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Comment by smat | Hacker News Reader

I am also curious how this period in movies will hold over time. Older movies with more practical effects (such as Star Wars) still have a very crisp look to them while newer movies look blurry and bloomy due to the heavy post processing.

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Star Wars is a tricky one, since the versions that are generally available and that lots of people have seen have all had various levels of after-the-fact VFX applied to them.

Once I learned how optical printing worked, Return of the Jedi was ruined for me. I could see the flickering black line around the flying craft. I never noticed that when I watched RotJ in the theater.

If you take a classic which have stood the test of time and compare it to the current average, the classic will probably look better. But that is just survivorship bias because we have forgotten all the forgettable movies. If you look at the average sci-fi movie from the 1970's, the special effects are not usually very impressive.

I was once on a flight watching Zoolander while a guy next to me watched some Avengers movie. The contrast in color grading between the two was shocking. Zoolander had crisp differentiated colors/objects, while the Avengers film was a morass of soft-focus muted purple and brown.

> newer movies look blurry and bloomy due to the heavy post processing

If newer movies look blurry and bloomy, it's probably because they're trying to look like old movies.

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