Quote:
Originally Posted by nissling
Mad Max Fury Road has been a big favorite for many ever since it got released. One of my personal favorite UHDs is Ready Player One, subjectively speaking. Some scenes look absolutely breathtaking in UHD with HDR.
I've worked with film scanning and restoration for quite some time and believe me when I tell you that the work is rarely like you think it is. CG is practically never redone or added into a new scan, unless you're George Lucas. At very most fades (optical or A/B) and credits are recreated digitally with scans of untouched negatives.
I remember one film where the image froze while the title was shown on screen. That dupe neg was simply too shabby for our taste so we scanned the original negatives (35mm Eastmancolor 5247), made the exact same frame freeze for the exact amount of time and combined it with the text on top. Once the time codes matched, I could then start on the color timing, followed by a dirt removal and finally adding a bit of fake grain. Yes, fake grain. Why? Because a digital frame that's been duplicated to stay on screen for like 45 seconds will look entirely static, making the restoration extremely evident. With the fake grain applied, carefully tuned, you honestly wouldn't be able to tell that it was done digitally.
In 4096x3072, I think this single title sequence took me at least three hours to complete. Not because the work is any complicated as far as VFX or color timing goes, but because the work is started from scratch and my goal is to replicate the original experience you'd get from watching a 40 year old print. Of course a print would be softer, much softer, but the colors and timing of the titles were exactly the same - Which is a way to show respect to the creator's intent.
I've also worked close with directors and DPs who are all extremely picky when it comes to color timing and spot inaccuracies right away. Most of them, I'd probably say 90-95%, want to stay true to the original look and are very confident on how their films are supposed to look. At least in Sweden. Very few are like Wong Kar-wai or James Cameron.
Now why am I telling you this?
Because the kind of work you're asking for is so much more than just simple CG that can be re-added. It's about staying true to the original film. The first example shows how time consuming a simple sequence can be to work with. That is not to say that higher resolutions cannot improve, because it surely can, but many directors aren't really this... Technical. They see their work in other ways than we, home theater enthusiasts, do. And I think it's primarily because most people don't care like we do neither. I do all my scans in 4K nowadays regardless of the source, but for those films that I've finished in 2K, I honestly just let them be. For now at least.
And this is without even getting into how difficult it is to recreate CG without altering the original look. We're talking keying, matting, rotoscoping, 3D modeling, shading, added motion blur, fake grain etc... If you can go back to the original project files, if they're even available with all other content you'll need, modern hardware and software may not handle it properly. Going back to older hardware and software may be a solution for compatibility but then the 4K workflow is not guaranteed to be reliable. Of course you can try to build a house of card at the same height as the Empire State Building. Or you can be satisfied with three stories and everyone else will be just as satisfied.
Don't buy it then. I'm very selective when purchasing UHDs, especially if it's a film I already own.
Lower bitrate won't give you a more pixellated image. If compression doesn't suffice you will get macroblocking and posterization, which in turn reduces sharpness and textures but not really in the way that you're describing it.
If it's pixellated due to the resolution, a higher bitrate won't change anything.
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Magnificent post. Reminds me of what RAH said about rebuilding the titles on My Fair Lady when they did the restoration, they applied some grain to the titles to avoid exactly what you said, the grain just sitting there all frozen like, and just used the same two frames of grain repeated alternately because you couldn't tell the difference.
And yes, the point about a DI is that it is literally the primary record of the finished product, inclusive of all the VFX and otherwise invisible digital trickery that's carried out far more often than people think - even on a Tarantino movie as recounted in the linked article about the VFX. When StudioCanal announced their special edition of Gaspar Noe's Irreversible everyone assumed it was gonna be a new transfer, especially because the movie had been recut into chronological order, but no: as there was so much digital post-production work that had gone into creating the original 2K version - not simply VFX but all the other things that directors do with the digital tech - that it was simply not feasible to essentially post-produce the movie again, as told by Indicator here:
https://forum.blu-ray.com/showthread...6#post18895586
THAT is what people are missing when it comes to these discussions. Of coursh it'd be amazing if every single 2K show got rebuilt into 4K (source permitting) but there's more to the average DI than people think, and rebuilding that takes time and money that the studios and even the filmmakers aren't willing to put in. Sure, they'll go the extra mile for an old movie where the negative is literally falling apart, but for something finished out to 2K then that's your final record of the show which won't physically deteriorate like film. And to refer to another of Atlantis' points: no-one said that doing a new transfer of something finished to film was quick, cheap and easy, but it's still eas
ier and cheap
er than doing a rebuild of a 2K movie shot on film. Sony quoted $56K for a full 4K workup from a cut negative and $105K for a 4K rebuild of a 2K show, that's not an insignificant difference.
We don't know either way but I'll bet cash money that there wasn't a lot of hidden digital tweakery on Crystal Skull aside from the actual VFX shots, Spielbergo being so old-school as he is, and with a potentially conformed negative that made it doubly easier to redo in 4K: no need for an extensive digital conform (just needed to slug in the upscaled VFX) and no need to dig up lots of select takes to digitally recreate scenes that stitch together those different takes (David Fincher split-screened up to four different takes together on Gone Girl) etc.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Atlantis Rising
I should have been clearer and stated that digital files should be made into non-fading 35mm negatives and YCM separation 35mm masters. Prints fade and get damaged. It's insane that there are movies made in past 10 years that only exist in digital and don't have a 35mm negative and YCM masters. Those could save a film one day in the decades to come. Digital files are more fragile than film. This is being discovered now by people working in archives. It's like computer files from the 90s in antiquated formats that can't be read in current computers. In 50 years will a digital file of a 2017 movie still work? 1's and 0's in a silicon chip scare me! They aren't real! A piece of non-fading 35/65mm in a salt mine is safer! Sounds crazy. Digital is great but it shouldn't become the be-all and end-all. I can see tons of data being lost in the years to come because people trust their modern tech too much.
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That's exactly what they do. Most major restorations of Old Movies undertaken by the studios are recorded out to a new negative and YCM seps, and even new movies finished out to a DI are given the same treatment, perhaps not automatically but if willed by the studio or filmmaker then they'll laser out some YCM seps for that too. Soderbergh had that done for Ocean's 13, even though it was finished out to 4K data they made film backups.
Digital archive formats like LTO tape are fairly stable in the long term but the problem is planned obsolescence, they keep updating the LTO spec and even tapes just a few years old aren't able to be run on newer hardware, to say nothing of the long-obsolete types of tape format that sprung up in the wake of the DI revolution. Warners' head of archiving recounted a story that when they did the Blu-rays of the LOTR extended editions they had nothing at their MPI restoration house that could run the tapes they had so they had to scour the country for a suitable machine and buy it.
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