Why Some Films Can Never Be Remastered - Video Tech Explained
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- Опубліковано 31 тра 2024
- Some old films and shows are able to be "remastered" to increase their resolution for modern screens. But there are also a wide range of films which can likely never be remastered beyond their original resolution. In this video, we discuss how film remastering works and why it sometimes isn't possible.
Learn more about the resolution standards used in film: • What Resolution Are Mo...
== Navigation ==
00:00 Introduction
01:22 The Resolution of Film
04:31 The Problem with TV
06:06 How Remastering Works
08:18 The Prequels & Digital Filmmaking
12:23 The Sequels & the Modern Era
13:17 Closing
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Well the reason the prequels can’t be remastered is because anakin was never granted the rank of master in the first place, but as the last remaining member of the council, Vader was able to elect himself as a master, meaning the original trilogy could be remastered.
W
That's a good point
Genius!!!
I'm so mad at you for this joke and that is why I upvoted it.
😮
The sharp film look of Phantom is fantastic. The weird creamy, smoothness of Clones and Revenge stick out way too much
Yeah they look bad. Regardless of the limitations they still managed to do a terrible job with the transfers.
I like digital art, oil paintings, etc, so Clones & Revenge looks stylish to me, whereas Phantom looks boring (too similar to OT, which I don’t care about either). Different strokes for different folks. 🤷🏻♀️
@@LilacSreya that's what she said
I don't share the opinion that their resolution can never be enhanced. This obviously can't be a "remaster", but I am very optimistic image procession / restoration can "sharpen" smoothed edges and even may be able to restore détails / textures lost because of the resolution of the recording camera.
@@LilacSreya That may be, but it will be much easier to build a TV screen that takes sharp pictures and smoothes it down, or even adds granularity in the resolution of your choice than to have one that can take a lower-resolution picture and "sharpen" it up.
As written, I am optimistic there will be restoration processes available eventually so a master file with higher resolution can be created and then burnt onto (I hope) physical media. But oil painting / smoothing effects can be added by your TV set or projector.
The SFX for Empire and Return were shot on better than 35mm resolution. They resurrected the old VistaVision format, which ran the film horizontally (IMAX style), using 8 perforations per frame without anamorphic lenses, making the postprocessing simpler and gaining additional resolution. They ran out of old VistaVision cameras and ended up building more (which they called "Empire cameras"). It's a great format.
That's one (expensive) way around generation loss during compositing. I'm font of the film look but I don't miss working with chemical film. Absolute nightmare.
They were also used on some Nolan films notably The Dark Knight truck flipping scene. Hitchcock filmed a lot of his films in VistaVision which is why they look nice after being remastered.
Also blade runner used a similar trick with 70mm film
A similar dynamic happened with the "Special Editions": the CGI added in 1997 made the movie look far more dated in ten years than any of the original effects ever did in twenty.
I don't know about that. I remember the weird cartoonish black line that surrounded the outline of the rancor. Or the "box" cutouts of the tie fighters. There were just some things that the special edition made better.
I've heard the best resolutions you can get of the pre-special editions are on laserdisc rip
@@AlextheHistorian Sure but nothing compares to the monstrosity that is Jaba rendered with 1997 CGI. 🥴
And then they entirely redid him for the 2004 special special edition. 💩
I actually wouldn't mind seeing a new attempt with a more faithful recreation of the original Jaba puppet.
Those old film artifacts like the matte lines you mention can be accepted as part of the texture of classic old movies. Although I am happy to have a version with them fixed.
@@mezzb Ok I can I see what you mean about that other stuff but c'mon...that "yub nub" song was THE WORST! I mean you go through the series hoping for this big ending...you know...the empire is defeated, balance has returned to the force, and the age of suffering is over...and what do you celebrate with? Yub nub. No thanks. I like the new ending to Jedi.
There are reasons to shoot in 8k other than the potential for future media, like being able to zoom into the footage in editing.
But i really love this video, the flow and clarity of ideas is incredible
Or when you downsample to 4k. "...image noise is greatly reduced. You get much more finer deals when you downsample a 8K clip to a 4K clip. There are more pixels when it comes to 8K, so more details are captured and retained when downsampled."
@@SM0R3S The reason for this is due to the way digital camera sensors work. Each camera sensor pixel actually only captures a single color, and the other colors where interpolated from the closest pixels that captured the other colors. Shooting in a higher resolution and then down sampling is a way to have actual full resolution detail.
Fun fact: the visual effects in the original trilogy (and lots of films after that) were shot in VistaVision, a system that runs 35mm horizontally through the camera and exposes an area of the film roughly twice that of normal 35mm. The advantage being a reduced generation loss when the different film elements were composited together
That's not fun at all - it is however entirely erotic.
@@xBINARYGODx Hitchcock did film a lot of pretty blondes in Vistavision
I remember making the jump from DVD to Blu-Ray and all of the old folks saying that they didn’t see the difference😂
I think they said that because they were around when movies and series went from VHS to DVD, which was a HUGE jump in quality. From DVD to Blu-ray, the quality improved, but that monumental difference from VHS to DVD was not there.
What also makes film look sharper over digital is the fact the grain is not in a square matrix like digital pixels, which makes it a lot nicer when viewing diagonal lines/shapes.
Exactly! From frame to frame the film grain is in different locations, giving greater detail.
yes, there is an actual physical depth to every frame of chemical emulsion film within which each grain is suspended
You can't see aliasing from 4K HDR at any remotely normal viewing distance. This is just superstition, a high fidelity digital film grain overlay would look indistinguishable.
You also need a lot more light to shoot on film than you do for digital so you naturally get more contrast and the chemical color grading process doesn't give you level of control over color as precise so when you want to make one element in a movie pop more you end up pushing the whole film towards that tone on the color wheel. You couldn't avoid getting depth of field or motion blur like you can with digital cameras also.
I'll always be blown away by (and grateful for) what CBS Digital did with Star Trek: The Next Generation on blu-ray. The whole series was shot on 35mm film, but was transferred to standard-def (SD) videotape for all editing and effects, since back in the 80s-90s, it was only going to SD television broadcast. When the project came up to release ST:TNG in HD, the post-production crew did some upscaling tests, but deemed that the results looked unsuitable. So they unbelievably got CBS to put the money up to *rescan* all the raw film negative in HD, including the raw bluescreen shots, and *recut each and every shot* according to the scripts and extensive production notes, and they redesigned and recomposited all the effects! There'll *never* be a restoration/uprez project with this kind of money and effort put to it ever again! Needless to say, I bought all 7 seasons. The results are stunning.
Star Trek: The Next Generation: The Complete Series a.co/d/erlSYfg
I heard good things about that. However, supposedly one seasons remastering was outsourced and isn't on the level of the rest of them. S2 if I remember correctly.
Interesting, not many companies back then (even less now) willing to take that risk
if you watch Star Trek: Voyager that show was on VHS tape and the originals were not saved from what I read. what do you do with that now
@@franesustic988 Yeah, I read about that, but personally, I didn't notice any really bad quality with S2.
@@waterup380 Voyager is in exactly the same situation that TNG was. Every episode and many special effects were shot on 35mm film, but edited on SD 480P videotape. Perfect, ultraHD copies of every episode exist in their archives (because 35mm film has as much resolution as 4k), but the only way to access them is through the same process the OP describes for TNG. It's expensive, because you literally have to go through every take of every shot and re-edit the show into what it was, not just rescan the edited master negative all at once, like you can with movies. The original master negative of Voyager (as with TNG) is a lo-res videotape that massively degrades the quality of the filmed scenes. Plus, with Voyager, they were starting to use digital effects along with the models shot on film, and 90s digital effects are too low-res and crappy to use (plus the actual project files are probably not in a format that would work anyway), so there would be more CGI work required to recreate the effects, especially for the later seasons. But Voyager is much less popular than TNG, so it's not cost effective. (Same problem with DS9).
TLDR: It's totally possible to do exactly the same thing with Voyager and get exactly the same breathtaking quality they got with TNG, but they probably won't because it's too expensive.
Delving more into the complexities, aside from it’s Sub-2K resolution, the F900 used only chroma 3:1:1 subsampling, meaning the colour resolution was lower than the image resolution. And because of that, the digital compositing was not up to snuff, that’s why the edges around the actors are blurred in the second movie.
The third film didn’t have that problem, as the F950 represented a significant upgrade. It had the full chroma range of 4:4:4, giving a sharper image (as sharp as 1080p can get), a full colour range and flawless compositing.
The lesson to be learned here, the cost of being a pioneer. The sooner you are out the gate, the sooner you are to date. Compare the blue screen work in _The Ten Commandments_ (1956) to the blue screen in _Star Wars_ (1977). I can only wonder how George would have done had he had something like the Red One (released 2007) in his arsenal from the start.
George was always a tech pioneer. Episodes II and III were as much about advancing technology and making digital a legitimate film format in the future as they were about completing his saga.
Lucasfilm was always on the cutting edge when he was head of it. As you said, the price he had to pay to push the industry forward.
It's so noticeable in hindsight! Hard to watch for me :/
This info is some good eating. Make sense when watching on capable displays.
@@originaldarkwater Indeed, heck....we wouldn't have the dominant form of animated movies (or how pretty much all forms of animation in some way) without his creation and ownership of what eventually became Pixar and their 3D animation pioneering.
The modern industry owes almost everything to Lucasfilm and Lucas making the decision to create it.
And I agree Light and Magic is a fantastic series (honestly wish it was longer!!!), one of the best on that service.
On Episode 2 didn’t they also crop the top and bottom of the frame to give it the aspect ratio consistent with the other movies? I remember reading that that sliced quite a bit off.
The question of how much resolution film has is also further complicated by the quality of the lenses used, because that can affect the captured "resolution" greatly. Especially when we're talking older and/or lower budget movies.
In that regard, lowish budget 90's movies often looked better than mid-budget 70's movies.
@@ryanjacobson2508 True, I originally also wanted to mention that lens quality has made great progress in the past few decades, and this could indeed often be the result of that.
@@ryanjacobson2508 Absolutely. I've noticed that even mid-budget films look "older" all the way up until the late '80s, and by around 1993, even a low budget movie looks visually cleaner than most blockbusters from 1986
Dude… your dry delivery on the cotton eye Joe line had me DYING. Professional comic here and I’m saying, mad props.
lmao I came to the comments here to say just that
High praise from a mad prop comic! You can't beat that!
For me it was double funny, because I have the line in my head for a few days now.
I am replaying Skyrim again and a follower keeps shouting "Where do you come from" during battles .. and I always follow up with "where do you go" ..
Was just about to comment this, dying of laughter
Thats such a random joke and it hit so good :D
Amazing explanations to complex formats put very plainly. The early 2000s have some other unfortunate casualties of the birth of digital cinema. Collateral from 2004 is a prime example where you can see the difference very plainly in 4K. Some shots use classic 35mm film whereas other shots use the Sony CineAlta and the Thomson VIPER and those scenes really stand out like a sore thumb.
And that's the reason I haven't upgraded that movie to 4K,
Slumdog Millionaire is another exemple. I remember seeing it in the cinema and witnessing really ugly digital noise visible in the dark scenes.
I think the worst casualties that I have seen have been anime from roughly 00-05. The attempts I have seen to reissue and/or remaster anime from this period, especially tv shows, range from crap to garbage, for the most part. There is always something wrong with them. Either some technical snafu or they just look like utter garbage.
Talking about both official releases as well as unofficial stuff.
I think AoTC and Revenge could benefit from re-renderings, especially in the Geonosis arena and the Mustafar scenes, I think most of those movies still look fine. At least, it doesn't seem like it's at as much of a deficit against present-day 4K in comparison to the older SD -> HD shift.
I wonder if Disney has all the raw video from filming. With the blue screens and all.
@That dog (not the puppy) Lucasfilm definitely still has it. I don't think it would be impossible to remaster them through those recordings, but it would be very time-consuming. And given how poorly MCU CGI holds up (pretty much on release), I don't think Disney has the patience for a re-rendering of prequel CGI.
The arena is a practical model and so is Mustafar, except for the compositing of greenscreen elements. But if your talking about the cg battle droids, creatures, ships, etc. I agree, so long as they don't make the scenes look drastically different
@@christianfieldhouse2728 MCU CGI suffers from the extremely tight crunch times. I don't trust Disney with any remastering if they don't even care about their current stuff.
The software used to render those movies is long dead, it will never happen.
As a video technician myself, this channel is amazing and deserves way more subs! Very clear, concise and entertaining explanation, was worth watching despite already knowing most of the things.
Q: "What's the point in 8k?"
A: Nyquist theorum. Over sample at twice the resolution of playback.
Once 4k playback becomes the norm, capture will need to be at 8k. 🎥
Great video, I've linked over to it.
Actually, what you're describing as the film master is an internegative, from which the theatrical release prints are made. So that movie you saw in the theater (pre-digital cinema) was actually a *4th* generation film. Because you have the original camera negative, right? Then that has to be printed to an interpositive, then that has to be printed to an internegative, so that when you make multiple copies, they can all look right (i.e., positive prints). And of course, let's face it, VHS was horrible. So was Beta and even laserdisc compared to what we can get today. If done right, and if all the elements are there and in good shape, think about it, we can actually get a direct scan of the original camera negative, digitally cleaned up (although it should theoretically be already pretty clean since it's the least touched of the films) and digitally "flipped" to make a positive, then the digital bits go directly to your blu-ray or 4K disc or streaming (video compression schemes notwithstanding). So you're getting pretty much what the DP and director saw in the dailies.
That’s how nondigital films are made today ❤
At which point in that chain are special effects like rotoscoping added
I think AI will be the future of upgrading any digital film to 8k and beyond.
For the sake of talking about “remasters”, calling it a master is fine. The name comes from music production anyway, where remastering involves using the original master tracks to re-balance or rework the song. The technical term might be internegative here, but it’s the same idea
Also it's worth noting that not all lenses used back in the film days resolve 4K+ resolutions. Hence, while you can technically scan a film using a 4/8K scanner, the result might appear softer than a modern lens would appear.
My man this really is quality content, this channel deserves way more views.
Been a fan of Hank Green for years. Great to know he's now teaching tech as well as science
"probably only watched the pristine copy in theaters a couple of times"
I think you may underestimate just how earth shattering the original Star Wars was when it first came out. It influenced my dad an incredible amount when it came out while he was in high school. He told me he saw it in theaters while it was out AT LEAST 50 times. Probably more, maybe 100. I think I remember him telling me that it was in theaters for a long time because of how well it did, and he saw it nearly every day, sometimes several times a day.
Except those aren't pristine. Big generational loss on negative to print alone, then those prints were burned to death on all those screenings.
I have a friend that saw the original Star Wars 13 times in theaters back in the day! Who does that nowadays? If I really like a movie I might see it twice in theaters, but 13 times, or even 50 times! Star Wars has had such a crazy impact on the world.
@@chickenmotherhalo The original Star Wars was something akin to revolutionary indeed. I went and watched Empire three times at the movies when it was released and also TRON four times.
However I like to think that the "lesser availability" was also a factor. When the original Star Wars was released, VHS wasn't really there yet and you couldn't just say "I'll buy the bd for the big ass 4k screen in my man cave next year." At least that was one factor for me to go watch TRON four times.
@@ytucharliesierra gotcha yeah that makes sense
@@chickenmotherhalo my salary only allows me to watch a movie in the movie theater once a year.
I would emphasize the color reproduction in the digital scanning and remastering process. The old movies that were transferred to the broadcast format in the 80s not only lost the resolution, but lost a ton of color detail. So much so that a lot of them got that brownish tint and pretty much none of them actually reproduced white color correctly. They were basically projected to the wall and recaptured through broadcast camera and captured to analog tape.
I am REALLY digging your videos. Learning a BUNCH!!! And it's not just you talking. You provide excellent video/effects to go along with what you're saying.
I also like that your stuff is scripted. Videos where the speaker talks off the cuff add to the view time and the flow of learning.
AND the fact that your young-ish (from my old-ish perspective) is a testament to your passion and craft. Keep up the great work. 10K subs will hopefully come sooner than later.
(If I could make one suggestion: work on not moving your hands on every word. Don't stop entirely, that makes for good communication. Hand gestures are useful and keeps us engaged. But emphasizing every word can be distracting.)
UA-cam recommending this to me after watching the "remastered trailer" for TPM is crazy
This is actually the same issue tv shows have from the 2000s where they were either filmed digitally or in the case of animated shows drawn digitally resulting in a lower image quality when brought to bluray or 4k bluray
Most 2000s shows were actually shot on panavision super 35 ('24,' 'Prison Break,' 'Lost,' 'Alias,' 'Smallville,' 'Relic Hunter,' 'Bionic Woman,' 'Heroes') which is why they they have that glossy, big-budget Hollywood movie look to them compared to your average streaming original show today)
Also most of us saw the 70mm blow up from 35mm which also degraded. I saw Empire 18 times in 70mm the summer of ‘80 mostly at the same theater and watched that print degrade over the 3 months. Lately I’ve been watching old Laurel and Hardy and Little Rascals all restored onto blu ray and those really have been a revelation as I had only seen horrible 16mm school prints or on TV and the same goes with the Universal Monsters films. Good video.
There are fan projects that tackle the topic of remastering the Original Trilogy, one set of which is a 4K scan of release prints (4K77, 4K80, 4K83), and another that removes the controversial changes by Lucas (Despecialized Editions).
They're using 35mm release prints, which are significantly reduced in resolution.
@@zippymufo9765 The fan project claimed to "offer better detail" than the offical [Disney] 4K versions, and they exemplified that in only one scene. They could've overscanned the release prints and applied sharpening to them, then downscaling them to 4K.
@@YuutaShinjou113 90 percent of the footage is identical between the official SE versions and the originals, so I don't know why fan editors don't just use the official releases as their "base", remove the SE changes, and then insert the footage from the original edits.
@ZippyMufo you don't know what you're talking about. There's literally changes in every aspect of the scenes. There are far more changes than you realize. There's power windows and lighting changes all over the place. It's also not authentic if you it the way you propose. That's what they used to do when they didn't have better sources. Now they do.
@@zippymufo9765 by the way, the fan project I was referring to in my previous reply was the 4K77, 4K80, and 4K83, in case you didn't know. I wasn't talking about Harmy's fan edits.
This is a very good explanation, with just the right balance of simplifications and technicalities. You deserve many more subscribers, and today you definitely gained one more. Keep it up!
This was an impressively informative video about the technical aspects of filming the Star Wars movies; along with explaining about the technical limitations of viewing videos in past decades.
I just want to point out that, in much of the world that isn't the U.S., standard definition was 576p, not 480p. I think this is why those regions were slower to embrace high-def formats, because their standard def didn't look nearly as bad.
as an european, 576i (remember, p stands for progressive and tv broadacsts, crts, vhs and dvds are interlaced) and 480i dont make that much of a difference especially on a digital screen. We just took longer because we usually take longer to adopt new tech and standards, i mean, where I'm from (spain) blu-ray never took off at all, we get no releases of anything unless 5 other countries already got it, and i know no one who own any blu-ray movies/shows irl even tho many people have consoles capable of playing them. We also took a while to get rid of analogue TV and to switch to LCDs, whie people in the us had HDTV lcds years prior and japan literally had (close to) 1080i HDTVs in the 80s and got 1080p way earlier, they used 480i for standard def too (they use NTSC as well), so yeah, it's just the market adoption trends of the region really
@@DEMENTO01Thanks so much for sharing, I really enjoyed reading your comment.
Do you believe the general technology "slower adoption" you're referring to is more a result of European culture not feeling the need to 'upgrade' all the time like American Consumers are pressured/marketed to, or do you think there's more factors at play?
@@OGReStart It's a smaller market. The film studios are going to release films where they make the most money first, then ancillary markets. Foreign releases also need more time for overdubbing and subtitling. China is a good example. Now that China has hundreds of 3D digital screens, films are released in China when they premiere in the rest of the world. Studios will even go so far as to make changes to the film so that they can be approved by the Chinese censors.
As a Brit, I agree with both of you on different points...
Firstly, yes, European tv quality is far better than American and I think that we were consequently less impressed by "advancements" in quality than americans. TV broadcast of american films would often be the superior "International Cut" versions (ie, Terminator 2 in the UK is basically the Directors Cut version with multiple extra scenes that were not in theatrical cuts).
Secondly, no, that is not the reason we were "slow" to adopt new formats. As said, that was because all the marketing pressure was on the American domestic market first and the rest of the world second.
Thirdly, my own opinion is that until fairly recently this stuff was both overpriced and overhyped. I can remember seeing demonstration models in shops showing the "advantage" of HDTV and laughing because the quality difference was negligible. Only the visual equivalent of Audiophiles were getting excited about it. Only when it became "the new normal" does the old stuff start to stand out.
Fourthly, and this might be a British only thing, but most people do not have space for a huge tv that takes up a whole wall. Our houses are smaller. My livingroom tv is 30in and we have an LCD projector in the bedroom that has a pixel size in the millimeter range. I don't think I know anyone with anything larger than a 50inch tv. And that is the kind of size that you need to have before flaws in the source start to outweigh the limitations of your own eyes across the width of a room.
I don't think 625 line television really helps the home release of theatrical film when all the extra resolution in height is wasted with letterboxing anyway, unless you think people liked buying Pan & Scan versions of films by the time larger TVs became cheaper, large enough that the Widescreen version of a film didn't feel impossible to see like on a physically small screen. Both 525 and 625 line standards require anamorphic compression to transmit widescreen before you step up to an actually wider picture with EDTV which requires Component (Y Pb Pr) Video in consumer electronics. Even then, consider that a DVD is still encoded to be anamorphic - the digital MPEG2 stream on the disc is still, at most, 720 pixels wide, regardless of if the stream is 480i/p or 576i/p.
Interesting that they would scan the sequels in 4K only. Even modest cinema cameras from 10 years ago did 5K and it's good practice to have a little bit of extra for better green screen masking, re-framing, getting the boom mic out of the shot or getting the sensor noise out.
The film scanning resolution in this case doesn’t have anything to do with the cameras used. And because it’s film, not digital, there isn’t any sensor noise to begin with to be helped by a high res scan. While it’s theoretically possible to scan 35mm to a 5K+ digital image, I would imagine it becomes a point of diminishing returns depending on how much of the film negative artefacts one wants to reveal while also dealing with more and more digital data and the need for more computing power and time in a VFX heavy movie.
I’m sure reframing is used but I also think the cinematographers on these films wouldn’t be too happy to think of their compositions and frames being decided by somebody in post.
(I could be wrong 🤷♂️)
To be fair, 4K televisions are not actually 4000 pixels wide, they're 3840 (the standard is called UHD). There is some extra space for cropping or whatever else needs to be done.
First video I’ve seen of yours. AWESOME work!!! Very informative and entertaining
Great content! Thanks for explaining all of this so well :)
Good job simplifying a complex subject. As an FX nerd, I know there's more to be said about the OT's use of large-format film for element photography, and the many other strategies the artists developed for minimizing grain and color shift in re-photographed composite shots, but you've articulated the fundamentals very well.
It should be noted that in some instances, initially for the 1997 Special Editions, ILM was able to re-scan and re-composit the original elements of shots, creating new presentations of those shots with zero image degradation that looked objectively cleaner and sharper even on VHS and Laserdisc.
This was an excellent summary but it focused almost exclusively on resolution. Certainly that was the big selling point of HD over SD. I would argue that the real benefit of UHD over HD is color depth and dynamic range, not increased resolution. On most screens and typical viewing distances, 4K over 2K resolution is scarcely noticeable but the increased color gamut is really obvious and shadow detail and highlights from HDR, if supported, are far beyond what HD is capable of showing. Film captures this detail inherently and it's this that makes film based remasters so spectacular.
Digital cameras are only just starting to catch up to the contrast ratios of film even now. 16 stops was the min on film, only the best cameras now can manage 16 most are far less, especially important given the inverse square law at play too. So yes you are totally right it's less about the resolution, although important, but more about contrast ratio and colour gamut.
Fantastic video and the HDR was greatly appreciated! You did a great job explaining this concept, and I'll be showing this video to some of my peers so they can finally understand what I've been talking about with remasters.
terrible*
Another great video! Really well done. So much great information in there. LOVE IT!
Great video!!!! Well done. I worked in digital effects at Turner Studios and went to school at a program where we had those original 'Star Wars" HD cameras and it was a big deal at the time. It was during the transition from film to digital and it was a serious technical upheaval.
8:40 The original trilogy actually used a larger than 35mm format called VistaVision as the medium for the effects shots to compensate for generation loss inherent to the compositing process. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VistaVision
Dykstra actually considered 65mm neg. Like what Doug Trumbull used on Close Encounters and Star Trek The Motion Picture. But settled on Vistavision. I guess its less unwieldy than 65mm, easier to work with. Cheaper and the equipment was cheaper and easier to convert to that system. Just a guess.
It's insane the amount of things I learn just by watching your videos! Keep up with the great work!
Great video. You did a fantastic job explaining it!
Besides, to the "shooting at 8K" point, 8K (or even 12K) cameras are great allies in post-production, as they allow for cropping/reframing/zooming shots with no detail lost. Meaning an 8K master might allow you to have less takes and an overall faster (and consequently cheaper) production process, given that video editing workstations can work with such huge viewports nowadays.
I think as AI upscaling gets better and better over time there will be fewer and fewer of these issues with older digital and video content. Which is a good thing, especially for TV shows that were shot on video tape.
AI upscale can be done well, but I've seen a poorly upscaled official 4K music video, which is unfortunate.
@@Greybell It takes time and effort. A lot of these places just run their content thru an upscaler and call it day, which is why the results often aren't that great.
@@CaptainFabulous84 makes me wonder why they don't hire those random remaster/upscale channels when they do it better than the official channels.
@@Greybell They don't want to pay. It's that simple.
I’m not exactly known for following along well on complex subjects, but this is just so well done. Ty for the knowledge!
Excellent analysis. It has been so tough for me to try and explain this exact topic to the non-videophiles in my life and this short video is now what I can recommend for them. Thanks!
It hurts me to think there are kids today - even adults - who have not had the experience of watching bootleg copies of Star Wars on VHS. Where one movie is pan and scan (where some of the video is cut off), one is widescreen (we had small CRT TVs and everything was small), and one was recorded off broadcast TV (with commercials and static).
What's the benefit of that?
Also, 28 Hours Later is a more extreme example, it was shot in standard definition (with a single scene shot in 35mm, and another scene in 8mm). They used a prosumer Canon XL-1 camera for the rest and it was capable of shooting in 720x480 pixels with a 4:3 aspect ratio in the "super fine" mode.
28 hours later?
@@Milos596 British zombie movie. 28 hoirs after the infection began. Was a surprise hit. They faked scenes of iconic London locations being empty just by filming early in the morning, asking stragglers to stop walking in shot for a moment, then quickly dressing the set and capturing the shot. Probably bumped up the exposure to make it look later in the day than it actually was.
@@keaton718 I think you mean “28 Days Later”… the one starring Cillian Murphy and directed by Danny Boyle, right? 😂
@@happyspaceinvader508 oh yeah, days not years
There's one thing that holds 8K consumer movies back: The human eyeball 1.0 only has ED (eye definition).
Filming in 8K, 16K, 64K if you like means you can enlarge even tiny parts of the overall recorded picture/film (you get into problems when dust particles get so big they physically block whole areas of pixels; then, you have 4,096K-pictures of air pollution). For consumer or cinema grade applications, however, you could almost project every pixel of a 4K picture to a corresponding light receptor in the eyeball.
Apart from film editing and zooming, bigger resolutions than 4K can be meaningful if you have, eg, a panoramic wall where a customer flow can pass quite close to the projection. This, however, is nothing for consumer-grade TV screens or even projetion screens (the projection then has to go through ambient dust), which are - comparatively - no larger than a postage stamp on the scales we're talking about now.
GREAT video! Thanks for your time and research!
I'm sure sometime in the future we will have advanced up-scaling techniques that will essentially be able to create the data that is lost in lower resolution images. The quality will depend on how good the system is at guessing what the missing lines will be, likely based on which lines are "revealed" as objects move around.
I started in film. Honestly 2k is fine. people have been watching 2k on huge screens in cinema and it's good enough. However I can also say that Topaz AI does a very good job upscaling from HD to UHD. Also I would be more concerned with compression and bitrate in the modern streaming world than 2k vs 4k
That's good news. I spent enough money on building and rebuilding my video collection, and I'm absolutely stopping at regular HD blu-ray. So I won't feel bad at all if I decide to save a few bucks by getting an HD-native projector, especially since the largest screen I can fit in my living room space is 100" diagonal.
Good point. The color banding, crushed blacks, smeared motion and so on that we often get with streaming are more often the biggest hindrance to quality.
Exactly. I concur on all accounts.
The cinema experience is viewing from a distance no less than 2x the distance from one side to the other of the projected image (which generally sucks for being too low) if you're in the good seats of about the middle you're a distance 5 times the width of the image.
At that distance you cannot resolve more than about 2500 distinct vertical lines with really good vision, in the low light of a cinema you probably can only resolve the detail of 1920x1080, very unlikely close to 4k.
@@Treblaine - Is this why I never notice "film grain" in the cinemas, but notice it a lot on some decent blu-ray releases?
Great video, really informative. Subscribed! Looking forward to seeing other videos
Incredible Quality, loved hearing about the process!
The original trilogy even used Vistavision for vfx shots. This is a 35 mm film set in horizontal to get widescreen view without anamorpic lenses. Also the extra resolution helps to get finer grain in the case you need to compose multiple shots and have more headroom to make mattes, etc.
Which is why it was relatively simple to remaster Star Trek TOS and TNG. They could go back and rescan the original film elements and then recreate the VFX using those orignal elements. DS9 and Voyager will probably never see HD remasters because the editing and VFX was only in SD. All the spaceship models were CGI by the end of both series. Even if the data files still exist, they would be unusable by today's standards. Since the percieved audience for the later shows is smaller, no studio would pay to effectively reproduce everything from scratch.
The editing for TNG was also done on video. It was a massive project to remaster it all. The blu ray sales weren't high enough for them to continue on to DS9.
God I want a DS9 remaster so badly.
From what I understand, they have more than half of the original models, thanks to VFX artists not throwing out their hard drives. Should they ever decide to do a remaster.. the fan 4K remaster sequences show there's real potential there. I'm sure we'll see one someday. Also the CGI/practical ships were a *huge* mix, nearly 50/50, in late DS9. One of the reasons I think they hold up so well, they mostly tried to use real models for the close ups on ships where it was available; I believe the Dominion heavy cruisers were the first all CGI ships.
@@MrGittz There is an AI upscaling, which is much better than the DVDs; not perfect, but a good stop-gap.
Why would these digital files be unusable? Isn’t there a possibility to convert these files to newer formats?
Loved your video man, u speak so well, keep it up!!
Excellent video. Clear, concise, and informative. Good sense of humor, too.
This is what I’m always talking about, I always feel before the digital theater/projector era, the analog cinema have a significantly bigger resolution, and now you just confirmed my suspicion all this time
Most people's eyes can't see past 4k resolution anything above 6k will start to look the same for alot of people. I myself don't even notice much diffrence between 1080P and 4k.
Obviously it depends on the screen size and how close you are watching. For example with VR glasses the difference between 1080p and 4k is night and day,
@@petrilampela I was excited when I got my 70 inch 4k tv, I watch at 8 ft from the tv and was looking forward to see how some of the UHD Blu rays I got looked, I wasted 35 dollars, I cannot see the difference in detail and sharpness between the normal blu rays and UHD ones, the only difference is in the coloring and is just different, not better, and I bought Jaws and Top Gun Maverick, 2 very well reviewed 4k releases of the films.
Im not a image quality enthusiast, but I do enjoy almost every single on of my Blu rays more than their DVD versions, with UHD the difference is just not enough.
@@fanmovie357 My screen is 65 inches and my watching distance is about 6.5 feet and I can see the difference between 1080p and 4k easily. But I agree that Blu-ray is totally enough with this setup, most of my favourite movies aren't even out on UHD and probably never will be.
@@petrilampela From what ive seen 4k crosses that threshold where a big amount of people just dont have the eyesight to notice the quality.
One funny thing though, 4k in gaming is quite noticeable it is similar to the jump from 720p to 1080p for me, but 1440p looks about 90% of the 4k quality to me despite being over half the pixels.
@@fanmovie357 Yeah. I guess it also depends on how the original movie was filmed. Most movies are filmed on 35mm or 16mm but for example Kubrick's 2001 was filmed on 70mm and I suspect it profits from the increased resolution more. If I remember correctly the 70mm film equals 6k or even 8k.
Love learning new things about art/entertainment and this video was super informative. Thank you!
great video and very good job explaining the topic in a way that was easy to understand
Fantastic video. I do wish you had covered Phantom Menace being the first movie to have a full digital intermediate, on account of all the take-combining George did. So the theoretical scanning that could be done would have to be a Star Trek level project, as someone else commented about.
The sequel trilogy also wasn’t completely 4K. The DP of The Last Jedi is notorious for not caring about 4K, and thus it was only rendered out at 2K. Though it’s anamorphic 2K, so you’d still likely see an improvement on 4K TVs.
Ya, not even Avatar 2 was fully 4k and we know how crazy Jim Cameron is about detail.
So I had recently tried Topaz Lab's up-scaler as a demo to see if I could upscale an older project (not a plug-it's just the one I tried) and I think that machine learning would be the fix for this. It's not at a point where it could work for any situation, but AI and machine learning up-scalers will probably be the solution to getting the prequel trilogy to a point where it's workable as a true remaster.
Believe me, first run release prints were incredibly high-resolution, even if there was some grain, contrast and artifacts from duplication. Most people under 40 won't have much experience with the way first-run 35mm films were projected in the 20th century, so their notion of older films comes from the degraded broadcast, tape or DVD versions that were available in their youth. So a fallacy has developed that equates remastering with creating something that wasn't there. As this video asserts, often it was always there on the negative, just compromised by analog duplication and/or the steep compression ratios of early digital home video.
awesome video, thx a lot for the research and explanation!
There is an unofficial version of Tron Legacy remastered in 4K which looks awesome. So if there’s enough budget and know-how behind the remaster, I believe it can look very well
I would love to seen Special Edition of Tron Legacy with a much worse realistic De-Aged Jeff Bridges as CLU
Wow, nice find! Impressive result from what I've seen on Reddit.
It's just a fan made upscale, you need the original source material to do a remaster.
I watched the original trilogy of star wars on a screen that was 5 times the size of the largest movie theater screen.
It was a special project in the Netherlands by fans.
The quality was 10 times better than current 4k versions.
The versions we watched were remastered by fan's especially for this type of screen.
I'm guessing you watched the Despecialized versions. I bet they were amazing to watch on that monstrous screen.
@yiarkungfu they took the harmy despecialized version as a template but the quality of those were not good enough for those massive screens. For screens that size you need 6K and 8K at a minimum.
They spend 2 years on the edits using several sources like the 4k77 materials (they had a master I believe) and a 8K project files.
They edited the movies following what harmy did and cleaned up everything maming it extremely crisp.
It took 2 years and 8 people to make it happen.
Imagine the amount of hard-drives needed to store all those raw project files. Insane.
Unfortunately they won't release it publicly as laws in the Netherlands are extremely strict and they don't want mickey mouse breathing down their necks
Sounds like bullshit. "5x larger than the largest screen" would be around 300ft x 160ft. That's a bit larger than the entirety of a football field or soccer pitch. No projector lamp in the world would be able to throw an image to a screen that size to appropriate brightness. And, considering there's no building that could hold that screen, you would have to show it outside, which means it would have to be even brighter.
Also, the 4k77 scans were in 4k and there are zero 8k projectors on the market, so it's clear you don't know what you're talking about.
@@eskiltester3913 Couldn't they just share stuff or information with the 4K77 etc. team? So not release it themselves, but make that project benefit from it.
Still love shooting film, there's an adrenaline rush in getting that shot right, and the feeling of xmas morning when you get your negative back. Not to mention the quality and color
Great video and the effort that went into the content!
💯Your videos are fantastic! I googled a question I had about color space and loved your video so much that I've been watching your channel for ~2 hours. You have an incredible talent for explaining, what can be very dense topics, in a clear and concise way. There's absolutely zero "noise", which I greatly appreciate both as an Instructional designer and as someone with ADHD.
The "noise" are his hands. The dude moves them CONSTANTLY.
A 35mm film negative has been said to contain between 5-6K of resolution.
And 70mm is above 8k .....2001 space was 70mm and easy above 8k
this was an excellently made video, thank you brother you deserve more subs
Wow this is a genuinely incredible video. Great job!
Analog recording was often far ahead of analog reproduction. Even back in the 20s and 30s original metal masters were reproduced quite badly via shellac. The point you don't discuss in this video but which is implied, is that it that the move from 35mm to digital was really made far too early.
I think with the way AI up scaling is progressing, I wouldn't be surprised if that's how a lot of older digitally recorded media is up scaled very soon. It might not show the exact detail that was present while filming, but I would bet 99% of consumers wouldn't care about that in the slightest.
Even at 360p, the essential viewing information is already there - for as much as the video laments the limitations of low-spec digital, all that's really needed is resolution high enough to tell the story you want to tell. AI upscaling doesn't give us the truth about what was filmed, but in cinema, the truth never mattered!
"but I would bet 99% of consumers wouldn't care about that in the slightest"
Because most people watch movies on their phones.
AI upscaling is definitely going to be used for that very purpose, just give it a couple more years, give or take
@@rawman44 People have wildly inflated ideas about what AI can do. It's like "internet" in the late 90s or "blockchain/web3" of five years ago. Or Tesla FSD of every single year.
🤢🤮
I have never had this explained to me so perfectly. THANK you so much!!!!
This is why many CGI heavy films even shot in 4k or 6k are remastered in 2k and then upscaled to 4k for the UHD bluray release, so the 2k rendered CGI blends in better with the film.
In a sense this is why 1080p blurays on a 1080p screen have a more balanced look to them. I remember seeing avatar bluray displayed on a flagship plasma tv back in 2010 and is looked superb.
In saying that, I think the varied filming and mastering compromises are a part of what makes films unique. If every film was made on 70mm and scanned at 8k this format would lose it appeal soon enough. I think every film should be available in HD or higher and we enjoy it for what it has to offer with both blemishes and limitations.
The Star Wars sequels were FILMED in 35mm? This is amazing. I assumed they were digital. I also recently learned that "Breaking Bad" was also in 35mm. Mindblowing for me.
There were some digital cameras used (especially on Last Jedi) as well as some larger IMAX film cameras, but they were *primarily* shot in 35mm, yes
@@VideoTechExplained Watching/reading interviews with DP Steve Yedlin, nearly half of Last Jedi was done with Alexa, but the 2.6K (anamorphic) and 3.4K footage blends seamlessly.
Actually, the original Star Wars was shot on a cheap 35 mm format, that degraded a lot over time.
When they digitized it for the final time a few years ago, they had to search Hollywood for "pirate" copies - people in the film industry, who had made a copy from the original master or a copy of a copy.
By gathering as many 35 mm films as possible (some of the copies were in more expensive and durable 35 mm formats), they used modern technique of superimposing many clips of the same frame, to make a new master. This had to be done on frame-by-frame level for each film. A crazy time consuming task!
Then they had to also digitally clean each frame, from scratches etc.
Actually, I don't remember the exact process, but I believe they had to scan all copies digitally, clean them digitally, superimpose many copies of each frame, do final work, like cleanup, colorgrading to modern standard, digitally paint bits and pieces, that could not be restored satisfactory. It must have been a huge, expensive task.
Jaws also had a pretty similar process from what I remember. I also think they had to use the "master" that they made for the Laserdisc version of the film as a base but i could be mistaken.
That sounds more like the 4K77 edition. That’s a fan restoration of the original film.
@@ghostviggen No. I have the story from a documentary series on Disney Plus, on the birth of ILM (I think it was).
ILM was started by George Lucas.
Anyways, it was on Disney Plus.
@@akyhne Great documentary, wish it was longer than 6 parts.
@@akyhne "Empire of Light" doesn't say anything about combining vintage prints to make new masters. That's definitely the 4K77 fan project.
I really enjoyed that, thank you. Fascinating stuff, well explained.
I already knew about the general concepts outlined here, but this was a great video!
But where Star Wars suffered, the Industry as a whole benefited from it. As far as I remember, Star Wars was one of the first (with the Prequels) to be filmed digitaly and at the same time use this crazy amount of green screens and cgi (wich was uncommon for the time). I'll remember Star Wars and the first few Transformers films to be a Milestone in Technology, the Film Industry benefited from a lot.
But even though the resolution of the prequels may be not that great in modern times, they have a certain Art Style the Sequels have not. While the prequels look kind of magic at many points, the sequels look like you'd expect life and space to look like (it's boring).
I've noticed this affect an old black-and-white TV shows like the Twilight zone. Those episodes that were shot on 16 mm film are so sharp on a modern television that you can see flaws in the way the sets are built and things like that. It's almost comical. 😁
This is super informative. Nice job! :)
This is everything I wanted to know! great video
George Lucas added heavy amount of Digital Noise Reduction (DNR) on top of the prequels, which makes them even worse waxy & smoothed over!
I think you're failing to take AI upscaling into account. As you pointed out, upscaling techniques are already pretty good, but there has been a lot of success in the last few years being able to generate realistic-looking details to fill in the gaps in lower resolution images (I realize this video was made before the ChatGPT explosion of recent months, but AI upscaling has been around for a while, now). Given enough computing power and refinement of the processes, I'm sure it will be possible to have AI upscaling generate "remasters" of the Star Wars prequel trilogy and other films of that era that are every bit as good as remasters of 35mm film. This will also help make 8K remasters of contemporary 4K films, should that become necessary. However, we are rapidly approaching the point where our eyes can no longer tell the difference, so I don't know how necessary 8K remasters will actually be.
Relatively speaking, AI upscaling has become quite impressive and it has even been used on some movies' remasters. Most notably, David Lynch's Inland Empire comes to mind, which was shot in standard definition.
But there is no upscaling algorithm/neural network yet that would do this at truly high fidelity. Every single AI-based upscaling algorithm so far, be it out of the latest research papers or a commercial product, comes with revealing and ultimately distracting artifacts that will date any remaster.
We've not come close to a scenario yet where this would compete against actual 35mm negative film.
Great job on this. Instant sub 🙌
Thanks for the information! Great video
terrible*
Yeah, the prequels may be stuck in the 2000s style. But I don’t really care. Like, they look incredible regardless.
Yeah he just made a video essay explaining in detail why the transitional technology made these films don’t look good, but art is art and if I like it it’s irrelevant how bad it looks 😂
Top notch information. Keep it up young man.
This human child just schooled me on how resolution is a construct of presentation format. Makes perfect sense.
Bravo.
Very informative. Thank you!
You are on this council, but you have not been given the rank of re-mastered.
Actually the 4ks of the original trilogy aren’t the most perfect either there are shots that are blurry from poor remastering loss of color making it look washed out and it had some digital tinkering like grain reduction and I think edge enhancement.
There is someone that got access and paid to scan multiple theater prints. Each print is slightly different, so by taking the best detail from each frame he was able to create a gorgeous restoration that is close to what the master / original film would have been like.
Problem is we will never see it
@@NoSpamForYou what’s the point if no one will benefit from it?
@@batman200 I know right? But it's a legal issue. This guy is an industry insider, did it for his own satisfaction.
4K77, 4K80 and 4K83 are the best we fans can get.
@@NoSpamForYou so the guys a selfish jerk and won’t give it to Disney for an official release that’s what it sounds like.
I like that you used the proper logos for all the Star Wars movies.
Great video! I always wondered what the resolution was on the Prequels.
Not forgetting that when the OG Star Wars Trilogy was in the cinema smoking was still allowed, so the film would have had a smoke haze also, the projector beam used to highlight it so well.
two remarks: film grain size is also dependent on ISO sensitivity and possibly different chemistry between different film factories and product lines.
As for upscaling algorithems: I have a feeling ML will do wonders in the near future. Can't wait. I have about 70 hours of 8mm and Super8 my grandad filmed since as far back as 1944, I really want to improve the sharpness and we are getting really close. home tools are months away.
Within 15 minutes I have learned more than within a few months. Incredible content! Big THANK YOU!
Completely blindsided by that Cotton Eye Joe joke. Bravo. Absolute masterpiece. Instantly subscribed lmao