Comment by pixelesque | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pixelesque | Hacker News Reader

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/

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/

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.

You can absolutely get straight disc rips.

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.

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

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?

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.

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.

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...

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.

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?

My bad, I thought I put the source. https://thedigitalbits.com/item/true-lies-2023-digital-uhd

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.

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