AI can ruin movies now, too - Aliens and True Lies on 4K (new Nerrel video).
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This is not entirely correct.
Cameron has been a pioneer in home video scene. He was the first to manage to shoot films in a way that allowed him to have different masters for different aspects ratios so that it doesn't loses its impact when doing translation from 2.39 to 1.43. Before him, everything was just standard pan and scan.
View: https://youtu.be/AbCqkQPnlOI
Well goddamn, he should sue. Like Scarlett Johanssen.
Nevertheless, the video is enlightening. I guess I'll just hold on to my James Cameron movie DVDs.
Y'all can thank Peter Jackson for this little disaster. His company, Park Road, developed this AI process for Beatles Get Back and have started to hire it out for restorations of old movies, so far been used for these new James Cameron 4ks to horrific results. Fun stuff!!
Outside of Jackson's company, AI upscaling for official restorations of old movies has been rarer, but Universal has tried it at least once - the TV cut of Spielberg's Duel on 4k is a horrific upscale too. It's entirely possible though that it becomes more prevalent as time goes on though, which is a scary prospect.
Huh, I don't remember this scene in House of Wax.
I consider protecting for different ratios while filming on-set as a totally different skillset from mastering a film for home video after the movie is complete, to be clear. So on and so forth. He absolutely has strong areas - but boy does he have weak points too. I don't think he's the first either though, now is he? Pretty sure Kubrick protected for home video before him and protecting for multiple projection ratios in general goes back even farther. Shining was entirely 4x3 protected for video in 1980 while Terminator had large portions hard-matted 1.85:1 in 1984. Open matte, and protected open matte, both well predate Cameron and home video was not purely pan and scan before him, in fact many older films were less panned and scanned than some Super 35 Cameron films, many of them not panning or scanning at all.
Thinking deeper on it, i think what you describe is yet more mythologizing of Cameron, of attributing innovation to him that others did well before and that was hardly unique to him / other technicians with less famous names are probably more to thank for. Absolutely yes, his scope films fared way better than the average scope film did on video and care was put into making sure it cropped well, but IMO much of that can be attributed to Super 35 as a format and he was not remotely the first to do it.
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I sent the video to a friend who is a self proclaimed "Alien" fan and he told me: "Already bought Aliens 4K , and I loved it"
So clearly people don't really care.
The fun thing will be when they feed those AI botched remasters to another AI in a few years For the 8K remasters and so on.
I imagine the actors won't be recognisable at all after a few remaster generations.
Sure there's nothing wrong, and enthusiast media should recommend them to avoid buying a 4k upgrade. It's amazing what some free shit can do to somebody's integrity.
You didn't see the video ?
Cause 2001 is an example in that video of how not to do it, since Kubrick filmed scenes without consideration for 4:3 and as such their only option was pan and scan and it didn't work because the film was often shot in a manner that made it so that two important elements on the screen would be spread far apart and no amount of pan and scan could get them on screen together at once. The star child scene is an example where at no point could you get the earth and star child on the screen at the same time.
Infact Kubrick used the side of his frame a lot, when most directors today would use sides for additional detail, Kubrick was someone who'd have a ton of important details there.
great video.
i am not an AI doomer and i imagine it will eventually be useful for this sort of thing, particularly for films where the original negatives would be challenging or impossible to restore. right now, though, the results look like total garbage and cameron should be embarrassed for putting his name to them.
i am not an AI doomer and i imagine it will eventually be useful for this sort of thing, particularly for films where the original negatives would be challenging or impossible to restore. right now, though, the results look like total garbage and cameron should be embarrassed for putting his name to them.
I never mentioned 2001 in my post so it's silly to bring that one up, I singled out Shining as an example of a movie entirely protected for 4x3 and home video well before Cameron ever did it. I didn't say 'every Kubrick movie was protected for 4x3', I said 'Kubrick started protecting his movies for video way before Cameron did'
It's just the facts, I'm just pointing out you're wrongly attributing it so wholly to him. Like, Cameron did not invent it, he was not the first to do it, it is not remotely something he is unique or the first to do. Before him, not everything was pan and scan. There were films protected for multiple ratios well before him, protected for as many as three different ratios even (On The Waterfront comes to mind, a movie made before Cameron was even born!)
"AI" as we now call it has indeed kind of been used in helpful ways before this - for scratch removal, dirt removal, etc. (Albeit you should manually point the AI to the dirt/scratch to be removed, letting it auto-detect dirt and scratches tends to create lots of false positives.)
The key IMO is to use it sparingly and in non-destructive ways, ways that don't alter the character of the film and don't try to deny the reality of what detail is there / meant to be there or deny the filmic origins of the movie. A great example for me and one of the few upscales I really was impressed by is Discotek's blu-ray of the film Memories: A few minutes of the film had early digital animation that was mastered to videotape and then printed out to film for the negative, and the generational loss left the footage looking really rough next to the surrounding beautiful native 35mm footage, so they used some upscaling tools to try and remove all the SD-videotape artifacting and restore it to how it might've looked originally as-animated and fit better with surrounding footage. Crucially, they give you the option to watch the non-upscaled version if you prefer no-tinkering!
Personally, I think it IS already useful when applied well and only where it's proper to apply it - the problem is that it will NEVER be useful when used for the kind of revisionist tinkering and modernizing these Cameron 4ks set out to achieve. Even if the results get 'cleaner' it's going to be applied in a destructive manner that betrays the integrity of the film itself.
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Both examples looked absolutely horrifying and have hard time understanding how anyone could say that's acceptable.
Even if you didn't account the obvious mistakes on frames, there's so many things wrong with the AI generated fake detail. Actors especially look like uncanny valley wax dolls... skin, hair, eyes, mouths... all terrible. Great way to ruin two absolute classics and this will probably affect many other movies that will get new 4K editions.
What a time to live in, when AI ruins internet, movies, search engines, art, social media (or what's left of it) and music.
Even if you didn't account the obvious mistakes on frames, there's so many things wrong with the AI generated fake detail. Actors especially look like uncanny valley wax dolls... skin, hair, eyes, mouths... all terrible. Great way to ruin two absolute classics and this will probably affect many other movies that will get new 4K editions.
What a time to live in, when AI ruins internet, movies, search engines, art, social media (or what's left of it) and music.
I don't think many casuals are paying a premium to buy 4k discs when they could just stream the thing on Disney.
Agreed. It moves way too fast. Even when pausing, most of it needs a more thorough explanation.
The part with Vasquez' face in Aliens though, that was quite blatant.
Mercifully as far as I know the only films to have this particular brand of AI muck applied so far are Beatles Get Back, Avatar 1, Titanic, The Abyss, and True Lies. Lord of the Rings may have used something similar as it was the same company that restored it, but it looks more like advanced degraining than advanced upscaling as it has no extra detail over the BDs, not even fake detail. Duel has even worse AI upscaling on its original TV cut but not on the 4k theatrical cut, but that wasn't Park Road like the Cameron 4ks and Get Back were.
Main thing to be wary of is if more filmmakers than just Cameron start hiring Park Road Post for their restorations of old films.
Some of the examples require the video resolution to be set pretty high to see as youtube compression does a number on it otherwise. Others like the cheek-mouth or butthole-mouth are easier to see lol.
Are their 4k versions of these movies without all this AI stuff or are we stuck with the hope Fan Projects will restore them properly?
Did they ever fix the ugly green added to Fellowship of the Ring in the BluRay?
Did they ever fix the ugly green added to Fellowship of the Ring in the BluRay?
They responded to actors sadness at being cut by cutting them again? Jesus, that is certainly a choice.
Never thought about how AI could also be used to ruin films this way but here we are. Film restoration is so important and AI will make it objectively worse.
It's actually sad to see some people even on this platform talk about it like it's an evolution or something to be celebrated.
It's actually sad to see some people even on this platform talk about it like it's an evolution or something to be celebrated.
Nope! Though there are some HD alternatives.
For each film:
Titanic: Old blu-ray is the same master without AI, HDTV or 35mm scans are for super-purists who want original colours and no effects tweaks though.
Abyss: Old HDTV master for theatrical cut though it has poor compression. Longer cut you're stuck with either DVD or the new AI upscale.
Aliens: Old blu-ray is the exact same as the 4k minus the AI.
True Lies: The old streaming remaster is the same as the 4k minus AI, it still streams on Hulu iirc but may not for much longer. Other than that, there's a Spanish bootleg of an old HDTV master that's rough but at least has no AI nonsense.
Avatar: It was finished in 2k so any 4k version is going to be an upscale anyways. I'd say stick with the blu-ray.
As for Fellowship, kinda, there's no more green tint but the entire movie is still wrong for different reasons. Rather than returning Fellowship to its original colours, they redid the colours entirely to try and make it match the Hobbit movies more, complete with desaturated flashbacks with a blur filter added. Two Towers and Return of the King on the new 4k releases also had the colours entirely redone where they were perfect on the old BDs - so the 4ks you basically have a different flavour of wrong for Fellowship and now Two Towers and ROTK are now newly-wrong, so you go from 2/3 films with correct colours to 0/3.
For LOTR I honestly just recommend sticking with the old BDs and getting fan fixes for the extended cut of the first film that gives it the original colour scheme.
Heck, there was actually a great video put out recently on the issues with the 4k versions.
View: https://youtu.be/zkNFZkUHeKQ
Thank you, I simply don't get why they keep doing that to poor Fellowship.
It hurts me so much too because it's my favourite of the three by far and I can't live without the extended cut 😭
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I actually do give a shit about how films look, and watch them on a calibrated TV (real calibration, not just dialing in TV settings) and despite the 4K transfer of Aliens not looking as good as it should have, it absolutely isn't as bad as I expected it to be. Like, the guy in the video claims he was only pausing the film when something immediately stood out to him, but he had to be scanning like a hawk and not just watching the fucking movie like most people do when they want to watch a film.
When you are desperately looking for errors, you're going to see them.
This is partially what I'm talking about. If you are already extremely familiar with the film in a different format, the differences will more easily stand out, and when you are actively looking for problems, you will spot them easier. Which isn't to say there isn't some obvious shit happening here, but the number he shows he found makes it extremely hard for me to believe he simply noticed every one of them them as soon as they happened, the first time they happened.
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There's also rips from the old d-theatre version of True Lies too. Not sure if it's the same master as the old HDTV version or what.
Always found it hilarious that there was no bluray but it was one of the only movies released in HD (1080i) on VHS.
This is probably the best video covering these releases and it's pretty digestible for laymen. Good stuff.
What isn't good stuff is Cameron's satisfaction with these complete fucking botch jobs. For the foreseeable future, Aliens, True Lies, The Abyss, Titanic and Terminator 2 - literally some of the most significant and beloved films in history - are presented with a hideous revisionist presentation that scrubs most of their natural detail away, makes them a hideous teal hue, and either washes out or blows out color detail completely. He's literally shat on his legacy from on high and the discs are still regularly sold out and hard to find because so many people keep snagging them.
4K Blu-ray could/should be the pinnacle of the home media format. There's virtually no other frontier to conquer that the format isn't already suited for. To waste these incredible films on this incredible format with nigh incomprehensibly bad releases is just confounding and infuriating beyond words. For as much credit as Cameron deserves for the films themselves, he definitely deserves derision for tainting the legacy of those films by phoning in what should have been their definitive releases.
What isn't good stuff is Cameron's satisfaction with these complete fucking botch jobs. For the foreseeable future, Aliens, True Lies, The Abyss, Titanic and Terminator 2 - literally some of the most significant and beloved films in history - are presented with a hideous revisionist presentation that scrubs most of their natural detail away, makes them a hideous teal hue, and either washes out or blows out color detail completely. He's literally shat on his legacy from on high and the discs are still regularly sold out and hard to find because so many people keep snagging them.
4K Blu-ray could/should be the pinnacle of the home media format. There's virtually no other frontier to conquer that the format isn't already suited for. To waste these incredible films on this incredible format with nigh incomprehensibly bad releases is just confounding and infuriating beyond words. For as much credit as Cameron deserves for the films themselves, he definitely deserves derision for tainting the legacy of those films by phoning in what should have been their definitive releases.
Yeah, Cameron had this weird thing much like Jackson where he was like 'no releasing my old movies on blu-ray until I can personally approve them!' and they just never ever did, year after year putting it off. Unfortunately for us, by the time they've now actually gone to give approval AI is a thing and they're demanding it be added.
The greatest irony of all is Piranha II is probably going to end up being the only Cameron movie that actually looks good on 4k because he doesn't have control of it lol.
Yup. Some people think it's overreacting, but it really fucking bugs me that James Cameron and Peter Jackson are taking what may be their films' final restorations or releases and possibly irrevocably altering their character and integrity and how they'll be seen for generations to come by all but the most devoted of film fanatics who seek out fan preservations. These may depressingly be the last stop for these movies, and may define how they're seen by new audiences from here on out. It may not add literal CGI cartoons like George Lucas' shit, but it's still replacing these films with tinkered and altered versions.
I'm not a supporter of AI, but it is just a tool, and like any tool, it can be used badly. Nerrel covers this at tail-end of the video, where he suggests that AI could be used in different ways to help streamline and speed up the more traditional upscaling / rescanning methods.
The way it's been used here is crap and cheap.
As bad as these transfers are, I'm actually not sure what I think is worse: Aliens not looking like Alien, or what Lucas did to the end of Return of the Jedi on Blu-ray (which of course carried over to the UHD). I have to mute the film during one of the most impactful scenes in the original trilogy.
At least we got a good version of The Matrix in 4K.
maybe this is just an "old person" thing. Newer generations will just expect that surrealistic deformations, frame by frame, is how old quirky films looked and get used to it. Hell, maybe directors will put them into their finished film deliberately to get that "early 2020s remaster" look and feel for their nostalgic indie film.
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Even as a joke this made me die inside a little to think about lol
I can at least point to one movie where something similar bugged me - The Holdovers ultra-muffled its audio to a ridiculous degree to emulate 70s movies when in fact only poor modern restorations that use over-aggressive hiss/noise removal on the audio sound that muffled. Those old films never originally sounded that bad.
Yup, and "AI" has been around for a while in some sort of form before it became a big buzzword and got over-applied for everything - like, for dirt and scratch removal, there it makes perfect sense because you're trying to remove damage and the computer is basically just using existing information from prior and later frames to automate the painting out and removal of damage accumulated on the film. Yet even then, in that lighter application, we see limits and it had to be applied properly and carefully - manually highlighting dirt and telling the computer to remove it worked great, but if you let the AI try and auto-detect the dirt itself it would get all sorts of false positives and erase sparks and water droplets and even actors' faces if they were distant enough lol.
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Reminds me of what they did to the old universal horror movies years ago for the dvd and bluray releases (probably 4k too).
Frankenstein Audio Comparison (BD vs LD)
Comparing the audio tracks of Frankenstein between the Blu-ray and Laserdisc across various scenes.
vimeo.com
Yup, there's a whole site for this. https://blah-ray.blogspot.com/Reminds me of what they did to the old universal horror movies years ago for the dvd and bluray releases (probably 4k too).
I'm sure if you really wanted there's probably much better modern methods of removing the hiss that doesn't degrade the quality so much.Frankenstein Audio Comparison (BD vs LD)
Comparing the audio tracks of Frankenstein between the Blu-ray and Laserdisc across various scenes.
For A Few Dollars More, compared on that site, might be the worst-ever example for me. Like, I get FAFDM's audio was pretty noisy and the music was prone to distortion, but the processed version is so muffled that it is not at ALL worth the processing lol.
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Yeah some were noticeable, like Vasquez face. But then at other times he kept saying stuff like "it doesn't even look like a human being!" over what looked very much to me like a slightly oversharpened human face.
This probably has a dedicated thread already, but I didn't find it when I previously looked, and think it's extremely relevant to this general theme of the topic.
variety.com
I'd worry less about AI fucking up the image, and more about AI fucking up the entire point. Disney is going to be using AI to "help" generate stories.
It's pretty sad how DLSS has actually been convincingly upscaling games (more often than not well) for a while now, but Cameron can't get it right with film.
Bob Iger: Hollywood Storytellers Need to ‘Embrace the Change’ Driven by Tech Innovation
Disney CEO Bob Iger talked brand-building and grappling with new technology in his address Thursday at the Canva Create event at Hollywood Park.
variety.com
I'd worry less about AI fucking up the image, and more about AI fucking up the entire point. Disney is going to be using AI to "help" generate stories.
It's pretty sad how DLSS has actually been convincingly upscaling games (more often than not well) for a while now, but Cameron can't get it right with film.
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I was shocked, how did this get greenlit?
If you're not sure what to look for or need more time, just pause the youtube video. It is really bad.
If you're not sure what to look for or need more time, just pause the youtube video. It is really bad.
Keep in mind that what I'm going to say here is fully unsubstantiated (wink) and I can't/won't try to back it up because of the ways I've heard about it, but I've had it on pretty good authority that Disney's been sitting on 4K transfers of the original trilogy, sans Lucas changes, and just hasn't done anything with them and they currently don't have any plans to.
They also (ALLEGEDLY) have 4K, HDR transfers of the original Omen, Lilo & Stitch and some other assorted Fox and Touchstone releases, all sitting in that good ol' Disney vault. Most of these transfers were (ALLEGEDLY) done around the time of the Die Hard franchises' 4K remasters (which eventually made their way to digital but currently have no physical release on the way.) No plans for 'em. No plans for any of them.
On top of that, The First Omen, the (surprisingly great) recent prequel, has a 4K scan with Dolby Vision and Atmos, but that's going exclusively to streaming. The physical releases are DVD and Blu-ray, no 4K release to speak of. That's also the first release that Sony's handling for Disney as a part of their new deal moving forward.
Why am I sharing all of this? Because it's the same reason Cameron shat out these releases. It's the same reason we may never actually get physical releases of the original Star Wars trilogy without the shitty Lucas additions. They just don't fucking care. The juice isn't worth the squeeze. They don't see a reason to pour any real time, money and effort into physical releases with pristine restorations and a bevy of carefully curated special features because the market for it is continuing to shrink, pales in comparison to their streaming business, and folks buy lackluster releases like Aliens and True Lies for $30+ a pop, even if they whine about the quality of the release on Reddit later.
What can we, as consumers, do? If we speak with our wallets, they'll stop the physical releases altogether. All the better for them, frankly. If we keep buying slop like the Maclunky Editions or T2: Madame Tussaud's Cut, they'll keep shitting out subpar releases at ridiculous premiums. We're trapped between a rock and a hard place. As a collector myself, I know I won't stop scooping up every damn release of a movie that I can, and I know the message that sends.
For the last 17 years, we've been buying release after release of the original Star Wars trilogy and they've only gotten worse and worse. More revisionist shit gets added, the transfers are subpar, whole sequences are ruined because George couldn't live with himself if he didn't fuck with just one more thing before he walked away. Meanwhile, somewhere in that Disney fault, that holy grail we've all been salivating for is collecting digital dust… and why would they bother spending the money to get it release-ready, pressed to discs, mass produced and marketed when they can either sit on it for a few more years while the shitty 4K releases we already have continue to sell out or eventually dump them on Disney+ after a rough quarter with slow subscriber growth?
Behind every quality physical media release, behind every beautiful restoration or transfer, there's a team of artists who are dedicated to presenting and preserving the best possible version of these movies that they themselves love. Those aren't the folks in charge of these conversions. Those aren't the folks in the room with Cameron when he's signing off on True Lies in 4K. Those are the "hurry it up, you've got Avatar to make" guys. That's Cameron saying "yeah, good enough," and leaving to go deep sea diving. They just don't fuckin' care, and it burns all of us who do.
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Some directors just seem to have this huge obsession with whatever the latest digital technology is + they overestimate their skill as a director transferring over to expertise in home video mastering and restoration. Somehow, Cameron and Jackson think this shit looks good, or at least somehow preferable to a filmic 35mm look.
I doubt Disney did it themselves if it exists. Like the current 4k masters of the SEs they'd probably be Lucas-inherited stuff that he was sitting on too. I am pretty sure, however, that they do have at bare minimum wayyyy better transfers than the old GOUT laserdisc transfers they trotted out for the DVDs. I believe some documentaries use clips from these masters and the original '77 crawl from a newer master was spliced into the old laserdisc trasnfer when they put it onto the DVD bonus features. I've heard some allege Lucas always had them keep those under lock and key and only to be used as historical reference for stuff like those documentaries but that's hearsay as I can hardly confirm it myself lol.
I think Disney is lazy on a lot of things, but Star Wars specifically I have no doubt it's Lucasfilm choosing, sadly, to lingeringly honour George's wishes that they originals never be released in high quality again.
IIRC he also preferred cropped full screen over letterboxing during the LD/VHS era due to the higher resolution. The man definitely has a different view when it comes to home media releases.
I don't know if Cameron did, but I know allegedly this is part of why Vittorio Storaro wants all his scope films cropped to 2.00:1 on home video, to maximize resolution and reduce black bars. He got to the point of outright lying about the movies being intended for that ratio all along lol.
Yeah that sucks pretty bad on the exemples in the video.... But It can be used for good, look at the french OG dragon ball bluray, they used AI to help them on the process and it looks really good, the best release as of now
View: https://youtu.be/mlGY8u9PbwI?feature=shared
View: https://youtu.be/mlGY8u9PbwI?feature=shared
"It doesn't have a great grasp of skin… yet."
No, can we stop the train please? AI doesn't grasp shit. It doesn't know now, nor will it ever (it's not actual AI we saw in fiction). It's just fucking math using probability and context to generate stuff.
No, can we stop the train please? AI doesn't grasp shit. It doesn't know now, nor will it ever (it's not actual AI we saw in fiction). It's just fucking math using probability and context to generate stuff.
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It's a figure of speech. Nerrel, and most people using anthropomorphic language to describe automated processes, do not actually believe these things are sentient and have souls and feelings. I feel like this shouldn't have to be clarified, because we've been using similar language to describe inanimate things for fucking centuries.
With AI it should be clear that it is not human like bc it is constantly attributed with human like behavior. Even when it makes mistakes it is said to "hallucinate". It's a problem specifically with AI bc of the snake oil being sold that it can think like a person can (it can't).
Also, I didn't talk about feelings or having a soul.
I agree with your overall point. But speaking as a writer it's very common for humans to anthropomorphise abstract or technical processes, or use human-like words to figuratively represent them. Studies show that we comprehend information better when we do this.
But as I say, I agree with your overall point.