Agree.

All those remastering are often done with more importance given to the economic side of things, instead of respecting the art.

Some are destroying the original work.

The first thing that pop into my mind is how they destroyed Buffy with the HD makeover:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZWNGq70Oyo

As a reddit commenter said about the cropping job: "All they had to do was nothing and they still fucked it up."

It's a disgrace.

Buffys remaster is a joke. Did they just try to automate the whole thing and not look at it before publishing it? I mean there are night scenes that are clearly shoot in daylight and they didn't even bother to adjust the lighting and color balance, scenes where you can see the edge of sets and the film crew or boom mics hanging in the picture.

Really appreciate you posting this! I didn't really watch Buffy but the video did a fantastic job of highlighting the issues.

The right way to do it is how The Wire has done it: https://davidsimon.com/the-wire-hd-with-videos/

But the pirates don’t have access to the original master files. If the 4K rescanning of the film is botched there is only the previous HD or SD version if even that. What would need preserving is the actual DCP files which are encrypted and not yet craked to my knowledge or original mastering files. Film archives are the ones preserving film legacy still.

Not really "pirates" but there ARE projects that have managed to get ahold of production prints to "restore" them.

https://www.thestarwarstrilogy.com/project-4k77/

If pirates were cared about preservation, they would not dare compress the rip from the disc.

And yet, they do. They throw away detail as they please. That’s preservation?

Preservation doesn't always mean to preserve every raw bit or analog signal off the original medium, but preserve the content itself, even if compression is used, because certain niche movies never get re-released on modern medium, you're just left with the original Laser-Disk or VHS, maybe even DVD if you're lucky, and that's it, so compressed video is better than no video because you have no legal way of obtaining that content today if it's not sold on any physical medium or on any streaming service.

Compression is needed on torrent sites because few peers are interesting in downloading and seeding a 60+GB raw file of a movie if the 12GB mkv looks just as good on the 1080p Wallmart monitor.

There are of course also RAW rips of blu-rays out there but mostly for AAA IPs like Star Wars, LotR, Matrix, etc, not for niche content that have a reduced audience.

If you think raw videos are available only for niche content, you have been missing out. BDRemux (i.e. not the Blu-Ray image with its menus but an un-recompressed repackaging of the video and audio into a .mkv file) is a common and decently well seeded format even for niche art films, from not only various private trackers but also the public Russian torrent tracker, with the hash carried along on other public trackers, too. Those 4k releases at 60GB or whatever are showing up, too.

You can absolutely get straight disc rips.

I agree in line of principle, everything that was officially released should be preserved.

But "accuracy" is the wrong word I think, old home video transfers are not more representative of the original theatrical presentation just because they came out first