck in both 35mm and 70mm — are among the finest they have ever produced (release prints were handled by Deluxe, while CFI provided interpositives and dailies). The filmmakers reserved special praise for the quality of the 70mm prints, which were blown up from the 35mm negative. Cameron reports that his past attempts to strike 70mm prints from 35mm negative have been satisfactory but hardly spectacular. "The 70mm prints of this film are shockingly great in terms of image quality," he states. "This is the fourth time I've printed in 70, and it's the first time that the 70 prints have looked substantially better than the 35s. The 35mm prints of True Lies are very good, but the 70s look like IMAX by comparison. We ran tests side by side, and it was no contest."

https://theasc.com/articles/true-lies-tests-cinemas-limits

This is not true at all. There are different types of negatives. You seem to be thinking of the camera original negative. There are other types of negatives. Interpositives and other versions are made to ultimately create the final negative of the completed film. This is then used to create the prints made to deliver to the theaters. There can even be an archival negative created, and depending on the level of effort, they can do color separation archive so you have 3 black-and-white negatives of the RGB that would all need to be scanned separately and then recombined to bring back the color version (which is fun as each negative can shrink/warp distinctly).

Essentially, it reads like you feel the only film version of a feature is the color print.

I'm not even a huge film nerd and the strangeness of the screenshots was evident - though there's no harm in a side by side, I can understand why they didn't include it.

I am a big film nerd and the strangeness was not evident at all, not even with zoom and spending time (I am very perceptive and attentive) trying to figure out what the complain actually is (oh, too much face detail? Smh...)

I think it's worse after while watching the movie itself. The smoothness makes everything look waxy.

I don't doubt that the difference is there. I also don't doubt that I would be able to see a significant difference.

My point is merely that it's impossible to see while displayed on their own, without the comparison. It was not provided and that's a pity.

I think others are just saying it's possible even without the side by side, but no harm in including it for those who can't see it.

The best way I can describe it is someone took an animated movie and applied AI guesses to make it look real. Which is sort of the opposite of what actually happens, but that's what the outcome looks like.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley

It's not as bad as that Predator Hunter Edition, but it looks too waxy, too "clean" and modern. https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-doxBelQegm0/W79ooJddeSI/AAAAAAAAP...

Must be different kinds of film nerds.

I actually laughed out loud at the Pixar Rose one hehe

As to his distaste for those upscaled and colorized vintage shorts, I'm happy to go on record and say that I love them

Then your sense of taste may be worth questioning

I can understand why people like them, they are interesting and give you a new way to look at old footage, even if they are also garish and fake looking.

They're not "fake looking", they are fake. There is no color information in the original film in much of those situations. The algorithm being used is basically inventing the chroma channel out of thin air, based on a guess.

Now what would be cool (and may already exist, given the extremely intelligent people who work on image processing) would be a setup where you could take a high-resolution scan of some black-and-white or some badly faded film, along with a lower-resolution copy of a version with more proper color, and "transfer" the color grading to "restore" color to the higher-resolution version. This would still require guessing, but much less so, as you're using an "authoritative" version as a control to direct the algorithm. I'd be fine with that as long as it was done with care and went through a vetting process.

Fake things can definitely look fake, I think, or am I missing the distinction you are drawing here? I don't understand what you are correcting me on, but I'm curious. I'm aware there's no color in the black and white original.

When you picture yourself, are you possibly a huge golden statue on a mountain?

I don’t see the need for A/B here. The frames posted demonstrate clearly the issues the author has without need for a reference. At least for me they look hideous :)

Historically, arguments that are literally "there's no need for opposing views because I am right" don't age well.

Scrolling the top of the article looking at movies I’ve never seen, I didn’t think anything of it.

It wasn’t until I saw a movie screenshot I was familiar with (“Titanic”). At that point I had to agree with the headline: I immediately said “yeah, she does look like a Pixar character” as the revelation came that I had mostly forgotten what a film looks like. I don’t think this perspective is too alarmist.

Detailed and specific, yes but someone’s got to do it.

My reaction was exactly the same as yours. Blogs like these usually have an assumed audience, I think, which is probably why there aren't any A/B picture comparisons. On a related note, I recently watched Dances with Wolves and was amazed at how authentic it felt despite not being in 4k and all the modern jazz.

Probably what "reduced you to tears" was not the Beatles itself but the personal experiences that you had with this music. It is an emotional anchor that companies are eager to exploit.

For me it is a way of extracting more money out of nostalgia from subpar works. I personally believe The Beatles disappeared when Brian Epstein died and the group(as bigger than the sum of its parts) could not remain united.

I see that all the time with people with things like their first motorbikes in exhibitions. For me, they are noisy outdated machines. For them it was freedom, it was how they impressed their first girlfriend or their first travel with friends and all the experiences that came from it.

Their first cars, pinball machines or more recently a commodore or a sega genesis, NES, play Station... as people that are getting older and making money can remember younger times.

It's so cool that you could explain all of this stuff to me.

And yet, somehow the recent Beatles projects reduced me to tears on several occasions.

In a good way or a bad way?

The 1902 original of the linked film was "actually shot on Biograph’s proprietary 68mm stock" i.e. could be considered very high resolution in any historical timeframe, even today ("The IMAX of the 1890s")

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Ud1aZFE0fU

Note that this post seems to be talking about at least three different techniques, not all of which were used on all the mentioned footage in question:

1. De-noising: often aggressive (and sometimes with pretty "basic" algorithms like bi-lateral filters) removal of noise / film grain.

2. Up-scaling. Note also that a lot of film stock in the 70s/80s was not that great quality, and even getting "useful" 2K resolution out of it might not always be possible (I'm not claiming that was the case in these cases, but it might be a consideration if a studio wants a 4K BluRay from the plate, which might not be possible otherwise)

3. Face replacements (Beatles Now and then footage only I think?).

They Will Not Grow Old was also colourised and retimed (the original footage like most 100 year footage was recorded by manually winding a handle to spool the film, so the speed of it (its frames per second) varies considerably leading to quite odd-looking footage (people walking is especially odd-looking) compared to footage we're used to within the last 70 years or so with mechanical/electronic winding.

It's why old physical media ownership and ripping it, is so important for true preservation. Pirates are doing God's work here. You can't count on IP holders, bug movie studios and streaming services, both for availability and for accuracy.

Agree.

All those remastering are often done with more importance given to the economic side of things, instead of respecting the art.

Some are destroying the original work.

The first thing that pop into my mind is how they destroyed Buffy with the HD makeover:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZWNGq70Oyo

As a reddit commenter said about the cropping job: "All they had to do was nothing and they still fucked it up."

It's a disgrace.

Buffys remaster is a joke. Did they just try to automate the whole thing and not look at it before publishing it? I mean there are night scenes that are clearly shoot in daylight and they didn't even bother to adjust the lighting and color balance, scenes where you can see the edge of sets and the film crew or boom mics hanging in the picture.

Really appreciate you posting this! I didn't really watch Buffy but the video did a fantastic job of highlighting the issues.

The right way to do it is how The Wire has done it: https://davidsimon.com/the-wire-hd-with-videos/

If pirates were cared about preservation, they would not dare compress the rip from the disc.

And yet, they do. They throw away detail as they please. That’s preservation?

Preservation doesn't always mean to preserve every raw bit or analog signal off the original medium, but preserve the content itself, even if compression is used, because certain niche movies never get re-released on modern medium, you're just left with the original Laser-Disk or VHS, maybe even DVD if you're lucky, and that's it, so compressed video is better than no video because you have no legal way of obtaining that content today if it's not sold on any physical medium or on any streaming service.

Compression is needed on torrent sites because few peers are interesting in downloading and seeding a 60+GB raw file of a movie if the 12GB mkv looks just as good on the 1080p Wallmart monitor.

There are of course also RAW rips of blu-rays out there but mostly for AAA IPs like Star Wars, LotR, Matrix, etc, not for niche content that have a reduced audience.

If you think raw videos are available only for niche content, you have been missing out. BDRemux (i.e. not the Blu-Ray image with its menus but an un-recompressed repackaging of the video and audio into a .mkv file) is a common and decently well seeded format even for niche art films, from not only various private trackers but also the public Russian torrent tracker, with the hash carried along on other public trackers, too. Those 4k releases at 60GB or whatever are showing up, too.

But the pirates don’t have access to the original master files. If the 4K rescanning of the film is botched there is only the previous HD or SD version if even that. What would need preserving is the actual DCP files which are encrypted and not yet craked to my knowledge or original mastering files. Film archives are the ones preserving film legacy still.

Not really "pirates" but there ARE projects that have managed to get ahold of production prints to "restore" them.

https://www.thestarwarstrilogy.com/project-4k77/

I agree in line of principle, everything that was officially released should be preserved.

But "accuracy" is the wrong word I think, old home video transfers are not more representative of the original theatrical presentation just because they came out first

An additional thought regarding Up-scaling: Until about 7 years ago, almost all digital VFX (including on True Lies and Titanic mentioned in the article: done by Digital Domain at the time) for film was still being rendered/delivered at 2K (other than occasional larger format things like IMax), so it's almost certain that in the 90s/2000s, while the plate footage on film might in theory have been very high resolution if scanned (if the film stock was good enough), the VFX delivered for it will have been only good enough for 2K resolution as that's what it was rendered/delivered at originally.

So anything "requiring" a 4K release would almost certainly have had to have been up-scaled, unless the studio managed to get the original VFX vendor to re-render/comp and deliver 4K footage which I've heard of happening in a few cases (Star Wars re-releases, some Pixar stuff), but other than that isn't generally done and the VFX can only be upscaled from the "original" delivery.

Babylon5 being the sadest case of this issue, although latest upscaled releases (18 months ago or some such?) are impressive.

You have to wonder if they did it on purpose, and someone just made the call that it wasn't worth hanging onto. Remember also that Crusader was canned after one season so there wasn't a lot of love for sci-fi.

The CGI could have done with a re-render, but the live shots might come out looking really bad trying to clean them up.

There was and is a lot of love outside the US. But that is only an afterthought for the US copyright holders. Latest B5 film, The Road Home still can't be legally streamed in some EU countries, months after release, despite there are plenty of fans.

I sometimes wonder if B5 or Firefly would have got a better go in the current environment of multiple subscription/streaming channels where there is a lot more appetite for shows that are different.

B5 obviously would have come out different as they would not have rushed to fit the planned storyline into season 4.

You somehow missed the chorus of complaints about promising series axed by streaming services after season 1 or 2?

For some inexplicable reason, the animation is horrid. You can't even tell who's who, faces have no definition, etc.

The blue ray complete series pack was released this month. I’m working my way through season 1 for the nth time :)

That kind of makes sense, but it would have only been necessary to use this on some VFX shots.

Face Replacement? Where did you see Face Replacement?

Denoising and Upscaling are both being done by AI these days, often in the same steps.

There is NO WAY that True Lies wouldn't support a 4K transfer. No way. Any 35mm print can be a great base for HD/4K, even one from the 1950s-60s, as shown by Criterion.

Maybe it was just really bad comping/roto-ing of Lennon from original footage, but it looks pretty face-replacement-like to me...

Unless you're talking about original 35mm negatives (which in some cases might have been lost / destroyed / degraded) where there is normally 4K resolution (with decent film stock - as mentioned before, some of the stock quality from the late 70s and 80s was very bad and digitising it didn't produce the resolution expected), using print copies (one or two removed from the original negative) will generally only give you 2K resolution.

The VFX would have been done at 2K anyway...

True Lies was a huge hit and an Arnold movie. I’m 100% sure they have tons of 35mm copies of the whole movie, and the original negative. It would be insane if they didn’t.

By the time True Lies came out home video already existed, so Hollywood had learnt about the long tail of movies in home release.

The kind of movies we don’t have good prints for are usually either obscure, so nobody wanted to pay to keep everything in good condition, or somehow damaged, or like you said, not good films stock or just old enough damage happened.

True Lies was shot by cinematographer Russell Carpenter (Titanic, Avatar: The Way of Water) on 35 mm photochemical film (in Super-35 “common top” format, with Eastman EXR 50D 5245, EXR 200T 5293, EXR 500T 5296 stocks) using Arriflex 35 BL4, 35 IIC, and 35-III as well as Moviecam Compact cameras, along with Zeiss Standard Speed, Super Speed, and Cooke Varotal lenses. Visual effects were also filmed in VistaVision format. The film was then finished photochemically in the 2.39:1 aspect ratio for theaters (which included 35 mm anamorphic blow-up release prints, as well as 70 mm blow-ups).

For its release on Ultra HD, Lightstorm, working with Park Road Post, has built a new 4K Digital Intermediate using recent 4K scans of the original camera negative (confirmed per Lightstorm). This footage has been “optimized” by Park Road’s proprietary deep-learning algorithms. Photochemical grain has been greatly reduced, though not eliminated entirely, while fine detail has been “enhanced” algorithmically. There are also occasional shots throughout the film that appear to have had a bit of old-school noise reduction applied, but it’s hard to be sure if it’s actual DNR or simply just that the Park Road process has been a little too heavy-handed in places.

Where did you get all this info from?

Also, if you scan the negatives (instead of the prints), you'd very likely have to re-create the grading all over again, which is extra work, and you'd have to match it to the 2k print VFX footage...

As far as I know that is the reason why Matrix and a few other movies have had such drastic changes in their 4k version.

They are indeed forced to redo all the color timing by going back to the negative. And since they have the opportunity, they go “hey why don’t we just improve the grade”

Leading to a movie that looks completely different.

Somehow this also happened with the French Connection.

I can't agree on OP's criticism of They Will Not Grow Old. First, the used footage was not an art movie. It was journalistic/documentary. It was meant to show reality (although mostly as propaganda).

Second, the restoration manages to bridge the gap between 1914 and 2014. Old B/W movies tend to give an impression of artificiality and distance. Seeing the colorized, interpolated version makes these soldiers people of blood and flesh. "This could happen to YOU", is what the movie says, and it couldn't have achieved it with the original footage. Given the slaughterhouse that was WWI, it seems entirely appropriate.

You're misinterpreting the process and the criticism. 1 + 2 are almost certainly being done together in a blackbox transformer, along with making the colors "pop" and faces "shiny". It's an opinionated edit that changes the substance of the piece, attempting to make it more palatable to modern eyeballs.

I rip my physical media into my digital library and I know right away when I’m dealing with a film transfer, compression goes to shit. All the grain and noise inherent to film doesn’t compress well. So I imagine all these AI upscaled film weren’t done for our benefit but to save streamers a bit of bandwidth.

Also film was expensive, directors shot a tight 90 minute movie and called it a day. Now, we have 2,3,4 hour movies that meander endlessly.

Many old films are really long

Gone With the Wind is 4 hours long

Lol I love people who take outliers to make a point. Look at the median length instead if you want something meaningful.

We watched Jingle All The Way yesterday, and even the kids noticed it was shorter than most of today’s films. It’s not even 90 minutes.

I just tried to watch Rich and Strange. The first 39 minutes are mostly vacation footage.

I usually like anything Hitchcock worked on. Maybe I should have given it another 30 minutes.

Anyway, it doesn’t give me the impression that they were worried about burning film stock, even though the movie is only 1:39.

I was hoping someone would call me out on that

https://stephenfollows.com/are-hollywood-movies-getting-long...

https://filmandmovielists.wordpress.com/2014/09/11/are-movie...

I track all the films I watch in a spreadsheet, half of them are in 1990-2010, which the last link shows films were becoming shorter for awhile

And the 10 Commandments was 3 hours, 40 minutes.

And Titanic (1997) was 3 hours, 15 minutes, and Che (2008 film) had some road show screenings at 4 hours, 27 minutes.

But Andy Hardy Gets Spring Fever (1939) was only 80 minutes.

Road show movies, with an intermission between the two acts of the film, don't have good economics. Lord of the Rings as three movies sells more ticket than one long one, and you can offer both evening and late shows.

Well if we’re having a contest for posting long movies, Siberiade is an excellent film that will take 4h35m of your time.

And they were exceptionally rare.

But here are 2 films from different eras with somewhat similar themes:

1985: The Breakfast Club, 1h37m 2023: The Holdovers, 2h13m

Also film was expensive, directors shot a tight 90 minute movie and called it a day

This is nonsense. The amount of film shot is orders of magnitude longer than the finished product and many scenes are shot over and over to get a good take. A film with a longer running time doesn't necessarily need more shooting time than a shorter film.

many scenes are shot over and over to get a good take.

No, many scenes are done correctly on the first take. Because film, film development, the equipment to edit film, and the staff cost real money. And you don't see if it was a good shot for weeks.

And you don't see if it was a good shot for weeks.

Often the next day, which is why they called them "dailies":

The term "dailies" comes from when movies were all shot on film because usually at the end of each day, the footage was developed, synced to sound, and printed on film in a batch (and later telecined onto videotape or disk) for viewing the next day by the director, selected actors, and film crew members. After the advent of digital filmmaking, "dailies" were available instantly after the take and the review process was no longer tied to the overnight processing of film and became more asynchronous.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dailies

You had to know quite quickly because the production needed to know whether the scene was captured properly so that it could be determined whether the set could be dismantled and the crew could move on to the next scene.

Also the cost of film compared to the payroll of all involved must be insignificant, no?

So I imagine all these AI upscaled film weren’t done for our benefit but to save streamers a bit of bandwidth.

You may be onto something here. A 2-hour 4k movie that’s already smooth and blobby encodes down to 10GB or so and doesn’t look so different from the full-fat Blu-ray. A good film transfer at 4k… it’ll start looking off when the target file’s under 30GB, if not sooner.

[edit] though, on the other hand, they can do this well enough when they encode for streaming, from a good source, no need to start with something bad, you can just add one extra step to make it bad before encoding. Though then it invites comparison of your “high quality” (but actually awful looking) 4k streams to the much-better original source.

If they did that, they’d more than double their labor costs.

We really need to shorten copyright terms, if only because the copyright holders are increasingly becoming companies that have never produced any content.

Play any old movie and you will see the intro meander for a while, opening credits will take sometimes almost 5 minutes. As opposed to now, movies start fast before you click out and watch another thing. Sure, they didn't particularly waste film, but they did meander... or, you could say they weren't meandering but setting the mood/ambiance for the film. One must remember directors were artists, cinema existed for the art not for the audience, there wasn't a whole lot of pandering.

cinema existed for the art not for the audience

Ars gratia artis, or so says MGM.

Regarding film grain and streaming : https://www.slashcam.com/news/single/Netflix-removes-movie-n...

This is off topic, but what do you use to organize your digital library? I just have a humongous hard drive I chuck files into, but I'm looking for a better way.

Now, we have 2,3,4 hour movies that meander endlessly.

And they all suck too. No wonder nobody goes to watch movies anymore.

Sigh. I haven't seen the True Lies transfer so I won't comment on that. But I have to take issue with that 4k 60fps clip ("The lumiere family goes on a trip 1895") and They Shall Not Grow Old.

The author calls both "disgusting" and "really fucking bad". I'm sorry, but I think they're both incredibly impressive feats of engineering and super impressive. Both films have done something which is otherwise impossible with original, grainy, out-of-sync b & w footage: Given us viewers a sense of immersion and realness that we'd otherwise be unable to experience.

None of us know what it was like to see the world of 1895 or 1914. And grainy black and white footage doesn't change that. But 4k 60fps footage gives us a true sense of "being there" and in that reality and I think that's damn incredible (and I'm thankful for it).

I think the author err'd using documentary footage as an example of what's bad about this. Taking an old film (a piece of art) and upscaling it is one thing. Taking real-world footage and making it more real is another thing entirely.

You keep saying real and true, but it's engineered from the authentic film.

Certainly it could be more immersive and give more of a sense of being there, but colorized b&w film is not real, it's guesses (maybe very good guesses).

b&w film isn't real, the world isn't black and white.

I know that colorized film sometimes picks the wrong colors, but really, so what? It's still way better and more watchable than b&w.

No film (or other imaging) is real, of course. But film without unnecessary processing is a reflection of reality. IMHO, color processing from color film is necessary.

It's still way better and more watchable than b&w.

Well, we can agree to disagree on this; clearly I'm in the minority that wants to watch films as originally captured/presented. But I wouldn't object to someone saying the altered versions are more watchable --- more people are willing to watch them; and better I wouldn't object vigorously too. I'm objecting to it being called real and true. The original images, limited as they are are more real than an intepreted image based on the actual image. Just as actual images are more real than a reenactment, even though a reenactment allows for much nicer image capture that could be more immersive and better.

b&w film isn't real, the world isn't black and white.

What does that mean? Then color pictures are not real either because the world is not limited by 10 bits of color. Makes no sense.

The unaltered black and white footage is "real" in the sense that the information it records, the shades of grey, are actually causally connected to the event it depicts. If I colourise it, the cause or the information is coming from me, the shade of red you see is just my arbitrary choice, it is determined by me and not by the actual light bouncing off the blood of a soldier in 1914. As such the information added by colourisation is less "real" in this sense or entirely "false".

Because it's not about the film in this case. It's about the reality that was filmed. The AI upscaled interpolated version looks closer to reality.

A key point about this, whether here or in AI restoration of classic audio from yesteryear or indeed AI restoration to use in court as forensic audio or video…

It ain't. It's made up, synthesized in a sophisticated way to become what is normally present in such a context. As such it is by definition fake and not reality, but a sort of consensus opinion of what usually goes into any given spot.

You are not even approaching reality. You're approaching what is typically expected, synthesized to most plausibly fill in the gap. If there is some unusual detail in the original media, the restoration will read it as damage or a glitch, and will wrest it from you and force it into a more predictable form.

This is not a forensic video. No one is claiming that the colours are actually real. As a documentary this brings us closer to the experience of reality than the black and white jerky movements of the original film. It definitely does approach reality. Grass is green, not grey.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GHHt-CBKkS0

People are not passive perceiving robots reacting to pre-processed data inputs. “Thinking” doesn't happen only on “complex stuff”, it continues all the time, but we're used to things we're used to. When you call something “real”, it just means that your idea of what is “real” matches, and that your imagination (which actually does all the work) starts working. However, there is no rule that it should sleep on other kinds of content.

the whole article has a kind of arrogant and condescending tone.

That something is impressively engineered is orthogonal to it being quality cinema.

But 4k 60fps footage gives us a true sense of "being there" and in that reality and I think that's damn incredible (and I'm thankful for it).

There is a difference between making things watchable and making things look worse with shitty colors

I agree with this.

AI interpolation for the two historical clips with extreme technical difficulties and film which would be nigh unwatchable is perfectly reasonable.

Applying AI to something like "Get Back" is not. The footage for "Get Back" is perfectly reasonable even if it was suboptimal. Even worse, at some point the original footage will get lost and the AI contaminated stuff will become the reference.

I don't really get what this person is complaining about. Sure, old film upscaled, coloured etc. is not as good as if it had been shot on modern equipment. Still looks better than the original, for the most part. I couldn't even really see the problems in most of the shots on the site.

It doesn't look better than the original to folks who grew up with media shot on actual film. Historically the crunchy-lighting-and-every-last-wrinkle levels of detail that are omnipresent in modern media were reserved for the lowest budget daytime soaps, and were a hallmark of cheap equipment, limited post budget, or both.

So? 35mm movies were shot at 24fps while TV shows used higher frame rates. And because TV shows used to be cheap soap operas or comedies, for a long time high-FPS video gave you a feeling of cheapness. But that doesn't mean that 24fps was actually better! It was a technological limitation that got enshrined by its use in high art.

"Better" is one of those obnoxious concepts that can be pivoted to whatever one wants it to mean to win an argument. Crispy ultra-high-def video is esthetically inferior to smoother presentations given by older equipment and methods. Yet another classic example of new isn't necessarily improved.

The first talkies were artistically inferior to the best silent movies of the time, too. And shooting in black and white retained its charm for a long time after Technicolor.

Proclaiming that a strictly bigger toolset is "[a]esthetically inferior" because directors are still learning how to use it is pure reflexive conservatism. There's no reason you have to show wrinkles just because you're shooting in 8k, it just becomes possible to do so while it was impossible before.

Piss on "reflexive conservatism", the inferiority is pervasive and trivial to discern. Given HDTV made it's debut in 1998, unless making ultra-high-def media has a steeper learning curve than the Manhattan project I'd say your argument that this is down to directors and not the technology itself seems flawed.

Given HDTV made it's debut in 1998

TV engineers started working on HDTV in the 70s. Sony demoed a HDTV video camera in 1981. HDTV made it's broadcast debut in the late 80s in Japan, under the name "Hi-Vision". First version of Rec. 709 was published in 1993.

All true, and high def broadcasts didn't begin in the continental US until 1998.

Still looks better than the original

What

I can see this with film restoration like the WW1 footage where you're dealing with severely damaged originals, but most film images shot on 35mm look great. While film has grain it also has great resolution, and cinema lenses tend to be the state of the art in optics. AI is ideal for fixing things like hairs in the gate, judder, and other shutter-related problems. I think it has excellent potential for image restoration as well. But it's not yet good enough to handle texture and most integrators don't have a good idea of how to develop intra-frame continuity.

It feels like this article is written exclusively for other film buffs. The author should have started with a video showcasing exactly what they think is wrong. Except for the folders, I didn't understand what he was talking about, especially with the downscaled screengrabs, until I saw the Beatles Now and Then video [1]. It looks a lot less natural when motion is involved, which really emphasizes the poor lighting and waxy look.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Opxhh9Oh3rg

I'm someone who doesn't really enjoy cinema much. I watch a few movies per year at most, generally with friends who want to see them.

But I totally recognised what the author was talking about, and I'm seeing it more and more! Everything starts to look imagined more than seen, the characters are covered in artefacts that make them look like aliens acting as humans, I sometimes find it viscerally off putting like I want to be sick looking at their creepy faces.

I'm surprised that people want side by sides as the examples all seem quite glaring to me, but it's interesting to see how different people take different things from images.

Same here, not a film buff but "everything looks like a snapchat filter" makes sense to me and I hate it.

I read the article, looked at the images and ready the comments. I have no idea what any of this is about. These all seem perfectly normal to me.

I wonder if some people are more (or less) sensitive to such things. I absolutely would need a side by side to understand what's even being discussed.

Looking at Ringo and Paul singing next to each other, they weren't even in the same room for this! https://youtu.be/Opxhh9Oh3rg?t=87

The excuse there is that the whole video is kind-of "moving images" inspired by Sgt. Peppers covers and the fact that the music is also a result of combined sounds recorded in different decades.

On another side, we have the recent "washing and flattening" of the films by AI for no reason but to "look better" for those who aren't really going to invest their energy to see where it gives worse results.

"It is expedient and profitable if people don’t remember what film is supposed to look like."

And there are also enough who have never seen how it looked like before, anyway.

Yes I wish there were some side-by-side comparisons, like A) Here's a typically shitty upscale/conversion and B) Here's what a good upscale/conversion would look like.

Could anyone who can see the video share in which countries the video is available? All of my usual VPN choices can't get rid of "The uploader has not made this video available in your country"

Imagine there's no countries....

And who is to say what a film looks like?

Why should anything have "film grain"? Why is 24hz a standard? Why is letterboxing a thing?

These are all tools, the public can't "forget what a film looks like" because if that happens, that's what a film looks like now.

To take one of your examples, the easiest target: letterboxing is a thing because film is created by filmmakers and cinematographers who must decide what pictures go in the frames of their film. As such, they choose to place objects in certain ways, reveal things (think John Carpenter using extreme widescreen in 'Halloween') through use of the edge of the film frame, and make choices of what images go where, much like a painter might outline figures in position on the canvas.

So, whether or not the resulting film had extra space (and perhaps film lights, extras, etc) captured on the initial recording, the film is what's placed in the intended frame.

To think anything else is like wanting to play back the record made in the recording studio, and play all of the hit record takes along with all the outtakes at the same time, just because they were there.

A documentary exists of the making of Steely Dan's 'Aja', in which the song 'Peg' is played. The Dan sit in the studio and audition guitar solo outtakes, which mostly deedle about in an animated way, sometimes with envelope filter, all before Jay Graydon came in with a bottleneck slide and a few well-chosen Hawaiian-guitar-sounding riffs, leading into the hit record's solo.

You might as well ask to hear all the loser solos played back at the same time as Jay Graydon's hit solo. I mean, they exist on the master tape! Surely the winning solution is to listen to every detail, and that's what 'Peg' sounds like now. You got more stuff! Everybody wants more, right? Play three solos at once. That counts as more! It's even been done in other records, why not here? Who's to say wanting more is wrong?

Donald Fagen and Walter Becker, apparently. And they did say those first attempts at solos were wrong, and revisiting them, still considered them unspeakably wrong.

So far, nobody has gained access to those masters (I believe they burned up in a fire, not long ago, lost forever?) and put out the popular choice where you can swap out solos or play them all at once to have more.

I don’t want to see boxes on my content. I’d prefer it fills the screen.

Well if you're creating content you can have it fill whatever shape screen you wish.

The cinematographer will say, get the right screen then.

Heck, I've got a curved 21:9 screen. Great fun. I do like it when stuff I watch fills the screen, and I've made videos that do that. When I do that out of regular widescreen footage, I'm the one who has to determine what will go where in the frame. Then when it's watched on a phone held upright, it's a very very teeny horizontal line :) and if I'd wanted to serve that screen, I'd be making TikToks…

Sure, I understand these things have a purpose, my point is that film doesn't stop being film just because it's different.

If the public decides letterboxing looks terrible, then it will turn into a more niche thing, that doesn't mean movies stop being movies.

Indeed, reading the article I felt like the author was conflating their feelings about watching analog film, and a director's intentions when creating a movie. The former is an artefact of the medium as it was before everything went digital, while the latter is about a creative vision and a story to be told.

It is worth mentioning that The Industry is once again falling behind The Piracy. All that warpsharping and filtering was a fad more than a decade ago, when people got big high resolution screens, but lacked new content. After a while, it was decided that mods should use their powers to stop that crap.

The answer is quite simple: any presentation is an artistic decision of “how it should look like”. Each time you put some image on screen you make choices (or someone chooses for you, and sets the defaults). Artistic decisions need taste. Many people just don't have any. Commoners who played with interesting toys, and made over-filtered rips probably thought that they really look cool, and did not understand what was lost. Commoners on this page who don't understand why objects shouldn't look like they went under a steamroller then got plastic edge embossing, and ask for comparisons probably really can't see the difference. If it sits like a duck… And the business knows well that “taste” is not important, “art” is not important, “quality” is not important — what is important is attention to the product. If it sells, it sells, no matter what it is.

The secret is that lot of people will watch 8-camrips-on-1-DVD content, and be just as happy. (You probably know a couple of such persons. You know, horrible streaming sites with more ads on screen than you can count, almost-dialup bitrates for “FullHD” and so on. “Why should I bother with all the other options”, etc.) However, there is an incentive to make them buy 4K-8K-3D-HDR-whatever TVs (which they don't even use in any new fashion), grab “newer and better” releases, subscribe to “newer and better” streaming services. Brainwashing about “new technologies” simply makes them believe that they acquired some enormous riches. When you tell them it's really crappy, you don't just argue about that specific quality, you question their life choices and beliefs.

The other day, I was thinking the kids are just about old enough to watch Star Wars episodes 4-6, and it occurred to me I don’t know how to obtain a decent (original plot and visual effects) copy, legally or otherwise.

I almost wish I still had that old VHS box set laying around.

Legally? Old VHS or laserdisk, so not really an option unless you're a fanatic.

Somewhat less clear cut legally? "Despecialized edition" is the keyword you're looking for on the torrent sites. Theres's even a wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harmy%27s_Despecialized_Editio...

That's actually a really good summary of the whole fan restoration situation.

Best available restoration, legal or otherwise, is 4k77 / 4k80 /4k83 (4k + the year of the film’s release).

A bunch of absolute lunatics acquired multiple 35mm prints of each movie in its original form (the Star Wars text crawl is just titled “Star Wars”, no episode IV), scanned them at ultra-high-quality, then used various references, including vintage stills, to hand-repair damage and color correct / regrade to compensate for fading.

Available on any torrent search (maybe even on an Internet Archive torrent? Not sure).

They released two official (well, “official”) versions of each: one with the film grain intact as-scanned (it’s rather aggressive, especially on the first film) and another with it cautiously denoised so it looks more like folks are used to on modern films.

None of the official releases come close, if you want to watch the closest practically-obtainable version to what people saw in the theaters on opening day—even a remarkably-good 35mm print on your own cinema projector wouldn’t look as close, because it’d be guaranteed to have noticeable scratches and fading.

[edit] oh and they have multiple audio mixes to suit most preferences. Can’t remember exactly what’s on them all, but Star Wars has both the original stereo and mono mixes (these feature some different ADR takes, between them—it’s not just a difference in audio channels) as well as at least one surround track.

I'd be happy to help point you in the right direction for this. Maybe send me a PM on Reddit, I am there under the same username.

It can be fun seeing something upscaled as a thought experiment on what life was like at a different time, it doesn't take much away from the original film imo.

Also, They Shall Not Grow Old was made in 2018 before the recent AI boom. It was an experimental and ambitious film at the time but I'm sure it could be done much better today.

You make an interesting point.

If the subject matter is popular enough, we could be entering an era where upscaling and correction are redone and rereleased every 4-6 years as the technology continues to improve.

The cynical take is that IP holders will attempt to milk owners for more money every time there's a major leap. The optimistic take is that perhaps We will start to see popular movies and television as evergreen works that get better and better over time; another lens would be to compare it to software, which we all seem to agree is never Done (and that's usually a good thing).

Yes, that's likely to happen at least with popular footage where there is interest in harvesting more value. I don't see it as anything negative; we keep redoing Shakespeare in novel ways, but the core is still there.

Totally agree. Old footage looking 'newer' (i.e. in colour, without noise, and at a higher frame rate) gives me a strange emotional feeling.

Original footage makes them seem like funny/strange people in an entirely different world.

This new AI footage makes them seem like they were just like me emotionally - which is much closer to the truth.

It's quite refreshing! I think you don't need to go very far back in time to feel disconnected from film because of the different frame rate making people move in jerky ways. It's like a stop-motion animation almost, and the lack of detail in the imagery removes us from subtle body language like slumping or the detail of emotion in someone's face. Getting some of that back in old film is such a gift.

There is a new WW2 documentary on netflix that has been colorized. It's much better than earlier attempts at colorizing WW2 footage, and makes WW2 much more real. But it would be good to see it colorized and sharpened by AI.

I recently had the displeasure of watching "Callas Paris 1958" in the cinema. Visually an unbelievable dystopia.

Here's the trailer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GzTMIoRpmF8 and in the description it claims 16mm film as source, which should have given in a much better result in my opinion. I guess there's plenty of TV tape after all in this production.

During her performance of Tosca the AI messed up grande. Callas singing, a candelabra in the background and the camera caught her face right in front of the candles. The AI set her lips and nose on flames...

I suspect the optics were quite bad in that period.

Ah, yes, the famous "make halo around every edge" period: https://youtu.be/GzTMIoRpmF8?t=13 (0:13)

EDIT: just watch this https://youtu.be/lxNThjjuqBk?t=164

Haloing is absolutely an artifact that can come from poor optics as well as processing.

Well, now you have the pleasure to know how it feels to have an astigmatism on one eye with a mismatched glasses and overall shortsightedness.

My brain reflexively tried to adapt because it though I had something in the eyes and I need to blink it out.

Yes, this is beyond bad.

Recently I got The Abyss on DVD. Yes, DVD. It looks phenomenal. Yes, on my huge 4k TV. It also sounds phenomenal. I think the whole format war jumped the shark at some point. A lot of these Blu Ray transfers look awful. Every streaming service sounds terrible, with the downmixes all irreversibly ruined.

I cancelled all of my streaming services and now I just go down to the used bookstore downtown and buy DVDs for two bucks.

My experience is the opposite: now that so much great art cinema has been released in Blu-Ray, even fairly obscure stuff, it feels like a much poorer experience when I have to watch the one or two films in a director’s oeuvre that are still solely on DVD. Especially if one is dealing with those visually stunning filmmakers to whom the saying “every frame a painting” applies.

I get my films exclusively through filesharing communities as DVD or Blu-Ray images and remuxes, so I have never seen streaming. However, the complaints I frequently see about streaming services offering subpar encodes even at high resolutions keeps me a faithful collector of physical-release rips.

The problem isn't the format. The problem is that the more advanced formats are contemporaneous with great directors who are still alive, but senile and blind. DVD and even Laserdisc were contemporaneous with the time before those directors lost their minds. This is why the very standard def Laserdisc of Star Wars is such a hot collectible.

Cases where a still-living director mucked up a Blu-Ray release of a classic film are fairly rare occurrences, though. There are a handful of examples that get discussed time and time again. But most cinephiles are happy that Agnes Varda, for example, lived long enough to oversee the HD transfers of her body of work. And often when color-grading on new releases gets criticized by random people on social media, actual familiarity with the theatrical prints shows that the new transfer is in fact faithful – the new 4K release of Kieślowski’s Trois couleurs (where the director died but the process was overseen by crew) is one example.

What AI upscaling (and generation) shares with the examples in the article is the strong denoising process (commonly referred to in video discussions as DNR, digital noise removal), hence why films like the infamous 4K version of Terminator 2 look so 'waxy'. In T2's case at least it's because it was based on the 3D version of the film (required such denoising for the stereoscopic process).

There are three sizes of Ultra HD (4K) Blu-Ray discs: BD-50, BD-66 and BD-100, with the latter two seeming the most common ime. Various releases, particularly if the run time isn't excessive, will encode them to fit on the less expensive, smaller capacity disc (IIRC BD-100 is harder to manufacture due to tolerances).

The other aspect is of course streaming/online digital encodes, which always optimize for filesize. One comparison of half a dozen 4K streaming services by a user on the enthusiast Blu-Ray.com forum found iTunes was about tied with the highest peak bitrate (~31Mbps), which is still only about 1080p Blu-Ray bitrate (Ultra HD Blu-Ray by comparison can be as high as 90Mbps).

What's ironic is when a film is released with the original grain very clearly intact, like Blade Runner: Final Cut, I've seen some comment their other family members have thought there was too much grain (tbf there are some very grain heavy—but lovely—scenes).

I think the effect of years of smartphones auto denoising all photos has contributed to some of this lack of pushback by non-enthusiasts.

've seen some comment their other family members have thought there was too much grain

I guess they never watched any actual film projected in cinemas?

They may not have. Or at least not for many years. Digital theater projectors have been a thing for a long time now

FYI, peak UHD blu-ray bitrate is closer to 150 Mbps than 90Mbps. There's one report in a reddit thread of over 200Mbps, I've only seen a bit over 100M although I don't have many UHD discs and I don't typically watch with the bandwidth indicator showing.

AV-1 as used on streaming may be more efficient than H.265 as commonly used on UHD discs, but not enough to make up for that kind of bandwidth difference.

What actually chills my blood more than anything is the thought that a lot of people think this all looks pretty good. You see this mindset at work whenever an AI fetishist posts a stable diffusion image of a woman with 13 fingers, 40 incisors and comically huge breasts. There’s an entire portion of the population that takes overt pleasure in the over-smoothed, perverts that prefer all media to be fast, high frame rate, and scrubbed squeaky clean.

This appears to really be what this post is all about, and to the extent it's what it's all about, the author is fighting a losing battle against taste itself.

People's enjoyment of something comes and goes. Art has had its pointillist movement, its cubism, its dadaism. If the people are comfortable with, or even enjoy, this style, and it's cheap to do, it's going to happen.

I enjoy both film grain, and the "creamy" tones that only a modern DSLR or comparable digital movie camera can produce.

I like both HDR with the garish lights right behind the actors' heads, and the artistry of a well-exposed negative processed through painstaking effort in a dark room to look good when printed.

Why can't we have both? Why do I have to pick a side and declare my love for one style or another?

One is clearly the true form of the art, and the other is mere drivel. Not sure which though!

We're approaching the end of physical media too, meaning that these effects will be exacerbated by compression for online streaming plus possibly more client side processing to compensate. The video that most people see on their TV will be far removed from the original film.

These companies need to be sued for falsely advertising UHD streaming. Sure, the resolution might be technically correct, but that doesn't matter when the stream is heavily compressed so they can save a nickel.

Yeah, it's ridiculous that 4K blu-ray and 4K Netflix etc are both advertised as UHD. The difference is huge.

Sometimes I think these „remastered“ releases are primarily done to tamper with copyright expiry.

Well, film scan quality has reached its peak. If they release a great copy today, no one will need any “better” one. What will they sell in 5 years? So they cripple the public copies to be the sole owner of the high quality one, and continue to sell “adjustments”.

I bet mostly they're about convincing people who already bought it to buy it again.

Though when I buy a used CD, I usually look for an original, not the remastered one.

Sound engineer here, laughing hollowly.

'They' have done this to audio for decades now. This exact thing, with the exact same motivations and the same result. One particular 'they' to watch out for is noted remixer Steven Wilson (of the band Porcupine Tree) who has been remixing progressive rock albums to more or less do this exact thing to 'em, and has covered almost everything by now, with his work outright replacing any way to hear the source material. Often the artist likes the sound being 'freshened up', and so it goes: everything's more plastic, year by year, with a bit more gloss and more of the reality sanded off and replaced with 'production'. You are always to hear a micro-surface of every possible sound as heard half an inch from your eardrum, all simultaneously, for 'clarity'.

This is a choice, of course. (it's also dated as hell, in my opinion, tying things to 'dawn of AI' with a heavy chain)

I can't help but sympathize. If an audio experience first came out and sold a million copies on a doddery old format which made a given amp, or drum, sound this large and this sonorous and that far away… for instance, consider Cream's Disraeli Gears album, where the mics were set up quite far away from the drums and instruments because the band were that loud that it was considered necessary… well then the experience might have played back (to the original listeners) as if the sounds were in fact many feet away, and very loud, and in an acoustic space of a given size. Realism.

Remasters and remixes have consistently, intentionally stripped away any such framing, to insist that any sonic detail must be closer and heard clearly. Rather than the sense of space predominating, or the sonic weight and pressure of the original capture, the sense of the clarity of the space and the amount of apparent detail on any given element must become more attention-getting than whatever previously seemed most obvious about the sound.

Wilson's very prone to this within the context of what resembles the original mix. He tries to honor the original mix but simultaneously strip away anything that detracts from the detail, so tone of voice is replaced by 'ability to hear the air passing over the vocal cords' and so on. Color of cymbal sound, replaced by ability to get 20k content and up out of that cymbal, and balance it correctly for if the cymbal was right in front of you. It's a sound that nearly any untrained listener would accept as 'more correct' because more is apparent.

If the movie, if the album, makes use of light and shadow, makes use of textures that are more foggy or grainy or vibey, that's simply removed. Nope! You get the clear and grainless version of that Rothko painting. Now it's really a consistent shade of color, and the edges of the lines are all cleaned up! You're welcome!

Nothing to do about it except hoard original releases, maybe show them to people sometimes (hey, kid, want to hear/see something really different?) and remember that you can still create new things without choosing the modern aesthetic.

Remember that a creator is aware of the voice of their chosen medium. Tastes may change, but when for instance the young Rolling Stones make Let It Bleed, which in its original form is quite murky and vibey by modern standards, and they write on the album sleeve 'to be played as loudly as possible', it's because they mixed and balanced it to produce that result from that medium, not because they had failed to make it Undercover (their 1983 album). They weren't looking for 80s or post-80s sound when they made Let It Bleed. It was what they meant to make at the time, through the voice of that medium.

In movies, the French Connection was intentionally shot handheld in many cases, and the director pointedly did not tell the cameramen what the actors were going to do or where they were going to go. You could quite easily AI the action scenes in that movie to make the cameras follow the actors better, frame them more dramatically and/or clearly, and produce action scenes where the handheld motion was stripped out of the shots and then, for instance, replaced with the shaky-cam of the Bourne movies, on the grounds that this was what the director would have wanted if he had known the Bourne movies would exist.

And in so doing, you'd so completely sabotage the intent of the director that it would be darkly hilarious, and it's very likely that if you played it for Bourne audiences they'd go 'yes, I like this. It's like that other thing I like! Good job repairing the old footage to make it better'.

When they have a chance to get work remastering something, and then sell it to you again, then yes… they want you to forget what a film looks like (and an album sounds like).

Having said all this I can tell you the one counterexample that would be worth existing.

'Katy Lied', AI-reconstructed to have the textures of 'Aja'.

This is because 'Katy Lied' suffered catastrophic damage in mixing and mastering, using an early form of DBX noise reduction that went horribly wrong. The band and Roger Nichols tried desperately to salvage it, and failed, and every version of the album you can ever hear is the result of a technical process that was broken and didn't deliver the intentions of the artists. They knew this, but they had nothing else to release.

'Aja' is also Steely Dan, but they had the technical side under control (apart from mistakenly recording over 'The Second Arrangement') and 'Aja' features many of the same musicians and vocalists that are present on 'Katy Lied'. Therefore, it's theoretically possible to take 'Katy Lied' and implant the textures found in 'Aja' onto the music in 'Katy Lied'. It would be replacing the existing textures with made-up, fake textures, but the existing textures are so badly compromised that it wouldn't automatically be a disaster. You'd get a fake 'Aja 2' with the music of 'Katy Lied', and it'd be functionally more like an AI upscaling than like outright new stuff being made.

HN leans techbro and won't understand your thoughtful and correct comment.

I think this is the type of side-by-side comparison I was hoping to see here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wfNTRONIPQ To be fair, to those saying Rose in Titanic now looks like a Pixar character, she was so heavily made up in the original that she always looked like a Pixar character.

Thank you for the link, the skin colors are off in almost all retouched shots, overly saturated and lacking the natural tone transitions. Really weird, like a generic netflix movie cover picture.

I approach it not from a perspective of "taste" per se, but from a perspective of purity and truth. All of these techniques (AI upscaling, colorizing, interpolation, etc) are adding information that was never there, which means you're no longer watching the genuine media.

By all means take the original film and rescan it in the highest possible resolution, to capture all the information that was in the film, but to add information that wasn't there to begin with is going too far.

It's like all the modern TVs that have the horrendous "motion smoothing" feature, which is enabled by default, and makes movies look like soap operas. When the TV performs frame interpolation, it's adding information that was never there, and wasn't intended by the director.

100%, this is the fundamental problem with all these techniques. We don't treat our other, more established, historic media/artefacts with the same contempt. If an ancient text fails to mention the colour of the emperor's robes we do not "interpolate" the text with our own ideas of what it should be in our new editions. This would be universally recognised as a textual corruption yet when photo "colourisers" do the same to colourless photographs they think they do the world a service. Why is historic media interesting and valuable in the first place? Fundamentally it is because a historic artefact conveys information from that time period. This is why none of these hyper-restored versions interest me, they are far too corrupted by false or spurious information. Time corrupts them enough already, we don't need to add more. This is the modern version of historical embellishment/exaggeration, contorting it into a more palatable or appealing semi-truth instead of telling the uglier actual truth. The motivations need not be nefarious, they could be entirely commercial like it is today.

They are more tools of embellishment than tools of restoration. A good restoration actually "restores" information. If an old manuscript is missing a page or contains an error, we replace it with the same portion from another manuscript. Likewise if there is a scratch on this frame we should use the same frame from another print to patch it over. We should try to develop our tools to do more of that sort of work. A motion picture produced in the 1990s does not need to look like one produced in the 2020s, in the same way a Rembrandt does not need to look like it was painted in Photoshop.

I've been waiting for the remasters of the Cameron films for years. Goddammit.

Don't watch Terminator 2, the remastered version that just hit the internet. It's horrible. Read my other comment here on this thread.

I don’t have strong feelings on the opinions in the blog post, but I wanted to praise the author’s writing. This is a topic that I personally don’t think about it or really have an interest in, but this is the first article like that which I have read to the end in a while. The title grabbed me and the rest held me in. Well written.

It's great to see big-o opinion coming back, rather than the wishywashy on-one-hand-on-the-other congenial dreck of a lot of internet content. Author thinks it sucks and you sure end up knowing it as a reader.

I do agree that seeing the original film is part of the charm of seeing an old movie sometimes

I'm not terribly surprised that the director of Avatar has "updated" his previous movies to look more digital than filmlike. Some people embrace the limits of the medium and some don't.

I had the displeasure to see the "remastered" version of Terminator 2: Judgment Day yesterday. I could not stomach it after 30 minutes. I had to dig around the internet an old DVD rip from 2000's of it to "wash out" my brain of the horror that remastered version inflicted upon my mind.

This is only a judgmentalist judgmentalizing. We are all perfectly capable of deciding for ourselves what looks good or hideous to us. Also, it was inevitable that ML tools would be used for things they cannot actually handle. A few uglified movies are really the least of our problems in that regard.

One elephant in the room is that noise (film grain) compresses very badly and so movies that would otherwise be transparently presentable with a couple gigabytes have visible compression artefacts in their BD-50 releases. And that almost all presentation is digital these days. And that in the days of digital everything and VFX, the grain is artificial anyway.

AV1 mandates support for film grain synthesis. Maybe, one day, this will become a standard part of film production.

I may be the only person in the universe but... I don't see it. Looks fine to me :shrug:.

"Both transfers are, however, within acceptable parameters for most normal people."

From the article commenting on Aliens and The Abyss.

Thank dog I was getting worried there for a second that I as a normal person would not find them within acceptable parameters.

I get where this guy is coming from but seriously there is no agenda or grand conspiracy behind all of this, nobody is trying to make anyone forget anything.

You have the choice to watch whichever version you prefer all the way back to VHS.

[Edit]

Taken from the comments of the same article:

"And just on principle, these are movies shot on film. They weren't intended to be digitally manipulated like this."

That's up to Cameron, it's just naive to think this won't keep happening. It's technological determinism.

Indeed looks terrible and as someone in the market for many of those UHD Blu-ray re-scans (yet again after lower res versions) this is almost uniformly unacceptable.

“When you finally do see a piece of footage transferred well, it can be breathtaking. Good archival practices require a lot of institutional knowledge and labor. It’s an art when done well, and the people who do it care so much about what they do. But the modern application of much of AI is precisely about taking labor out of the equation.”

Like CGI, this is another case of identifying when it’s used badly but not noticing when it’s used well. Criterion, for example, uses every single one of these AI techniques to do their restorations. They just do it well.

“You see this mindset at work whenever an AI fetishist posts a stable diffusion image of a woman with 13 fingers, 40 incisors and comically huge breasts. There’s an entire portion of the population that takes overt pleasure in the over-smoothed, perverts that prefer all media to be fast, high frame rate, and scrubbed squeaky clean.” Why does the author conflate imperfection with perfection here? AI is equally capable of mimicking perfection and imperfection. Thats one of the reasons why it’s so exciting.

There are plenty of people that use AI to generate organic imagery and noise and I wager that more rough, textured imagery is about to get in vogue again, and the reason will be because AI has made it easier to achieve.

Just take a look at Poor Things. The imagery is so ornate and full of rough texture elements. I don’t know exactly how they made it but I’d hazard a guess that AI was either involved or that they were inspired by AI art like Refik Anadol and/or the generative art movement coming out of the NFT space right now.

Presumably they're not burning the film, and could even reprocess the digitized with models designed to replicate film

The answer with a rare, offensively over-aggressive application of HDR, if using Vudu (once these hit digital/streaming), is to switch from UHD to HDX. You will still get the 4K file streamed, but without the HDR. Granted I’ve rarely ever been disappointed enough in a 4K transfer to have to attempt this but one time, with Once Upon a Time in the West. Most 4K HDR looks fantastic. It’s rare for a transfer to be so awful as to have to do this. Haven’t seen True Lies yet so we shall see..

I laughed out loud several times reading this. Grain is desirable and aesthetic, but it's also a part of history.

People that want to aggressively remove it, even if it alters their image contents in the process, these people have lost the plot. It is essentially dysmorphic.

I thought that Beatles Now and Then video was only missing appearances from Donald Duck and JEM. Also, Paul excised John Lennon musical material from the original tape that I'd always considered to be the pinnacle of the song.

Can't wait to see new art specifically created using this technique as an artistic medium

Superb write-up, a good balance of technical:non-technical while building its argument inexorably.

Yyyyy

About the new Trainspotting color correction: https://twitter.com/SadHillDevan/status/1714317990819500239?...

This article kind of touches a bit on something related to this. It seems that the ability to properly process interlaced SD video for HD usage is highly lacking, including at numerous TV networks who air old programming. I can often get a better quality file out of a DVD rip that I do myself than what passes for retro TV nowadays. When Game Show Network is airing any SD programming nowadays, the processing done to it is so bad that I have to wonder who made the decision to process it that way, and who allowed it to actually air that way. It's disgusting. I could get better quality from an SP VHS or S-VHS tape than the video they air that is originally sourced from professional high-bandwidth videotapes.

Same is true for online video preservation. Few know how to do it right, or anything approaching right. VHS was not 320x240 30fps as a lot of people have thought over the years. I think that the lddecode/vhsdecode approach is the right way forward for preservation of any analog video content. Capture the raw signal, archive and re-process that as technology improves.

This is captured on a home VHS with VHS-Decode, and then upscaled to 4k for YouTube and deinterlaced to 50 FPS QTGMC, and as a result it looks great.

Fuck yeah, QTGMC. I use it for all of my 540p DVD encodes (via VapourSynth) and they look fantastic with integer scaling to 1080, 2160, etc.

Film grain. 24fps. Audiophiles. Name a better holier than thou trio.

if you think those are great, keep them to yourself. For rest of us mortals, let us enjoy non-grainy, 60+ fps, "normal" audio.

Meanwhile, this is happening: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dL55umWSDNQ