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Comment by procflora | Hacker News Reader

Wow, that tweet they link to with a super punched in shot looks really really bad! Hard to believe Cameron thought this looked better than just a normal 4k transfer, yikes. Was really looking forward to a UHD release of The Abyss but now I'm not so sure...

https://twitter.com/RazorwireRyan/status/1735753526167347232

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Direct image link: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GBaikRhX0AEcjuy?format=jpg

Wild that somebody thought this was an improvement.

What the actual FUCK is that???

I think they cheaped out and re-filmed a bunch of action figures. :-)

The "enhanced" image looks a lot like those retouched Russian photos from the Stalinist era

It's aggressively de-noised. Very much like modern phone cameras do these days: almost looks like a watercolour painting in some cases.

I really hate the result, they apply something like some gaussian filter followed by deconvolution which makes people's faces very uncanny: super soft skin with super sharp wrinkles

Exactly. It looks airbrushed as hell.

The one on the left looks normal.

The one on the right looks like you ran an edge-directed upscaler on it. Those things have distinct artifacts, and sometimes it looks like all curves turn into snakes. Or it can make new diagonal curves out of random noise.

Not knocking edge-directed upscalers though, they can work in real time and are very good for line-art graphics. You can even inject them into games that have never had that feature before.

The automated HD 'remaster' of Buffy is the prime example of how badly this can go wrong. A great breakdown of the problems is on YouTube here: https://youtube.com/watch?v=oZWNGq70Oyo

Great video and a travesty. I’m not a huge fan, but I respect that people are. That they ruined the show and it’s hard to find in it’s not ruined form…

> Hard to believe Cameron thought this looked better

I doubt he even looked, he's too busy with his blue monkeys these days. Most likely someone duped him on taking on the AI upscaling and he signed off on it without looking and the movie studio just shipped the output without QA to save time and money, because they're going to streaming not in cinemas.

He’s insanely detail oriented. I’m almost certain he either approved everything, or, he no longer has right of refusal.

I also found the studio audio description track for Aliens very ordinary. It's a film that says "aliens" on the tin, but there are no verbal descriptions for them other than "giant", "towering" and "beast". Not really doing Giger, Winston or Cameron justice there. I'd be surprised if he heard it, or read the script prior to recording.

> Hard to believe Cameron thought this looked better than just a normal 4k transfer, yikes.

Torrent people do this too, and movies is not their dayjob, but their hobby. I guess some people prefer the machine denoised look.

Cameron doesn't give a crap. He just needs his latest shot of money.

It seems little wild to assume the maker of a movie would care less about the movie than a random mob on the internet (instead of maybe just having a different opinion) but the assumption does feel very internet.

Depends on if he cares more about his current movie project(s) than his old ones. He still needs $$

I bet even Kubrick would have been tempted if the situation came about.

To me, thinking of it as temptation is an issue.

Society collectively deciding for creators what is supposedly the right thing to do with or the right way to think about their work is so strange.

What is strange is the notion that the original creator should retain full control of a creation once released.

That would indeed be a very strange notion.

The Abyss in only good on VHS, or laserdisc if you have the setup...

Really? VHS with its grainy 240 x 320 resolution is better than a blu ray?

Yes, on a 28" flat crt sony trinitron from 1995

I inherited a 34” flat Sony Trinitron from a roommate moving out. He inherited it from the guy who sold him his house. It was the two inches shy of the largest CRT Sony made, and it was a damn 200 lbs (91 kg) white elephant.

I eventually foisted it off on some deliverymen for free. They didn’t believe me when I told them the weight. When they finally lifted it, it was gratifying to hear one grunt, “Damn. I guess it really is 200 lbs.”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FD_Trinitron/WEGA

I had a 36" at one point, yeah took 2 of us to move it.

352x480, not 240. The Abyss, being shot on film, is 24fps. A VHS of The Abyss would achieve 29.97fps by using 3:2 pulldown which is lossless since it duplicates fields to make up the difference.

Up to you! I like to watch the content in its period accurate format.

I watched it in a theater with much better than NTSC resolution. VHS is only period accurate for things released straight to VHS.

I did too. When it was in theater and then 10 more times when I ran a private non-profit theater and ran the VHS through a jank projector setup.

Wouldn't that be the original film?

It depends. A large movie - yes. But many movies were made with less of a focus on the cinema and more on the video rental ("direct-to-video") or TV syndication.

TV content like Star Trek the Next generation were definitely never meant to display in high definition, and such things can show in props etc.

TNG is famous for being shot on 35mm film. Because of this, it had a higher "definition" than most other television productions and was able to be very well remastered for later releases, with some wonkyness around reshooting/remaking a lot of visual effects that had not been done on film.

Yes, no argument there. Many shows were shot on film and it made a big difference even back in the SDTV days, because electronic cameras just weren't any good. It wasn't only about resolution. There were electronic cameras with great horizontal resolution, but the look was still very "cheap" with blown highlights, muddy colors etc.

Another famous example is Friends, also shot on 35mm film. It has the advantage over Star The Next Generation is that the props in Friends are actual, real life things, so if we now see the fine details of something, we just sea a teapot a little better. While the prop in Star Trek has a higher risk of looking like that duct taped PVC pipe it is rather than the SciFi ray gun it portrays.

Or say, that one actress in the pool scene where you see her from behind nude and, in low definition, nothing could be seen. Once they upscaled it, things were... more visible.

So pedantic. Can you access the original film? What is a VHS?

Do you or kstrauser make films? Please enlightening me more on the nuances of personal preference?

Personal preference is fine! Describing VHS as “periodic accurate” as though that was these films’ original format is the silly bit.

Silly to you. Again, to you.

Since the film does not run in theaters indefinitely and at the time VHS was a common format, among others.

Given film reciprocity and resolution related to period produced film stock and processing techniques, VHS and other reduced resolution formats from the same period, look better, to me! than rescans(4k, which super35 barely supports) and up-resing. Again IMHO because I guess people take this otherwise.

So I guess you just never watch movies from before 1980 or so?

I own equipment capable of view films and plates from any period of film production. I have processed and looked at found "film" from before 1900. I use quotes because it wasnt the same as today and many varieties of techniques existed to capture images or make moving images.

Silly to you. Again, to you.

What do you mean 'again'? You never said that in your original comment.

Given film reciprocity and resolution related to period produced film stock and processing techniques, VHS and other reduced resolution formats from the same period, look better, to me!

What you're describing is just nostalgia, nothing more. That's fine, no need to rationalize it.

Why stop at VHS? Why not copy it a few times back and forth between tapes?

4k, which super35 barely supports

I agree, but regular blu ray is 2k

I don't see how these can be compared. They are totally different color schemes. It's possible that if you took the right image and displayed it using the same color scheme as the left image that it would look better than the left image.

Here's a quick and dirty attempt to even up the colours:

https://www.matteason.co.uk/share/true-lies-colours.png

And the full-size original for comparison:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GBaikRhX0AEcjuy?format=jpg&name=...

(I just overlaid the original on the left over the upscaled version on the right and set the blending mode to Colour in Photoshop)

Nice trick, I didn't know this

But Arnold looks like some smeared painting. Look at it in black and white, it still looks like shit.

This is very bad.

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