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Comment by vlunkr | Hacker News Reader

It's interesting that when we revisit older movies, all the way up to the 90s, we're watching them at much much higher quality than we did originally. Special effects, costumes and sets are all much more believable when you're viewing them on a little grainy screen. I think some older movies are unfairly judged by how they look on hardware that couldn't have existed at the time.

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There’s a video floating around out there somewhere from the 80s show Knight Rider. One of the things about that car was that it could drive itself. I always assumed they used some sort of complex remote control system to film those scenes, but the video clearly shows that it’s just a guy wearing a suit that looks like the seat in the car. I guess simple wins out over cool.

EDIT: Here’s a link to the tweet with the video. https://twitter.com/BryanPassifiume/status/13356368964881203...

That’s awesome: the author of that tweet is a friend of mine and a journalist out of Toronto. Small world.

This is only strictly true if you're talking about television. The analog nature of film and its degradation along with the imperfection of human memory mean we can't really know for sure exactly how, for example, Lawrence of Arabia looked on the big screen in its contemporary transfers. But it was definitely better than anything seen on a television prior to at least 1080p if not 4k.

The analog nature of film and its degradation along with the imperfection of human memory mean we can't really know for sure exactly how, for example, Lawrence of Arabia looked on the big screen in its contemporary transfers.

It depends on the source material.

As luck would have it, I just recently got the 4K Blu-ray of Lawrence of Arabia, and it is very very grainy. Much more so than the 4K version of Rear Window, though that has a lot of noticeable grain.

Fortunately, some theaters still occasionally show classics like these, so when Lawrence comes around, we should find out. Hopefully. Assuming it comes in on big reels of film, and not over a digital link.

A couple of years ago, I was lucky to see Lowrence of Arabia in a local cinema with a 70 mm film projector. The film was originally shot on 65mm and it looked fabulous on the big screen! I don’t remember the film grain being an issue. I usually notice it at the start of the film but then quickly get used to it. It’s also likely that the picture quality was cleaned to some degree.

I presume your Blu-Ray transfer was processed conservatively. Digital filters to remove film grain can introduce their own artifacts which degrade the image quality and make the picture look different from how it was originally intended to be seen.

A big difference is that the prints degrade and viewing conditions varied greatly. If you were watching Lawrence first run on 70mm print at large theater with the projector lamps cranked it was borderline religious experience. But if you weren’t in a big city and caught the end of the second or third run or a 35mm print with lamps at normal levels 4k on a newer tv is almost certainly better.

It's part of the Progress Quest™ style transfer from audiophiles trying to maximize numbers to videophiles trying to maximize numbers. Audiophiles are listening to music in "better" quality than the people who made it had through their monitors, and people are watching movies in "better" quality than the directors saw their final cuts in.

We're either moments before or moments after direct competition between UHD televisions and AI-aided upscaling and artificial sharpness, where details that never existed in the original are being precisely rendered by screens with higher resolutions than the human eye.

Television that was made on film has held up pretty well.

I'm watching ST:TNG at 1080p now and it's visually stunning. Everything else about it is still awesome, too.

Are you watching the original or the remaster?

The latter was only possible because it was originally shot in film, yes, but it was also an incredible amount of work. They needed to reassemble every episode from film!

They did a fabulous job of the Star Trek transfers (I’m currently watching the original series).

However, some studios put very little effort into their film to HD transfers. Last year, I watched Buffy, the Vampire Slayer on Disney+ and its transfer from film is woefully bad. For certain scenes, the picture quality looked like upscaled standard definition and these transitions were very jarring. Also, whatever filter they used for grain removal made the flesh tones and facial features look “wrong”.

Even worse was the wholly unnecessary conversion from 4:3 to 16:9. The resulting composition of many scenes was distractingly bad. At one stage, they the second camera unit can be seen filming the action from the side!

Edit: Fortunately, Disney+ have made The Simpsons (another transfer from film) available in 4:3 – as well as the default 16:9. There’s a setting in the UI to play it in 4:3.

I don't know about Buffy but some later Star Trek series like Deep Space 9 will be really hard to remaster because they were shot on video instead of film. The detail just isn't there to be enhanced.

Deep Space 9 was also shot on film. The editing, effects, and mastering were completed on video (same for TNG). This is true for nearly every 1-hour US prime-time drama of that era (Buffy, X-Files, etc).

https://www.slashfilm.com/549088/star-trek-voyager-deep-spac...

I really wish for a ds9 remaster, which supposedly could be done in 16:9 since they were much more careful to not have mics etc inside the larger frame while filming.

But ds9 is not as popular as tng, and I think fewer of the effects where done on film, so it might bring in less revenue but may be even more expensive to remaster than tng.

Some people redid some ds9 battle scenes on YouTube and they look awesome. There’s also some remastered footage in the de8 documentary (I think “what u leave behind”?)

Makes u dream a little

I think maybe the problem is that DS9, especially the latter seasons, made much heavier use of effects, since it was entering the CGI era?

An this unfortunately also makes a remaster of VOY and DS9 very unlikely. I also read somewhere that they used more digital effects and 3D renders which makes a remaster even more difficult, as it would basically require to update or even redo them.

Theatres were a thing back then. But ye concerning TV you are right. My best example of that is playing Ocarina of Time on a big modern TV ... it was so much more impressive on a small ctr.

For video games, there's another factor: much of the artwork in old-school games was specifically designed to be altered by both CRT scanlines and NTSC composite effects. So many sprites in 2D games and textures in 3D games rely on NTSC effects to antialias the graphics and turn dithering into real gradients and you're missing out on so much with a modern screen.

The closest you can get to that experience now is to use an emulator and apply some heavy shaders (some emulators have built-in shaders, but if one doesn't I'd recommend installing reshade and setting up CRT-Royale and GTUv050).

Modern upscalers/HDMI conversion devices with retro consoles in mind like the retrotink offer the ability to add scanlines as well. So it is possible on real hardware for those that care enough.

So I basically have two concerns with that:

1. A much bigger issue is NTSC composite. Making it look like a CRT is a much smaller part of the picture than what NTSC composite effects do. For example, If you were to hook up the RGB headers on an SNES (yes, the SNES has RGB headers on the board) to an actual CRT it would look awful because SNES games were designed with NTSC blending effects in mind.

2. There are scanlines and there are good scanlines. Most artificial scanlines look like garbage and not at all like an actual CRT's scanlines. There are some good filters out there, but you really have to do your research. If you see the words "slot mask" used to describe the filter, it's probably good. This is one of the reasons I'm a fan of the CRT-Royale reshade filter, because it does an excellent job at emulating the look of a slot mask.

RGB output is commonly desired in the retro gaming community. And RGB mods on the SNES and other consoles are commonly done. I've personally used HD Retrovisions component SNES (so RGB out) cables on a CRT and IMO the results look fantastic. Hell Nintendo themselves sold RGB cables for the Super Famicom and SNES in Europe. NTSC composite effects were a much bigger part of older 8 bit machines. Much less so on later consoles especially as expectations of the game heading to PAL regions rose.

Just watch My Life in Gaming's YouTube videos about getting the best output from a console.

The Retrotink and the OSSC are very highly praised and designed by retro game enthusiasts. While I have not personally used one I'm sure they're probably pretty good.

Yeah, video games are probably even worse off than movies. If you're playing on original hardware, most modern TVs don't scale them properly and they look terrible. There are external upscalers and RGB modding, but it's an expensive and esoteric thing to dig in to.

Special effects, costumes and sets are all much more believable when you're viewing them on a little grainy screen

Can confirm. I recently watched Ghostbusters on Blu-ray. Wow. The special effects are really obvious.

> The special effects are really obvious.

I've never understood this complaint. Almost all special effects are obvious, because they depict things that aren't real. I don't remember watching Ghostbusters in the theater and wondering if those were really ghosts.

Some people just cannot (or refuse to) recognise all the noise you can see around old/cheap/low quality effects. I often watched those silly Japanese horror varieties where they would show you a grainy video of some dark place, and then maybe a grainy shot of someone crawling out of something. But you know it's two separate things spliced together because the grains are of a different size, or when one area is gray-scale while another is simply decolourised to match. My friends could never tell the difference.

It's easier to suspend your disbelief when you can't see the little squares around the TIE Fighter as it attacks the Millennium Falcon.

Older 'practical' special effects still hold up better than much more recent early CGI though. Even if you can tell that something is a physical model, IMO it still looks 100x better than a poorly rendered and animated low-poly 3d effect.

Even modern CG is garbage and suffers from the uncanny valley effect.

I don't enjoy Marvel films but even if I did they're unwatchable because of the awful CG.

The Blu-Ray release of Star Trek TNG suffers from this a ton -- it was great seeing one of my favorite childhood TV shows in high def but it made all of the costumes, makeup, and sets look so fake!

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