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> Painting out these movie mistakes as part of a restoration is wrong. What's in the movie is in the movie, and altering the movie to this extent is a form of r

• alabastervlog 2y ago
  I’m a lot more bothered by the change to the color grading in the “after” of Alien than the minor change to the effect, and by the picture looking way shittier in the “fixed” Goodfellas shot (the first is blu ray, the second “blu ray and streaming”, so hopefully the example was taken from streaming and that’s why it looks so much worse)
  • crazygringo 2y ago
    Oh yeah. Totally agreed on not changing the color grading. That's as big as changing the music. With blogs that take screenshots of 4K content though, sometimes that's using a media player with poor HDR color decoding though. Bad HDR always winds up with a green tint, that's the telltale sign. VLC is the worst with that. But I don't think that's the case here. There are definitely a lot of rereleases with badly done color.
    • devilbunny 2y ago
      > VLC is the worst with that So, what would you recommend instead? This is waaay outside my wheelhouse to judge.
      • matheusmoreira 2y ago
        The best video player is mpv.
    • dylan604 2y ago
      The color grading is a funny one. I worked on a large episodic animated series that was released in the US from a 16mm print copy of the episodes. The original transfer was done at a facility that I worked at, but only as a tape assistant to the colorists. It was transferred as SD to DigiBeta. Years later, the film was brought back out and sent to another local post house for an HD transfer. The person in charge of that made some "interesting" decisions, and the transfer was universally panned. Years later, the same prints were scanned again to HD, but with a different producer for the project. At this time, the colorist also took a lot of interest in the project and found reference film material on the exact same film the prints were on. Using that reference, the colors came out drastically different from anything ever made from these prints. Even though the original creator of the animated series was never involved in any of the post process decisions, it was later relayed that he was extremely pleased with the results of this release as it was the closest to the colors as he had envisioned them way back when the series was being made. Sometimes, the post processes loses a lot when people make decisions. It might take a special released version for the director to actually get a version they feel they wanted the world to see. Sometimes, yes, they go too far, but others it's actually a decent result.
  • tvaziri 2y ago
    It was taken from streaming but that’s the “new” color grade
  • trgn 2y ago
    looks like a videogame
• madrox 2y ago
  I also found this take interesting coming from someone at ILM where they grafted Hayden Christensen into Return of the Jedi. Though in this day and age I can’t help but ask “why not both?” It feels easy to add a choice to your viewing experience. If they can do it for Black Mirror then they can certainly ask up front “which version would you like to see?”
  • bigstrat2003 2y ago
    > I also found this take interesting coming from someone at ILM where they grafted Hayden Christensen into Return of the Jedi. Presumably the author would be opposed to that as well. Just because his employer did it doesn't mean he approves of it.
    • madrox 2y ago
      Absolutely
  • simonh 2y ago
    I literally just finished watching Episode IV, the one with the CGI makeover. The extra alien CGI in Mos Eisley is awful. It doesn’t stand up at all, with the one exception of the Jaba scene which gets away with it because it is pretty fun. I wish we’d watched the original version.
    • Henchman21 2y ago
      Is it easy to find the original? I’d love a copy of each on my Plex server, but I have had trouble finding an original copy. I admit I may not know where or how to look; advice is welcome!
      • Namahanna 2y ago
        What you are looking for is this - https://www.thestarwarstrilogy.com/project-4k77/ https://www.thestarwarstrilogy.com/project-4k77/ "97% of project 4K77 is from a single, original 1977 35mm Technicolor release print, scanned at full 4K, cleaned at 4K, and rendered at 4K." Opening scene comparison - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1b47UP6ZGI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1b47UP6ZGI
• WalterBright 2y ago
  Why oh why did the music for Rocky & Bullwinkle change for the dvd release? It's horrible. The R&B on VHS have the original music.
  • Onawa 2y ago
    Because of expired licenses to use the original music. You can see the same thing happening with later releases of media. As an example, DVD releases of Scrubs were known to have switched out many songs in the entire show.
    • pests 2y ago
      This happens in the streaming days too. I believe Arrested Development was one where when it came to streaming they had to change the music.
    • Khaine 2y ago
      It happened with Daria as well.
  • shmeeed 2y ago
    They didn't have the license and actually got sued for the VHS release. https://old.reddit.com/r/FrostbiteFalls/comments/1flr8ue/frank_comstock_and_the_bullwinkle_music_that_got/ https://old.reddit.com/r/FrostbiteFalls/comments/1flr8ue/fra...
    • WalterBright 2y ago
      Thank you, at last I have an explanation! As for the people responsible: You Maniacs! You blew it up! Ah, damn you! God damn you all to hell!
      • anjel 2y ago
        Its almost always a rights issue with changes to movie and TV soundtracks.
• thih9 2y ago
  > It's the equivalent of fixing a spelling error in a novel, I was surprised to learn that this is a thing and has been for a long time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wicked_Bible https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wicked_Bible
  • WalterBright 2y ago
    The trouble with spelling errors is they drop me out of the immersion in the story. I recall reading one that averaged 2 spelling errors per page. The story and writing was fine, but reading it was like driving on a beautiful country road and hitting a pothole every hundred yards. I finally just gave up on the book.
    • mitthrowaway2 2y ago
      Spelling errors also are sometimes not introduced by the author, but by the typesetter or publisher. In a preface to the Lord of the Rings, Tolkien complains about how many revisions it took to get typesetters to type the book correctly, especially with the words that he had made up or created new conventions for (elves vs. elfs, for example).
      • thih9 2y ago
        I suppose Tolkien’s work would be an exception, especially at the time. Typesetter seeing a made up word would correct it - and for most books it would have been the right choice.
• Ghos3t 2y ago
  There is some value in the mistakes and limitations of older movies, I am sure if you look it up people who can explain it far better than me can give lots of examples, I saw a video once about the growing trend of analog horror where people intentionally watch older horror movies in older storage and display formats like VHS and CRT televisions, because in many ways the high def modern tv screens and 4K mastered prints actually take away from the atmosphere of the original movie that was made keeping the limitations of the technology of the time. Wes Anderson also talks about how watching the fur pattern constantly changing on the model of King Kong in the black and white stop-motion movie due to the puppeteers touching the model to manipulate it inspired him to do the same in his Fantastic Mr Fox movie
  • mort96 2y ago
    It's similar to how old games look so different on modern hardware: the pixel art on a current-day screen looks like high-fidelity perfectly sharp uniformly colored squares, while the "pixel art" of old games rendered on a CRT didn't look like "pixel art" at all but rather like high-fidelity art rendered on a low-fidelity screen. There's a lot of detail implied by the way CRTs render what's encoded in software as perfect squares.
    • teddyh 2y ago
      Illustrative images: <https://imgur.com/gallery/SSpcDzA https://imgur.com/gallery/SSpcDzA>
      • pezezin 2y ago
        The weird rainbow effects on Sonic's waterfalls are NOT due to the properties of CRT, but a result of the Megadrive's awful composite encoder. Connect the screen through a RGB cable cable, or composite through a 32X, and the resulting image is much cleaner. Someone created a whole subreddit a few days ago to analyze the effect and post comparison pictures: https://www.reddit.com/r/Fuckingwaterfall/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Fuckingwaterfall/
        • 2y ago
• jancsika 2y ago
  > It's the equivalent of fixing a spelling error in a novel, or a wrong chord in sheet music. Your analogies don't pass a simple self-check-- they are vastly different in scope. At worst a spelling error will create a single alternative spelling in history. Wrong chords, however, typically create entire branches of full pieces of music that include allusions to and variations upon the wrong chord. For example-- there's no way to "correct" the C major chord in Rachmaninoff's Variations on a Theme by Chopin. What are you going to do, change every single variation in Rachmaninoff's piece to reflect the correct chord (C minor) from Chopin's prelude? It gets even more complicated in jazz where chord substitutions are not only expected but often supersede the original chords. Even more to the point-- a lot of the die-hard Charlie Parker fans not only love the recording he made while obviously drunk, they love it in spite of Parker's wishes for nobody to ever hear it it (much less repeatedly play it and talk about it). That's all to say a) correcting an entrenched wrong chord is no simplistic task, and b) in any case it's wrong to assume that the artist's intentions are always the chief concern.
  • sumeno 2y ago
    The analogy was fine, you're just stretching it too far. Of course there are times when it's better to leave a "wrong" chord in music, but it's incredibly common for sheet music to have unintentional errors, especially in an ensemble setting. If trumpets are playing a unison part but 1 and 2 have a Bb and trumpet 3 has a B natural nobody thinks twice about fixing the trumpet 3 part. That's the analogy, not jazz and Rachmaninoff
• tvaziri 2y ago
  agree to disagree
• krick 2y ago
  Yeah, I knew there must be a debate about this in the comments the moment I saw it. Honestly, I personally disagree with the sentiment on all levels. Meaning, I agree with your observation that there are degrees to "restoration", and fixing a mistake is just not the same as changing music. But then, I also have no sympathy to your objection of changing music or replacing a puppet with CG. I mean, I may like the old take better, but whatever, I'm not the one who made the movie. The people who made this particular cut for this particular release made it (duh). And these may or may be not the same directors and producers that made the cut you consider "the original one". It's their vision. Surely, it may seem surprising to a naïve viewer that it's not the director the movie is attributed to who "made it" in its entirety, but this is just never the case and obviously any cinema enthusiast knows it all too well anyway. (But then I should probably mention that my fundamental disagreement with the sentiment spreads way farther than that, and I myself consider it kinda extreme. I often would be fine with the kind of "restoration" that essentially destroys the original thing. This would be off-topic to explain it here, because it wouldn't be about the movies anymore, but I just think that too much respect for the great things of the past often leads to losing sight of why these things were made in the first place. They were meant to be great at the time, not to be respected as a very old pile of rubbish a couple of thousands years later.) The only thing I am kinda objecting to is when changes made reflect the current political agenda in one way or another (i.e. censorship, be it taboo on display of tits on TV, cutting out statements that seem "politically incorrect" at the time and place of the release, removing some persona non-grata who made a very minor cameo appearance in the original movie or anything else like that). But, again, I don't really object to that because "they don't have the right to do it", but because it's just irritatingly stupid and makes me roll my eyes. It doesn't necessarily make the movie worse or even substantially different (I might not even notice), but unlike with remastering of the original movie, the intent clearly isn't to make it "better" (in their opinion), but just acting out of fear to cause trouble by displaying today something that was fine yesterday as is. What I think is kinda lacking is very clear and non-ambiguous versioning of movies. I am not that much of a movie enthusiast myself, but some people obviously care if you can see the original number-plate falling off the car, and it would be nice if these people could easily refer to that particular edit they like better. They kinda always do it anyway, but that only happens if they need to specifically mention this number plate falling off, and normally they try to pretend that 10 edits made for 10 releases on different media in different countries are all the same movie, which (almost by definition) is not the case. I mean, for books we have versions and ISBNs, and it's normal to reference specifically that, not just one of the authors and the title. Should be standard practice for movies too.
• noizejoy 2y ago
  >> Painting out these movie mistakes as part of a restoration is wrong. > It's really not the equivalent though. I don't see anything wrong with fixing a license plate or removing a reflection or a modern-day wristwatch. I think it depends on the primary objective of the restoration. If I’m trying to preserve history, I shouldn’t fix errors. If I’m trying to make a (by implication derivative) work that maximizes enjoyability for (new) audiences, then it’s ok to fix. e.g. a long time ago, I once transferred vinyl recordings of an extremely amateur community musical group to CD. After thinking long and hard, I decided to fix recording technology flaws (a bad hum) and vinyl degradation flaws (crackles, dust, etc). But I didn’t fix any of the musical performance flaws. Bottom line: I decided to respect the history of the performance, and disrespect the history of the recording and playback technology/medium.
  • echelon 2y ago
    In 100 years (probably sooner), the vast majority of people won't be watching our films anymore. Those deep catalogs of IP have lower value with each passing year. Films are becoming less and less popular with new forms of entertainment that are more immediate, more democratized or individualistic. Our dopamine is being juiced and our attention getting sucked into games, social media, and all other kinds of long tail attractors. Influencers are bigger than Hollywood stars. They simply cater to more interests. Distribution and production are no longer hard problems, so you don't need to build up a Hollywood star. Film is becoming what radio used to be. It may never become as niche as the radio drama is today, but it certainly won't have the same limitless trajectory we thought it would have pre-pandemic. Whatever we do today to "fix" films or make them more accessible is accomplishing one thing: extending their lifespan for as long as most (average, non-film connoisseur) people might still be interested in watching.
    • gerdesj 2y ago
      "In 100 years (probably sooner), the vast majority of people won't be watching our films anymore." I quite strongly disagree with you. I lived through the latter stages of the transition from monochrome to full colour and various other things that were hailed as game changers that would render the previous status quo as somehow defunct. I defy you to watch something like a Harold Lloyd movie involving a clock and not have sweaty palms or at least a mildly elevated ... emotional response of some sort. We call them films or movies or whatever but those are long form stories. A book might be one too or a pdf. The novella is a short story. A matinee was an extended session at the cinema with multiple "value adds" to the main production. Theatre ... cartoons ... you know how this goes! Might I remind you that you have only two eyes, which means that a radio drama in your car is the only safe media for a "drama" in a car, for the driver. You do get aural distraction but it is mostly manageable. One day you will have FSD (Mr Musk says so) and you will be able to watch telly with your feet on the dash but that is not today. Media and formats change but the purpose is largely the same: telling a story. We are, after all, the story telling ape.
• jart 2y ago
  [flagged]
• damerou 2y ago
  Ok
• GMoromisato 2y ago
  It's not that easy, in my opinion. George Lucas and James Cameron have both said that their restorations were how they would have wanted to release the movie if they had had the technology/budget. I personally hate the reworked Star Wars trilogy compared to the original, only because that's what I saw first. If I had seen them in the opposite order, would I feel the same way? I don't know. As with anything, there is no bright line. For example, translations of The Odyssey are constantly changing the vocabulary. And more recently we've seen changes to novels to conform to modern sensibilities (e.g., Roald Dahl novels). For me, I guess, my preference is to allow creators to do whatever they want with their creations, but I wish they would make all versions available. Steven Spielberg did that with ET when he digitally replaced all guns with walkie-talkies.
  • tummler 2y ago
    The counter argument is that once art is released into the world, it becomes a conversation with the people consuming it and no longer belongs solely to the creator. I empathize with, and see the validity in, both sides.
  • s1artibartfast 2y ago
    They have millions of dollars at stake, so it is hard for me to take them at face value. There is also decades of years between production, so the directors are different people as well. Modern George Lucas doesnt think that Han Solo is the kind of guy who shoots first, now that hes rolling is Disney franchise money. What would 1977 Lucas think if asked?
  • toast0 2y ago
    > It's not that easy, in my opinion. George Lucas and James Cameron have both said that their restorations were how they would have wanted to release the movie if they had had the technology/budget. I dunno about Cameron's films (I don't think I've seen an original and an unchanged from him), but for Star Wars, the constraints helped make the film good. Yes, there's some rough bits, but all of the additions subtract rather than add. Maybe it's not what his vision was, but we liked it as it was. If you watch ROTJ, you can already see where unconstrained technology distracts Lucas and it turns into too much of a green screen affair in parts. The prequel trilogy is so much green screen and it just feels so sterile and unbelievable; none of the characters interact with the environment at all; they're not hot in the desert or even when having a light saber duel in lava fields or whatever. They don't get cold or wet, etc. In ROTJ, the speeder bike stuff is mostly gratituous, but there's interaction with the environment.
• gwbas1c 2y ago
  Art is subjective, and thus the decision to "fix" mistakes is also subjective. I generally will side with whatever the filmmaker wants me to see now. What's important is that the original is preserved, accessible, and we know the changes. This rarely happens.
• matthewdgreen 2y ago
  > They weren’t done with intent. “A Litany in a Time of Plague” contains a famous line: “brightness falls from the air.” Many scholars believe it’s a printing error, that the original line was “brightness falls from the hair.” But with apologies to Jay McInerney (who made this point better than I) the former is so much more beautiful. Sometimes art isn’t intentional.
• beloch 2y ago
  It's debatable where the line should be drawn, and the best approach is not to draw it at all. Sure, update flicks with CG fixes, but the original theatrical version should always be made available too. That was Lucas' mistake with the original Star Wars trilogy. He fixed mistakes, CG'd characters and sets, spliced in deleted scenes, filmed entirely new sequences, replaced music, etc.. He felt he was making the movies better, but the updated editions weren't the familiar old friends people had known since childhood. If he'd made good transfers of the original versions available in the latest home video formats in addition to his newer versions, everybody would have been happy. He didn't do that. Some people want the original versions and some want updated versions. Given that the first step to producing new spruced up versions is to restore the original, it makes sense to make both available.
• nandomrumber 2y ago
  I don’t really follow film, though I do watch the odd movie. Do films still occasionally have different cuts, is that still a thing with DVD releases? There’s at least two films I never liked the theatrical release of, but the directors cuts were entirely likeable.
• ashoeafoot 2y ago
  The dangling licence plate sets a mood.