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The Matrix looks dramatically different on Hulu versus on HBO Max
- jeffbee 5y agoReminds me why I maintain all those DVDs, Blu-Rays, CDs, records, and tapes. They're the same every time I play them. No streaming services to "remaster" my favorite records, change all the colors, delete scenes, add characters, letterbox the damned Simpsons, for crying out loud Disney+!!!
- whynotminot 5y agoBut this is highlighting that the problem actually lies potentially in the sources you're declaring as immutable--there is a bluray release that hews closer to green, and an UHD bluray release that hews closer to blue, which apparently is more in line with the theatrical release. Your disc is just another snapshot in time reflecting the decisions of whoever handled the master for the disc--not all that different than whoever made the choices for the streaming version.
- jerf 5y agoThe point is that it is indeed a snapshot... nobody can come in later and change it. If I want the changed thing, I can go get it. It doesn't guarantee I get the best version of whatever, but at least what I have won't change out from underneath me.
- xeromal 5y agoNothing changed in these versions though. If you have HBO, you've been getting the same version. The video changes based on the service you use
- anjbe 5y ago> Nothing changed in these versions though. There’s no guarantee of that, and definitely no guarantee it won’t happen in the future. One example: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/16/arts/television/netflix-deleted-13-reasons-why-suicide-scene.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/16/arts/television/netflix-d... To say nothing of the far more common case of whole works simply disappearing as publishing/streaming rights shift around.
- jerf 5y agoIn practice, the way things disappear is almost a fatal flaw for me. I don't watch a lot of streaming video from these services, but I enjoy what I do quite a bit. I'll put a lot of stuff on my "future watchlist", whatever they call it, and get around to it several months later. Which means my experience with Netflix was quite often that I would see something I want to watch, but it would disappear before I watched it. That's like, maximally frustrating. And as Silicon Valley becomes ever more comfortable with censorship, as long as they can justify it to themselves that they're only doing it badthink badpeople so it's OK as long as it's in favor of them, it's likely that more and more things are going to get modified or disappeared. They're up to putting passive-aggressive warnings in front of some things now, it's only a matter of time and not much of it before they start outright editing old things wholesale. This is still theoretical... but only just. They've been creeping up on this for a while and they are very close to running out of small steps to take before they get to this point.
- brnt 5y agoAt least we know which snapshot we're talking about and are free to buy (and sell) the snapshot of our choosing. Streaming is just another form of broadcast. What you see now, isn't what you're going to see tomorrow.
- kuon 5y agoWell, online platforms do not care a lot about the content. For example, on disney+, the simpsons are cropped to 16/9, which removes a lot of the image. Hopefully, I found an original version on torrent, but that's really a bad move from disney.
- Latty 5y agoThis was true originally, they added support to watch the original aspect ratio ages ago though: https://www.theverge.com/21273476/simpsons-original-4-3-aspect-ratio-disney-plus-stream-how-to https://www.theverge.com/21273476/simpsons-original-4-3-aspe...
- kuon 5y agoWell, that's good the option is there, but OMG who came up with that UI? They should put a ratio button on the player, not some hidden option in a details tabs I never opened. It is still very bad that the default ratio is wrong, I see zero reason to watch it in this cropped ratio. Anyway, thanks for pointing that up.
- slickdork 5y agoDisney+ actually has both versions of the Simpsons. There's an option to use the original aspect ratio you can check (of course that's opt in - the default is the wrong ratio). Seinfeld on Netflix on the other hand only has the cropped aspect ratio (booooooooo).
- tomjakubowski 5y agoSeinfeld was actually filmed on 16:9 and then cropped to 4:3 for broadcasts in the 90s. So the 16:9 Seinfeld is showing you more, not less. The good seasons of the Simpsons are so full of sight gags. The crop (or worse, when the crop consciously pans and scans) totally spoils them.
- sorenjan 5y ago> Seinfeld was actually filmed on 16:9 and then cropped to 4:3 for broadcasts in the 90s. So the 16:9 Seinfeld is showing you more, not less. According to this tweet they cropped out the pothole from the episode The Pothole. https://twitter.com/Thatoneguy64/status/1443961536079450117 https://twitter.com/Thatoneguy64/status/1443961536079450117
- post_break 5y agoI wonder if this person has the incorrect settings on their TV for HDR content or color space.
- ascagnel_ 5y agoThis was my first thought as well -- HBO Max has a new Dolby Vision version, while Hulu continues to be bottom-of-the-barrel in terms of its image quality (they appear to routinely use the lowest bit-rate for video, and have historically been late to move from older interlaced or SD transfers to progressive & HD transfers). Hulu is likely serving up a feed based on the DVD, theatrical, or original HD TV release.
- seanicus 5y agoI have the Matrix 4K disc that ostensibly HBO MAX is using for it's 4K version and it's one of the most pristine discs I own. It was the first disc I loaded up on my home system post-upgrade and featured a level of quality of image so high that at one point I stopped to see how many of Keanu's pores I could count. It looks so blown out in that post that I thought that it was an iphone shot of the writer's screen... I'm still not convinced that it isn't frankly; all those screengrabs look weird to me. But definitely not impossible that these just looks like crap; streamers seem keenly aware that for the most part their audiences are happy to consume their media as low-contrast Tasty Wheat slop that they half-watch while scrolling insta/tiktok.
- carabiner 5y agolol "dramatically different." To most, it just looks greener, that's it. It won't affect an average viewer's enjoyment of the film. This reminds me of a typography article that says a g with excess kerning in some font is a devastating flaw.
- schappim 5y agoThe “looks greener” is actually a central part of the filmography (not sure if this is the right word), as the colours are tinted green whenever the characters are in the matrix and shift back when they are in the real world.
- colechristensen 5y agoCinematography would probably be the appropriate word.
- schappim 5y agoThank you!
- colechristensen 5y ago“Filmography” means something more like bibliography and might be defined as “a list of films” for one purpose or another. Like a director’s filmography would be the list of films they worked on.
- jaclaz 5y agoSurely but also photography, the title in the movie titles is often "director of photography" though an Oscar is named as "best cinematography": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinematographer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinematographer https://stephenfollows.com/cinematographer-vs-director-of-photography/ https://stephenfollows.com/cinematographer-vs-director-of-ph...
- xeromal 5y ago
- fourseventy 5y agoToo bad they never made any sequels...
- fortyseven 5y agoAnimatrix helps with that pain, thankfully.
- seanicus 5y agoCertainly none of them are a patch on the original, which stands alone as a totemic duck press of action/sci-fi cinema, but Reloaded has some really fun wtf ideas that twisted my brain in the same way that the original did, as well as a set piece (the highway chase) that's on par with Matrix 1. I've tried to find value in Revolutions but it's a harder task for me. I've seen Resurrections once and it's too early to say. I really enjoyed it but it hasn't sat well with me since viewing. Hoping to pop it on this weekend and get a better impression.
- yaksha13 5y agoThe scene color is quite important to the storytelling. Most often I think of Green as being in the Matrix and Blue as being in the "real" world/ Zion
- denimnerd42 5y agoA much more significant problem to me is when streaming services don't preserve the original aspect ratio. Like cropping to make a 4:3 show 16:9 or a 2.35:1 movie 16:9.
- bsimpson 5y agoThey're both crimes against film.
- cronix 5y agoNo films were harmed in the making of this digital product.
- jwlake 5y agoMovies usually have several terrible cuts, tv versions are usually much much worse than the bluray versions. Streaming is a mixed bad, sometimes better. Disney+ actually bringing out good versions (IMAX) hopefully will force others to improve.
- seanicus 5y agoAnd don't even get me started on the effect of these vendors' compression methodologies. I watched the Burton Batman movies when HBO MAX debuted and I couldn't believe how dogshit they looked due to their dark palette not playing well with the very aggressive compression. Esp. wild when you consider the amount of money the the Batman movies have brought in for WB. It's their flagship franchise and I assume the highest brand recognition of any IP they own (sorry, Bugs). HBO didn't roll out 4K content until months later, though, so things may have improved since then.
- grumbel 5y agoTaking a show originally cropped for 4:3 and expanding the image to 16:9 can also lead to fun results when microphones, lightstands and crew are in the parts of the picture that where originally cropped out. Buffy was a famous victim of that. And fitting for the topic, there is a Matrix - Open Matte trailer on Youtube, was never broadcast in that form, but an interesting watch at what is in the full picture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8GdG4Ryt9ro https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8GdG4Ryt9ro
- schappim 5y agoThe “looks greener” is actually a central part of the filmography (not sure if this is the right word), as the colours are tinted green whenever the characters are in the matrix and shift back when they are in the real world. Edit: Moved off the dead parent comment
- DeepYogurt 5y agoAs I recall the green tint was added to the second DVD release. The theatrical release had a more balanced color palette. Edit: Seems that the UHD release removed the green tint as well https://www.avforums.com/reviews/the-matrix-4k-blu-ray-review.14950 https://www.avforums.com/reviews/the-matrix-4k-blu-ray-revie...
- neogodless 5y agoAlso from paragraph 2 of the article: > The initial DVD release had a neutral-warm color palette while the 2008 Blu-ray added a heavy green cast to match the sequels. The Matrix's 2018 UHD Blu-ray release apparently hews closer to how the film looked in theaters with a more purple-blue tint
- DeepYogurt 5y agoParagraph 9 > 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. Updated my comment to reference a second dvd release.
- dunham 5y ago> it was one of the first titles that many DVD adopters bought I remember it being bundled (in the same box) with my first DVD player.
- quercusa 5y agoIt never occurred to me to wonder what streaming services use for their sources. Do they send an intern over to Best Buy to pick up a Blu-Ray?
- pavlov 5y agoJudging by the picture quality on many of the older shows and movies, an intern at the studio digitized a big stack of dusty NTSC Betacam tapes into MPEG-2 files with all encoder settings left at default low-bitrate CBR, then uploaded it to Amazon and everywhere else where it got further mangled by re-encoding at various H.264 levels.
- deergomoo 5y agoEven newer shows often have appalling picture quality on streaming services. Dark scenes especially—I watched Mr Robot on Prime Video a few months ago and the blocking and compression artefacts in dark scenes (which, if you’ve never seen the show, is a lot of them) were unbelievable. I’ve seen 700MB DVD rips with better handling.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- mikeryan 5y agoNo there's a whole industry, with MPA driven security standards around getting digital source files from the studios to the streamers (or usually actually directly to the streamers DRM system) That being said there are likely multiple "masters" of a film that are available to the streaming service to choose from however. If you're interested details of the MPA Content Security Standards can be viewed here (PDF) https://www.motionpictures.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/MPA-Best-Practices-Common-Guidelines-V4.09-FINAL.pdf https://www.motionpictures.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/MP...
- quercusa 5y agoThanks!
- allenu 5y ago> Some people genuinely like the green cast of the 2008 Blu-ray. I never did the see the original Matrix movie in theaters (I watched on a "DivX;)" rip provided by my roommate at the time). Did the original theater version not have a green tint to it? The rip that I saw did and to me that feels like the "definitive" look of The Matrix. Am I misremembering and it was only added to the 2008 Blu-ray?
- ModernMech 5y agoI had it on a VHS circa 2000. It was my favorite movie at the time and I must have watched it 100 times. Definitely had a green tint in that version (I remember being concerned it was my tv and adjusting the colors).
- unbanned 5y agoDownload an old cam or telecine and have a look?
- notatoad 5y agoit kind of looks like they took the blu-ray version that was streaming on hulu and desaturated it to make it less green, rather than going back to the original version.
- neogodless 5y agoFrom the article: > The Hulu version had a strong green cast, and I suspect it used the 2008 Blu-ray version at its source. Meanwhile, the HBO Max version is more purple and blue, so it seems likely that it came from the 2018 UHD Blu-ray.
- Lammy 5y agoThe industry term is "color grading" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_grading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_grading
- CarVac 5y agoHDR content to not-full-brightness-capable display autoconversion was a terrible idea. Take the color grading away from someone with an eye for aesthetics and give it to a dumb algorithm.
- gruez 5y agoagreed. I have a SDR monitor and given the choice between a 4K HDR release and a 1080p SDR release, I'll always go for the 1080p release. The colors in the HDR always look off compared to the SDR. I tried a bunch of fixes (eg. different media players, tweaking tonemapping settings, etc.), but it never works. Does anyone know whether it's still an issue on HDR400 (ie. "fake HDR") monitors ?
- MaxBarraclough 5y agoI do the same. UHD Blu-Rays with HDR look terrible on my non-HDR 4K TV. The colours come out terribly 'flat', and no amount of tweaking the display settings is able to set it right. I'm careful to go with ordinary Blu-Rays instead. Ideally of course I'd rather a non-HDR UHD Blu-Ray but these are increasingly rare. You'd think the disc players would be smart enough to do a good job mapping HDR to SDR, but here we are.
- gruez 5y ago>You'd think the disc players would be smart enough to do a good job mapping HDR to SDR, but here we are. I suspect the reason is that SDR and HDR have separate color grading/correction applied, so it's basically impossible to automatically convert HDR to SDR. Or in other words, "automatic" conversion from HDR to SDR inevitably looks bad, so production studios manually redo the color correction for SDR.
- MaxBarraclough 5y ago> "automatic" conversion from HDR to SDR inevitably looks bad, so production studios manually redo the color correction for SDR Perhaps that's it. What happens if you point a camera at an HDR TV and view the image/video on an SDR TV? Would the colours look flat?
- ben7799 5y agoIt's been so long since these were in the theaters I wouldn't remember which was most accurate. I saw them all in the theater but I watched the original so many times on the original DVD that to my mind the DVD release would be "correct". I haven't seen any of them in a long time but I sure loved that first movie for about 5 years. My feeling that it should be more green when they are in the Matrix and less so outside of the Matrix matches up with other commenters though. There were very very obvious filmography/cinematography/color grading choices the directors made to show the contrast between the Matrix and the Real as you watched the movie. One of the example scenes with Agent Smith pointing his gun is NOT in the Matrix though, that's in the construct.. can't remember but I think those did not have the green tint.
- larusso 5y agoI was not able to watch the first movie when it was released in cinema because I was a year to young to watch it (Germany late nineties and no PG-13 madness as it is today). But I watched a double feature when Matrix reloaded was released a few years later. And I still remember that I saw the color grading of Matrix Reloaded and was really annoyed by it. For me Matrix before the sequels where released was blue (you can also see this in the movie poster, which you can find green graded versions now as well ;)). With the release of the sequels everything became green. I’m also the owner of the blu-ray release and was not amused by the color changes.
- ramadis 5y agoFor those interested, there is an interesting video [1] that explains how/why the different versions with different color gradings came to be. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KEdgmNZnLs4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KEdgmNZnLs4
- turdnagel 5y agoI did not see the film in theaters as I was 12 at the time, but I racked dozens of plays of the DVD version, which has the green tint and looks "correct" to me. (Edit: Apparently the 1999 DVD did not have the tint, but I that's not what I remember...) It would be interesting to do a comparison between the green tint version and the "untinted" / neutral without the issues with highlights/whites.
- alternatetwo 5y agoHere are a couple of screenshots I made just a few days ago: https://imgur.com/a/f8630kc https://imgur.com/a/f8630kc The original colour timing is very certainly NOT the green bucket they spilled over the masters for the original bluray release.
- turdnagel 5y agoThank you for sharing that. I just watched the 2018 UHD Blu-ray and compared with an earlier Blu-ray 1080p release. To my eyes, everything is shifted to be a bit more blue, not green, and specifically in the skin tones. There is definitely a tint in both versions, but skin tones aren't as affected in the earlier versions vs. the later ones.
- jdavis703 5y agoMany comments here are clamoring for immutable masters. We also see comments elsewhere complaining when historic buildings receive a an addition in a contemporary architectural style etc. For most of human history art has always been mutable. If you tour the National Gallery of Art there are plenty of paintings that have been changed throughout out the years to match changing and politics or theologies. In fact, most performance art has always been somewhat unique. Every show Shakespeare put on was slightly different.
- sircastor 5y agoSee Also: Star Wars.
- ivanech 5y agoOh geez the Star Wars special edition is one of the stronger arguments in favor of immutability
- thatswrong0 5y agoSeriously. Like how on Earth did he think blocking the whole screen with a CGI dinosaur was an improvement? (https://youtu.be/OEch4j4KyoU?t=353 https://youtu.be/OEch4j4KyoU?t=353)
- edent 5y agoBecause the Special Editions aren't for you. They're an advert for ILM's services. The target audience is movie makers, producers, directors, executives etc. They can see all the whizz-bang effects that ILM are able to produce - and how they can revitalise old movies.
- thatswrong0 5y agoBut that shot just looks awful.
- 5y ago
- titzer 5y agoA fun mind-twist is to think of the film itself every time one of the characters in the film mentions "The Matrix". E.g. "No one can be told what the Matrix is". Indeed. Nobody can be told what this movie is. Ha! It makes it even more meta than it already is. The Matrix was shot in 1999 and takes place in 1999. It was purposefully shot with the technology of the time; cellphones, computers, etc. As such, it serves as a perfect time capsule of that period. So in a sense, The Matrix (the movie) is indeed a simulation of 1999!
- FroshKiller 5y agoIt doesn’t take place in 1999. The plaque aboard the Nebuchadnezzar says it was built in 2069, so it’s at least that far in the future and almost certainly further since it probably wasn’t the machines commemorating the date.
- titzer 5y agohttps://matrix.fandom.com/wiki/1999 https://matrix.fandom.com/wiki/1999
- dml2135 5y agoOh man, just wait until you see the new sequel.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- titzer 5y agoI did. Twice. It's...different.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- subsubzero 5y agoI saw the first matrix the night before it came out in 1998 in san jose ca. I remember the whole film had a bluish tint to it, it was filmed in Australia(alot of it) and remember not loving the tint. In subsequent films (reloaded and revolutions) they went to the green tint and then applied the green tint to future dvd releases of the original matrix to preserve a continity to the series.
- Avery3R 5y agoJust a theory, but it looks like it could be caused by differences in the tone mapping algorithm used to convert the HDR masters down into an SDR palette.
- AndrewUnmuted 5y ago> When you steam The Matrix, you don't know which version you're going to get, and that stinks. You know which version you get, ironically, if you pirate the film from the private torrent tracker networks out there. Fuck Big IP! Pirate your favorite film today!
- seanicus 5y agoAnd sadly you may end up getting a higher res version than what you'd get on streaming.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- boffinism 5y agoGreat use of the word 'hews' in an article about hues.
- ivanech 5y agoHaha I almost said that the 2018 version hews closer to the theatrical release's hues but that felt too cheesy
- zelias 5y agoOne thing I could never figure out about the Matrix is why they would write all the code on top-to-bottom lines. You'd think it would be left-to-right or right-to-left even if it's all written by machines!
- saltcured 5y agoTo me, it implied a bit of the "future is east-asian" styling of Blade Runner. Vertical signage from a digital chinatown. But it also made it seem both familiar and alien to see green phosphor characters fill the screen top to bottom, but with an extra bit of ghosting and smearing as the different columns seemed to flow at different rates. It also reminds of older electronic sign boards of airports and stock markets, with large fields of characters flipping in loosely synchronized ways.
- aenis 5y agoI am sorry for asking such a basic question but did anyone here figured out a working hw/sw solution for playing blue ray uhd/hdr videos on macbooks? I spent considerable amount of time researching and found nothing that would not crash on my mbp w/ m1 max.
- aeturnum 5y agoIt's interesting to compare this to Ghost in the Shell (1995) a key influence on the Matrix. It also had a re-release in 2008 which brought the color palette in line with the GITS extended universe, but that re-release is consistently referred to as 2.0 and is understood as a separate release. This kind of sloppy mastering across different platforms suggests that whoever is in charge of ensuring the original films are available in high-quality formats is not doing a great job.
- 0_____0 5y agoIIRC each streaming service has a different set of acceptance criteria. I haven't read about color grading in this regard, but Netflix, Disney etc. do control things like audio levels to ensure that the experience is even across their different media titles -- having to crank up the volume on one title, only to be blown away when starting another one is a poor user experience. Requirements around mean audio level can have non-trivial impacts on the experience of a film -- ones with a lot of quiet/loud contrast may be affected differently from ones with less peaky audio tracks. I hadn't thought about it before, but it makes sense that this would apply to the visual aspect as well.
- 35mm_guy 5y agoLet's just sort out the color grading versions: The one with the blown out highlights and leaning often way too much into the blue is the most recent remastered version done for the UHD BD release. Beside a few scenes outside the matrix it is the version furthest away from the theatrical presentation. It's the only one currently available in UHD though. The green tint version is the color grading that was done to bring the first movie in line with the planned look of the sequels. This is the HD version most people know and was widely available on DVD and of course on BD. It was not well done, as digital color correction was in its infancy back then and there are many issues with the color grading overall - but never received an official correction. This is version was also used for digital screening later on. Now onwards to how the movie actually looked theatrical: The theatrical release looked very close to the first R1 NTSC DVD (well as far as telecining goes of course) - and only this one (VHS and LaserDisc are naturally more off). Cannot speak for other than US releases though. Also the same version as on the initial R1 DVDs was broadcasted on cable at least back 2000/2001 in HD. Minor differences, but more off than the DVDs (looks like color space conversion round trip from Rec.709 to 601, back to 709), though unless you have a trained eye for color grading and a reference like display you probably won't notice the sublte differences here at all. Anyway, the theatrical release does not have the the strong green tint as released later. It has a slight green and an amber vibe instead (to reflect amber and green monochrome monitors), but not as pronounced as the later release most people know from BD and streaming services or later DVD releases. In fact the green is very sublte, but giving you a monochromic vibe back in the days and the amber is more pronounced, sometimes almost yellowish, but not reddish. Some scenes are almost neutral. It gives you the best impression how the movie looked in cinemas when it came out, though due to telecine it is naturally a bit off. Some of the green is getting lost and the amber is tad more pronounced than it should be. How do I know that exactly? I have an EK print in my collection. Don't get fooled by some scans of 35mm you see on youtube. Even though you can still the absence of the strong green tint, the print from which these scenes came are way off in color as these prints already deteriorated. And most companies offering scan services do some color correction as the prints are often really bad that people buy. What is the best version? Take your poison. None is probably how it was envisioned. For theatrical they couldn't achieve the look with classic color timing and digital color correcion was not really feasible in 99. Then with the sequels they overdid it, with the new toy "digital color correction" and the recent UHD remaster when totally overboard emulating a bad 35mm scans often for whatever reason. The vision probablty lies between theatrical and BD somewhere. I personally always prefer theatrical, but well what do you expect from people collecting actual prints...
- Havoc 5y agoI thought the parts that take place within the matrix are intentionally green while the outside ones are blueish. eg the scenes where their nebuchadnezzar flies through the old tunnels is completely blue even in the greenish shade edition
- Melatonic 5y agoIn the original theatrical release the color correction within the Matrix was intentionally a sort of "bleach bypass" look - not as dramatic as what you see amateur photographers doing but definitely quite different than the heavy green hue. Personally preferred this look myself and I wish they had kept it for the subsequent films. If the Matrix is supposed to look like "our" world then why would it be heavily green ? It still contrasted very well with the cold, metallic muted colors of the "real". The greens were mostly only in the shadows and very subtle and in some scenes more subtle than others. The reason the original looked so good and is hard to replicate now in post is that they were very likely applying actual chemical color corrections to the original negative film. Probably using some kind of transfer film and a variation of the bleach bypass or similar method.
- seanicus 5y agoThere's a great statement in the color palette of Matrix 4; the world inside The Matrix looks great! Pairs well with the ending of Matrix 3 - the terms of the détente between the machines and humans is that anyone who wants to leave the matrix should be able to do so. So surprise surprise, the machines have manufactured a matrix that looks like a postcard.