Your favorite blu-ray re-release sucks

December 24, 2023 10:01 AM

They Want You To Forget What A Film Looks Like: some people need their deep learning algorithms taken away from them.
posted by simmering octagon (35 comments total)

It’s Italian Futurism in 4k, a noise reduction death drive.

Now that’s sentence!
posted by GenjiandProust at 10:20 AM on December 24, 2023 [18 favorites]

Thank you for posting this, and thank you to Chris Person (an ironically AI-adjacent name if ever there was one) for writing this. I've been complaining about this nonsense for years, but lacked the vocabulary and the technical knowledge to do so in such fine detail.
posted by Faint of Butt at 10:20 AM on December 24, 2023 [2 favorites]

I'll say it again: now is a great time to buy DVDs! I never had much of a collection when it was the main format; it felt a bit expensive and I'm not a huge movie re-watcher.

But dammit I hate these AI shenanigans, "garish" and "shambolic" indeed. I have been using my local libraries a lot too, but I worry that their DVD collections will dwindle over the next decade, and it's becoming clear that physical media I own is the only reliable way I can watch something I like in the not-too-distant future.
posted by SaltySalticid at 10:22 AM on December 24, 2023 [13 favorites]

two things come to mind.

First of all, people have been ruining great old artifacts with new technology since whenever technology got invented. Call it applied engineer's disease. The upside nowadays, I suppose, is that we still have pretty decent versions of the original artifacts in archive somewhere, so much of the damage of this deep-learning-improves-everything sickness can eventually be undone.

Second, sometimes the deep learning stuff yields great results. Recent case in point, this upgrade (organized and funded by fans) of an old Genesis concert from back when Peter Gabriel was still fronting the band and they were the definitively cool sorta underground band of the moment. Now if only we could figure out how to go back and re-shoot/re-edit things because whoever was on top of that for this performance wasn't (ie: fabulous guitar solo rips forth but the but focus is on everyone else but the guy playing it).
posted by philip-random at 10:39 AM on December 24, 2023 [7 favorites]

Distribute the source with the new output so the source is preserved and people can see the differences.

(ie: fabulous guitar solo rips forth but the but focus is on everyone else but the guy playing it).
I'm sure next year's version of the software will concoct and interpolate what's missing.
posted by pracowity at 11:08 AM on December 24, 2023 [1 favorite]

If you have never seen the movie True Lies, you are probably under 30.

Or, you know, you don't like shitty movies.
posted by box at 11:10 AM on December 24, 2023 [10 favorites]

Site linked to is not firefox friendly
posted by falsedmitri at 11:19 AM on December 24, 2023

Maybe it's a matter of extensions, because firefox just loaded it correctly for me.
posted by pracowity at 11:26 AM on December 24, 2023 [6 favorites]

I worry that their DVD collections will dwindle over the next decade

You are smart to worry. Yes, this will happen and is already happening at many libraries. In a time of constrained (artificially or otherwise) budgets, "everyone has streaming anyway" isn't the correct response, but it also isn't entirely an incorrect response.
posted by cupcakeninja at 11:47 AM on December 24, 2023 [2 favorites]

I watched get back and really have no earthly idea what this guy is yabbering about.
posted by Sebmojo at 11:53 AM on December 24, 2023 [3 favorites]

Like, every single era of technology has specific things, produced as an artefact of trying to produce the best result, that will identify it to future generations. But the melting dogs hellscape this person is upset about just looks like film stills to me. It smacks of audiophiles complaining about cds sounding sterile.
posted by Sebmojo at 11:56 AM on December 24, 2023 [6 favorites]

sigh. I really hope this is in part an accommodation to smushing them down for streaming, and that the disc releases will look better.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 12:10 PM on December 24, 2023 [1 favorite]

If you have never seen the movie True Lies, you are probably under 30.

Or, you know, you don't like shitty movies.

one of a small handful of movies I've ever walked out of. Racist to the core. And then there's the double-plus-ugly misogyny. So go ahead, deep learning algorithms, do your worst.
posted by philip-random at 12:20 PM on December 24, 2023 [9 favorites]

If we know anything about filmmaker James Cameron, it’s that he couldn’t give a shit about technology and he absolves himself of ever having any creative control over how his movies look, especially the computer generated special effects.
posted by Back At It Again At Krispy Kreme at 12:46 PM on December 24, 2023 [3 favorites]

Here is a clip from the new 4K True Lies transfer. I am no expert, but to me it looks absolutely fantastic. The author is conflating the obvious AI of those old B&W films cranked up to 60fps, which creates a strange blurring effect I also don't like, with what? Noise reduction from the original True Lies print? Is there a kind of digital airbrushing? The average person is not going to notice this at all. I'm not sure what the problem is. Maybe if he included comparison images it would be more clear.

James Cameron is a technical genius but, like George Lucas (who is not a technical genius), doesn't always know when to stop tinkering. Slight derails but my beef with Cameron was him messing around with the frame rates for The Way of Water. It was 24fps and then would randomly changed to 48fps, sometimes just for a few seconds. Why, James, why? It took me right out every time...except for all the underwater scenes, and then the higher framerate looked pretty great. He should have limited the frame rate tinkering for just those scenes.
posted by zardoz at 1:24 PM on December 24, 2023

This before/after comparison from the streaming version of the Aliens 4K remaster has very noticeable “digital airbrushing” to me, and I’m usually not that picky about these things. The digital noise reduction is presumably meant to eliminate film grain, but too much and it also makes skin and cloth look unnaturally smooth and plastic. (Source with more comparison images.)

(Also, Reddit detectives say the “remaster” is really the same master as the previous Blu-Ray release, just digitally upscaled.)
posted by mbrubeck at 1:44 PM on December 24, 2023 [10 favorites]

Thanks, mbrubeck, that's what I was looking for. I would need to watch the whole movie and see if that smoothness jumped out at me. I also think it depends on the scene, lighting, etc.
posted by zardoz at 2:01 PM on December 24, 2023

… now is a great time to buy DVDs!

And here, I just my laserdisc player working again…
posted by Huggiesbear at 2:12 PM on December 24, 2023 [5 favorites]

The Aliens comparisons are super useful. I really don't like what it does to shadows.
posted by porpoise at 2:26 PM on December 24, 2023 [2 favorites]

And i mean this in no way to come off as smug, but i really saw this coming as soon as the nvidia ai upscaling of video stuff came out(I.E. what the shield tv boxes can do). I knew that no matter the quality of tools or equipment available, this over-processed facetuned $7 ai professional headshot generator look was going to become "high tech" and "cutting edge" and a lot of companies and curators of various stripes were going to fall for it.

This kind of easy to see at a glance tech stuff plays really well in a corporate work meeting or committee, especially with people who don't know what the fuck they're talking about or have any taste. It also works incredibly well on people who are desperate to seem relevant and "with it".

Ugly early """ai""" bing image generator stuff will be a meme revisited many times over the coming decades, but this kind video processing of crap will be the immediately recognizable giant 80s hairdo of the late 2010s/2020s.

Eventually, this look will become something ironically affected and intentionally applied to footage as a stylistic choice, or to make it look "retro".
posted by emptythought at 2:47 PM on December 24, 2023 [7 favorites]

Only a couple of these strike me as uncanny valley weird. The Titanic one, the They Shall Not Grow Old one, and "The Neck". Never noticed any weirdness in Get Back. Nothing like Legolas in the Hobbit movies, yikes!

Better than squiggly monsters in Mos Eisley...
(Sorry George Lucas, but just, no)
posted by Windopaene at 2:55 PM on December 24, 2023

I kind of wish no-one would tell them how bad this is. I don't want it to get "better".
posted by amtho at 3:13 PM on December 24, 2023 [2 favorites]

Um, True Lies is a perfectly cromulent movie that was part of a stable of Films My Family Owned (as a result of a McDonalds deal) so back off.

But, also, I guess I'm a philistine or have bad eyes because the article could have used some direct frame comparisons since, to be honest, I couldn't tell the damn difference for most of them. Besides Waxy Rose of course.
posted by DeepSeaHaggis at 3:16 PM on December 24, 2023 [2 favorites]

It's just... how hard is it, really?

I saw Aliens in a theater in 1986. Those images, the ones on the screen -- give me those. They were grainy in 86 and I didn't mind because that's what the movie looked like. Gimme that. Not rocket science. The movie that got projected back in the day, give me it.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 3:32 PM on December 24, 2023 [8 favorites]

Second, sometimes the deep learning stuff yields great results. Recent case in point, this upgrade (organized and funded by fans) of an old Genesis concert from back when Peter Gabriel was still fronting the band and they were the definitively cool sorta underground band of the moment.

Now, my understanding was that the concert video was an actual rescan of old film at a higher resolution, rather than just upscaling existing stuff. Kind of akin to how other music videos shot on film have had 4K rescans done and released in recent years, featuring the actual image data caught by the camera rather than digitally hallucinated sharpening of blurry images
posted by DoctorFedora at 4:43 PM on December 24, 2023 [2 favorites]

Ok so I...obtained a copy of the 4K Aliens. Watched several parts, and I do not know what the fuss is about. Like, at all. It looks fabulous. I get that people are disappointed in the missing film grain, and how that affects things like skin tone. Maybe I need to get my eyes examined or something, but I genuinely don't see the problem. I'm an 80s child and watched a VHS copy of Aliens more times than I can count back in the day, and that was a cropped, comparatively very grainy and washed out copy. Nowadays with big 4K tvs it's like a dream; the only problem is when the frame rate gets all screwy, but that's easily fixed. But it's a golden age for watching movies at home.
posted by zardoz at 3:51 AM on December 25, 2023

zardoz, a lot of this reminds me of the point when Roger Ebert insisted on the superiority of B&W film, noting that "people dream in black and white" as though that proved it was somehow "natural" to human experience.

Thing is, people who watched a lot of B&W film and television are primarily the ones who dream in B&W. He was projecting his Boomer norms on the species as a whole, and defining an aesthetic absolute from that.

I appreciate the whole "photorealism isn't a copy of reality: it's a copy of photography" line of argument that got a lot of buzz a decade ago. We even caught the bug here six years ago. But maybe sometimes more detail is more immersive in some ways, and perhaps some stories benefit from this.

I also recall an argument from a decade ago that there was a generational divide on whether high frame rates seemed "fake" to different people. Some folks thought it seemed "more real" while others thought it seemed less like a film and more like a cheap security camera.
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 5:51 AM on December 25, 2023 [4 favorites]

I don’t recall where I saw it now, but someone else dislikes this True Lies remaster as well and they did side-by-side frame comparisons. When I saw those, I agreed, the Blueray is worse.

But looking at these shots without comparison, it’s pretty hard for me to see the fuss (maybe the folders in that first shot).

I’m curious how much money studios make from physical media any more. I honestly don’t know if it will still be here in 10 years or so. And I’m sure this technology makes a now secondary bit of work cheaper.


(Also, off topic footnote, reading the articles about the criticism of the racism of True Lies, I discovered Casey Kasem was an Arab American. I never knew that.)
posted by teece303 at 7:47 AM on December 25, 2023

comparatively very grainy

Yes. _Aliens_ is grainy. The movie itself was primarily on film stock that created a grainy image. That's _Aliens_, grainy. Grainy is not a fault introduced in vhs or dvd or bluray. Grainy is how that movie is. It's fine to dislike that; that just means you dislike the way the movie _Aliens_ looks, which is fine.

I’m curious how much money studios make from physical media any more. I honestly don’t know if it will still be here in 10 years or so.

I doubt it'll be any worse off than physical music albums; there's a large enough core that wants a physical thing, and at least with 4k bluray as opposed to vinyl lp's the quality is indisputably better than the streamed alternative. But it's definitely shifting to a niche product primarily sold online to enthusiasts, priced and marketed accordingly.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 8:46 AM on December 25, 2023 [3 favorites]

[Dusting off some old DVD/video compression knowledge...]

Film grain (along with pretty much any visual noise like dirt or scratches) represents a specific challenge for video compression algorithms which, among other things, are trying to reduce the amount of information (data rate) required to faithfully represent each source frame. One strategy for controlling data rate amounts determining what parts of one frame can be reused by the next frame with little or no change. A very simplistic example would be a section of blue sky that in theory should be reusable from frame to frame so long as the hue and saturation of the section doesn't change (or changes so little as to be deemed imperceptibly different to the human eye---which is a whole other story). The presence of film grain, however, makes such optimizations difficult since grain does to some degree vary from frame to frame. So compression algorithms have to be carefully balanced between finding ways to re-use information between frames (i.e. reducing data rate) and preserving the integrity of original image quality.

At some point a compression strategy was proposed that began by analyzing the grain structure of the source material and then removing it entirely. This would, using the example above, make it easier for the algorithm to re-use sections of blue sky from frame to frame since there would be no grain noise to consider. The result would a very spatially optimized encoding of the film. But film images 'cleaned up' in this manner would look entirely unnatural (i.e. like it was entirely rendered) and certainly NOT like the original when played back. To fix this deficiency, metadata could be included that instructed the player to 'inject' noise back into the frames as they were decoded to closely simulate the grain structure of the original film. Kind of neat, actually.

To me it sounds like they've adopted the first part of this strategy (film grain is being removed prior to compression) but not the second part (inclusion of metadata that could be used to restore grain for playback. Someone with more current knowledge of compression algorithms, esp. those used for streaming, might be able to comment on this.
posted by Insert Clever Name Here at 9:26 AM on December 25, 2023 [6 favorites]

I remember playing Mass Effect, a video game that came out probably 12 or so years ago. It's a Star Trek kind of game with more shooting, but there's lots of conversations, a bunch of humanoid looking alien species and other humans to interact with, etc.

The game has an optional Film Grain effect you could have displayed on the entire thing, and I absolutely loved it. Felt like I was watching/playing an old SF movie. Most people hated it as it made it look slightly more blurry, less "OMG graphics!" video game looks. I think that was the first time I saw this reverse option in a game.

I agree about this technology. I watched part of the WW1 Jackson film and while fascinating in its own way, I found the visual clean-up effects really, really distracting. Like there was weird blurring going on in different parts of the image, and my eye would keep looking those (very often) not focal parts of the image.

Give me film grain and blur.
posted by SoberHighland at 11:14 AM on December 25, 2023 [3 favorites]

All the talk of re-adding film grain reminds me of the point when I found the "add tape hiss" button on a DAW, years back. It baffled me until I watched some tutorials, and realised it was there to add a bit of cheap "room tone" to an otherwise antiseptic track composed from artificial instruments. I could hear the way the white noise was smoothing over things and tying it all together.

Most of the time, that kind of talk just sounds like mysticism to me. Like "oh no, this sound is very green, and we need more purple" kind of abstract nonsense. But for a brief while it really clicked with me how noise can affect contrast in sound the way it does with visuals.
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 7:05 PM on December 25, 2023 [2 favorites]

Insert Clever Name Here has it.

Let me add that I worked on a low-budget MeFi favorite for a Major Streaming Service that decreed that every frame of the final edit had to be run through ReNeat, a program that examines image sequences and changes each image in an effort to mask over noise inherent in the original camera master due to insufficient lighting and camera department budgets.

This is why every Netflix original has a similar plastic-wrapped look to it; like skeletons coming back to life and pulling your hair, Netflix can bring the low-light imagery up but not out.

I hope I didn’t give inadvertently away the show I worked on. I don’t want them all looking for the guy who did this.
posted by infinitewindow at 8:09 PM on December 25, 2023 [7 favorites]

If you have never seen the movie True Lies, you are probably under 30.
Didn't see it- I've only seen short clips of it, but I did watch the motorcycle/horse chase scene being filmed in the park across the street from my office.

As far as grainy, I grew up watching B&W TV complete with ghosting and snow, so 4K seems unnatural to me.
posted by MtDewd at 4:55 AM on December 27, 2023

From the article:

The same is true to a lesser extent for The Beatles: Get Back. Nobody would begrudge Jackson for color grading and restoring rough footage

Um, probably you would, Chris Person, in certain times and places along the history of filmmaking technology.

I'm no evangelist for the cutting edge—plenty of my favorite stuff is rooted in analog and the old-fashioned and arcane. But AI marches onward, and it's going to take filmmaking by storm, full stop. People will yell about it for a while, then it'll become the norm, and then what's the norm now will stick out as looking dated and strange.

The instances cited in the article may indeed be horrible, but they're test runs. In ten years this will be a non-issue.
posted by Rykey at 9:16 AM on December 27, 2023