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I'm not a film expert, but I like to think I have taste? And yet, somehow the recent Beatles projects reduced me to tears on several occasions. Am I secretly a

• cracrecry 3y ago
  Probably what "reduced you to tears" was not the Beatles itself but the personal experiences that you had with this music. It is an emotional anchor that companies are eager to exploit. 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 For me, they are noisy outdated machines.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.
  • peteforde 3y ago
    It's so cool that you could explain all of this stuff to me.
• j4yav 3y ago
  I'm not even a huge film nerd and the strangeness of the screenshots was evident - though there's no harm in a side by side, I can understand why they didn't include it.
  • machomaster 3y ago
    I am a big film nerd and the strangeness was not evident at all, not even with zoom and spending time (I am very perceptive and attentive) trying to figure out what the complain actually is (oh, too much face detail? Smh...)
    • j4yav 3y ago
      Must be different kinds of film nerds.
    • skydhash 3y ago
      I think it's worse after while watching the movie itself. The smoothness makes everything look waxy.
      • j4yav 3y ago
        The best way I can describe it is someone took an animated movie and applied AI guesses to make it look real. Which is sort of the opposite of what actually happens, but that's what the outcome looks like.
        • lamontcg 3y ago
          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley
      • machomaster 3y ago
        I don't doubt that the difference is there. I also don't doubt that I would be able to see a significant difference. 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.
• ekianjo 3y ago
  > As to his distaste for those upscaled and colorized vintage shorts, I'm happy to go on record and say that I love them Then your sense of taste may be worth questioning
  • j4yav 3y ago
    I can understand why people like them, they are interesting and give you a new way to look at old footage, even if they are also garish and fake looking.
    • LocalH 3y ago
      They're not "fake looking", they are fake. There is no color information in the original film in much of those situations. The algorithm being used is basically inventing the chroma channel out of thin air, based on a guess. 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.
      • j4yav 3y ago
        Fake things can definitely look fake, I think, or am I missing the distinction you are drawing here? I don't understand what you are correcting me on, but I'm curious. I'm aware there's no color in the black and white original.
        • peteforde 3y ago
          Honestly, I think that a lot of people on HN are just difficult. I don't know whether it's learned or biological, but there's clearly a driving urge for some of these folks to just argue the most pedantic nonsense until the oxygen is all gone. 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.
• kranke155 3y ago
  The Beatles project was a pretty good transfer, I'd say. It's the needless use of the same tech to create these horrific transfers of Cameron's work that are creating controversy. The Matrix was also destroyed in its 4k transfer by ridiculously bad color correction.
  • evandrofisico 3y ago
    The Matrix new transfer made me really sad. It is one of my favorite movies of all time, and this new version had the colors done all wrong and in some scenes, I had the impression that the framerate was wrong, especially the bullet time and other action scenes, like they don't match the rest of the movie.
    • gjsman-1000 3y ago
      Curiously, if you look into it, it was the original home release that had the colors done all wrong. The original theatrical release was, according to observers, hardly green. The 4K version, ironically, is more correct to the original theatrical film.
      • wharvle 3y ago
        The original dvd release was fine. It was every release after the second movie that “fixed” the first by making its color grading as smash-you-in-the-face green as the sequels (except the newest 4k I’m aware of, which put it back to something resembling the original color grading)
        • kranke155 3y ago
          Ah that makes sense. 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.
  • 3y ago
• acqq 3y ago
  The 1902 original of the linked film was "actually shot on Biograph’s proprietary 68mm stock" i.e. could be considered very high resolution in any historical timeframe, even today ("The IMAX of the 1890s") https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Ud1aZFE0fU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Ud1aZFE0fU
• mondomondo 3y ago
  [dead]
• jahnu 3y ago
  I don’t see the need for A/B here. The frames posted demonstrate clearly the issues the author has without need for a reference. At least for me they look hideous :)
  • peteforde 3y ago
    Historically, arguments that are literally "there's no need for opposing views because I am right" don't age well.
• masswerk 3y ago
  The real and dramatic issue with True Lies is that the original high-resolution negative is available and that there's also a recent 4K-scan. 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?
  • op00to 3y ago
    > what is gained? Removing film grain makes compression far more efficient. This reduces costs of streaming.
    • ethbr1 3y ago
      I find it hilarious that HBO's classic "snow" static dissolve is literally the worst clip for digital compression. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=P_Oh7HizY5I https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=P_Oh7HizY5I Which I guess is why Max has a boring gradient.
      • karmakaze 3y ago
        I could be worse if it had chroma information.
    • ancientworldnow 3y ago
      It barely makes a difference in reality. I've done final online conform tests for major distributors and the differences in savings vs perceptual cost (if delivering to a targeted bitrate) are negligible. It's also entirely moot for blu-ray delivery.
    • masswerk 3y ago
      So, here ist your comment with the grain removed (quote -> GTP summary -> GTP re-expanded to original length): > 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.) ;-)
• hammock 3y ago
  Scrolling the top of the article looking at movies I’ve never seen, I didn’t think anything of it. 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.
  • hunter-gatherer 3y ago
    My reaction was exactly the same as yours. Blogs like these usually have an assumed audience, I think, which is probably why there aren't any A/B picture comparisons. On a related note, I recently watched Dances with Wolves and was amazed at how authentic it felt despite not being in 4k and all the modern jazz.
• pimlottc 3y ago
  > And yet, somehow the recent Beatles projects reduced me to tears on several occasions. In a good way or a bad way?