They want you to forget what a film looks like
aftermath.site
aftermath.site
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.
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 For me, they are noisy outdated machines.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.
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.
Then your sense of taste may be worth questioning
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.
I find it hilarious that someone would be deeply offended by AI colorization of scenes from 100+ years ago, which are impossible to recreate and many showing glimpses into the past which would otherwise be mostly forgotten. The reason that they get millions of views is because it gives modern people the opportunity to make the shocking realization that times change, but these people are not so different from us.
One has to wonder if someone angry about the introduction of artificial color is also angry to realize that actors are playing characters and comedians are not just making up funny jokes while you watch.
The Matrix was also destroyed in its 4k transfer by ridiculously bad color correction.
The 4K version, ironically, is more correct to the original theatrical film.
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.
Which of the color corrections destroyed it? The one where they made everything green? Or the one where they made the colors 'normal'?
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 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.
The cartoonishly green version of it is the second DVD release which tried to match the sequels.
The theatrical release and the first DVD were not cartoonishly green.
So the 4k release is attempting to fix an issue introduced later on anyway. The theatrical release does not match the current 4k “revision”
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...
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.
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”.
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?
Removing film grain makes compression far more efficient. This reduces costs of streaming.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=P_Oh7HizY5I
Which I guess is why Max has a boring gradient.
> 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.)
;-)
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?
Essentially, it reads like you feel the only film version of a feature is the color print.
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.
> 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."
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.
In a good way or a bad way?
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.
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.
The CGI could have done with a re-render, but the live shots might come out looking really bad trying to clean them up.
B5 obviously would have come out different as they would not have rushed to fit the planned storyline into season 4.
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.
And yet, they do. They throw away detail as they please. That’s preservation?
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.
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
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Imagine there's no countries....
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.
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.
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.
I guess they never watched any actual film projected in cinemas?
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.
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.
I almost wish I still had that old VHS box set laying around.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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).
“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.”
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.
Gone With the Wind is 4 hours long
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.
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.
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
But here are 2 films from different eras with somewhat similar themes:
1985: The Breakfast Club, 1h37m 2023: The Holdovers, 2h13m
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.
We really need to shorten copyright terms, if only because the copyright holders are increasingly becoming companies that have never produced any content.
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.
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.
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.
Ars gratia artis, or so says MGM.
And they all suck too. No wonder nobody goes to watch movies anymore.
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...
EDIT: just watch this https://youtu.be/lxNThjjuqBk?t=164
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
There is a difference between making things watchable and making things look worse with shitty colors
I cancelled all of my streaming services and now I just go down to the used bookstore downtown and buy DVDs for two bucks.
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.
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.
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.
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…
If the public decides letterboxing looks terrible, then it will turn into a more niche thing, that doesn't mean movies stop being movies.
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.
>“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.
AV1 mandates support for film grain synthesis. Maybe, one day, this will become a standard part of film production.
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 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?
'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).
'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.
Though when I buy a used CD, I usually look for an original, not the remastered one.
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.
if you think those are great, keep them to yourself. For rest of us mortals, let us enjoy non-grainy, 60+ fps, "normal" audio.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.