More generally, automatically second guessing the artistic choices of whoever originally color graded the film, for the sake of adding narratively gratuitous features like HDR or extremely high resolution, is a nasty thing to do. There might be moderately more dynamic range in the original physical film than there was in a digital copy; if so, by all means try to capture it in a new digitization while trying to match the visual impression of a theater projection to the extent practical. The "AI" features demonstrated here are incredibly tacky though.
People put in charge of making new versions of beloved artworks need to have good taste and exercise some discretion. Art from different times and places looks different due to changes in both the medium and the culture, and we should enjoy those differences rather than trying to erase them all.
I will submit that directors are not generally the right people to call the shots here. A director can never watch his own movie the way the audience does. They always see an unfulfilled vision, a compromise being made here and there because of technology being limited, and some like Cameron or Lucas will make misguided attempts to modernize to make up for it.
This disregards that Aliens will always be a goofy 80s movie and not a movie from them 2020s. Its look should be preserved, be that the film grain, or its color grade. At least, the few people who still buy optical media should be given the choice, as they are the most likely to care.
It contains very little of humour, all the cast and the director are taking it seriously. I'll buy Goonies as a goofy film, but Aliens? I remember someone glued to a wall and screaming in agony as a creature tears its way out of her chest. I remember the ratcheting tension of the motion-detectors getting more and more high pitched as nothing is happening but we're expecting it any moment now.
I know there's some don't-think-about-it plot-holes, but goofy?
Ok, fair. James Cameron can do whatever he wants with his films. They are his artistic output, and if he feels the technology available at the time, he can certainly work to mitigate that. I assure you, this is not common among directors.
> I will submit that directors are not generally the right people to call the shots here. A director can never watch his own movie the way the audience does.
Ha. I'm a Tech Artist and do VFX, so I have more visibility than most into how a lot of these decisions get made. I'm not trying to be a jerk, but of all the confidently incorrect declarations about art I've seen in tech fora, this has got to be in the top 5.
To some extent, the misconception is understandable from a consumer vantage point: without spending a lot of time creating images from nothing to have a specific impact on the viewer, you really don't understand how many decisions there are to make about minutiae, and how much it all affects how the work hits. Prompt-based AI image generators are a good example of this. Their making these decisions is the real boon for non-artists that want to make images, and also why they're non-starters for high-level professional deliverable work. Learning to use art tools to produce clean images is the easy part. The hard part is deciding at an extremely granular level what those images should contain. Since the models amalgamate those decisions from the millions of decisions that artists have already made in different images, that lets end users indefinitely create visually compelling images without having to know why they're compelling at a granular level. But even with the finer-grained control you can get with prompt manipulation, control nets, inpainting, loras, etc. it's still bumper cars vs driving. Famous artists are usually famous because their vision isn't just a mix of what other people have done before them-- it's got other stimuli, references, connections and influences that are implemented in unusual, generally very specific ways. Fighting against the amalgamated decisions of every artist that contributed to the model to achieve those results requires so much more effort than just making it from scratch. That's why generative AI in industry tools like Nuke don't integrate prompts or generate direct visuals-- they do things like make masks for compositing. A huge win, but 100% not creating images that go on screen. On a much more extreme level, Disney could not have trained a model with the entirety of early animation and pre-1937 non-animated visual art-- even their own films-- and come up with The Old Mill, no matter how much engineering they did.
In a film, almost all of those decisions made by an AI model when generating images are made, or at least finalized, by the director, often in conjunction with the DP. Most of them are obsessed with things like the slope and toe of film, grain, minute differences in very specific color representations, etc. etc. etc. and it affects nearly everything about the film-- set decisions, framing to get more or less of something, what time of day to shoot at, lighting, grading, etc. etc. etc. Saying directors shouldn't have complete control over the medium on which their movies are captured betrays a complete lack of understanding of making movies, both as an art form, and a practical process. If you want to learn more about how movies are made before you pontificate about the craft of making movies, I recommend looking at StudioBinder's youtube channel for a sub-cliff's-notes level introduction to how it's actually done.
State of the badass art.
This is the original sin of this process. They are tampering with the artistic object, it's no longer what the artists intended.
Some might say this is being pedantic, but the quality of the image has a huge impact on the feel of a movie. For some films, such as Blade Runner, the mood and feel created by the (dark, obscured) look of the film is easily half of the impact. Changing that film would be a crime against humanity, yet I imagine it's only a matter of time before it gets regraded so people can see the film "properly".
The first time I saw Blade Runner was on a CRT TV from VHS tape and it was still faithful to the original, which I've seen on the big screen and various digital formats too. Poor reproduction doesn't add something that isn't there in the original, it just degrades the image. That generally can't be controlled and is a lot different to intentionally changing the image.
It quite literally does
>That generally can't be controlled
Yes it can, just don't make any VHS versions
Hardly pedantic, the quality of the image is one of the key variables in cinema.
I'm also not too sure about comparing it with some unidentified 'streaming' version. That's like comparing a high resolution digital audio file with a phone call.
Selective sharpening does have a tendency to overemphasize clear edges while leaving the 'unclear' parts untouched, this can give a bit of a plasticy effect especially on skin.
But then im also of the opinion that most HDR content is too damn dark anyway.
It's not, though -- it's entirely the problem with players. Not just software players but also TV's.
There are lots of TV shows now that are available in 1080p SDR and in 4K HDR. When you play them both on any player or TV, they should have the same brightness in "regular" scenes like two people talking in a room. They're meant to. HDR is only meant to make a handful of elements brighter -- glowing lightsabers, glints of sunlight, explosions. HDR is never meant to make any of the content darker.
Unfortunately, far too many video players and televisions (and projectors) map HDR terribly. The TV's aren't actually meaningfully brighter, but they want to advertise HDR support, so they map the wider HDR brightness range to their limited brightness, so that lightsabers etc. get the full brightness, but everything else is way too dark. This is the disaster that makes everyone think HDR content is too dark.
When the correct thing to do would be to display HDR content at full brightness so it matches SDR for normal scenes, and then things like lightsabers, glints of sunlight, etc. just get blown out to white. To admit the hardware has brightness limitations and should never have been advertised as HDR in the first place.
So the problem isn't with HDR content. The problem is with HDR players, TV's, and projectors. It's mostly on the hardware side, with manufacturers that want to advertise HDR support when that's a lie, because they're not actually producing hardware that is HDR-level bright enough.
I have to do some math to check if this matters or not, but HDR is able to make dark scenes much better too. SDR video doesn't have nearly enough bit depth to represent anything dark well (it's not even 8-bit) whereas 10bit HDR does. So I would expect to see more dark scenes in properly displayed HDR.
Also, in dynamic HDR you should be able to make a dark scene by encoding it brighter and using the metadata to darken it, though I don't remember if it actually works in practice or if anything does it.
Step ONE every time I buy a TV is to spend a half an hour or so using tons of calibration images to get it dialed in to a sensible setting, and it's shocking how much a lot of them need changed. Almost every TV comes calibrated to be used as a display unit in the store which means contrast is rammed through the roof, brightness is way up, they usually have about 15 different kinds of smoothing or frame interpolation going, "denoisiers," color filtering for some insane reason, it's fucking ridiculous.
This is honestly why most of the time I buy cheap ass off-brand TV's because there's just less bullshit to turn off when the TV has "fewer" features.
Even just talking about SDR for the moment, films and TV shows have a lot of work put in so that their color, brightness, sharpness and contrast are just right.
And then modern TV settings apply all sorts of filters that just destroy it.
It's bizarre. I do the same thing you do in terms of calibration and it takes forever. All just to get it to act like a dumb monitor for my Apple TV. I just want it to display the signal and nothing more.
So many people are watching TV and films with weird color, weird contrast, and weird swimmy frame interpolation. And that's before you get to HDR where it's weird dark on top of it all.
It genuinely makes me want there to be either a government regulatory body or else some kind of private-organization seal that guarantees you get a normal-color, normal-contrast, normal-brightness, normal-motion image as filmmakers and TV producers intend. You can have all the other options too, but either make them non-default, or provide a single-click "director's choice high-fidelity (TM)" option to undo all the garbage they add. Or something like that.
Because it's completely out of control.
It's not even possible to turn off in some - you have to install a "dumb" camera app.
Eh. Usually you can flip it to movie + warm(2) + dynamic contrast off + enhancements off (think noise reduction) and you’re 90% there. You can get a smidge better picture with calibration images, but most midrange+ TVs come decently calibrated out of the factory these days. Not really worth the effort unless you go all the way and use a colorimeter.
E.g. on my Epson projector, there's a "sharpness" setting that goes from 1 to 10, and IIRC the only way to turn off sharpening is to set it to 3. Because values 1 and 2 wind up applying a blur filter. It's not documented. You have to figure out the "3" value from trial and error with a calibration image.
Similarly you need to figure out whether each of your connected devices is outputting RGB 0-255 or RGB 16-235, and set the toggles for your TV to handle the correct input range.
And so forth. The calibration images aren't for figuring out perfect color accuracy with a colorimeter. They're for basic things like displaying smooth gradients from black to white, and are the blacks or whites being cut off? Is the gamma totally off when compared to a checkerboard? Are saturation gradients displaying normally or does it show the image is over-saturated? Is a series of alternating black and white lines displaying as simple lines, or is there a crunchy halo around them (from sharpening) or blurring?
So it's not "eh" at all. In my experience it takes 15 to 30 minutes, as you hunt around the submenus to try to find all the relevant settings, and try to figure out what each setting even means since the documentation is useless. Like, on a power-saving display, should the main color setting be "Natural" or "Cinema" or "Bright Cinema"? You're going to have to experiment.
That's the point I'm making. You can buy expensive HDR displays that actually display correctly where it's not dark.
They're just expensive, and so most people aren't buying those ones.
So I will repeat, the problem is not with HDR content. It's with displays advertising themselves as HDR when they're simply not.
Spatial audio is like this too.
However, like HDR, it can be difficult to avoid. My laptop screen supports HDR because the laptop is otherwise exactly what I want and it doesn't come in a non-HDR variant. My earbuds support spatial audio because I elected to get AirPods Pro for their other qualities and they don't come in a non-HDR variant.
"Vote with your wallet" isn't really an option with things like this.
But, the net effect is still in the right direction, maybe.
Anyway I've listened to music mixed for Apple Music with "Spatial Audio" too and it sounds like crap compared to normal stereo mixes IMO so I guess my opinion stands.
Where do you configure "Spatialize Audio" globally? I can't find anything in the Bluetooth settings (where they've hidden every other AirPods config)
Somehow the transition from SDR to HDR has been messed up in a major way, for which I can't think of any similar equivalent. E.g. there was never any "step backwards" in going from 480p to 1080p or 4K, or from stereo to 5.1, or from h.264 to h.265.
But the rollout of HDR has been bungled catastrophically. The content is technically fine but the hardware side has been a disaster.
If I were the movie studios, I would seriously think about releasing 4K only in SDR until television manufacturers start showing HDR at full brightness again, and release software updates to fix it in existing models.
Isn't the actual issue that SDR content tends to be mapped so that 0 is the darkest colour the TV can display and 1.0 is the brightest colour the TV can display?
When an HDR signal comes along, then of course the brightest element it can display isn't any brighter than 1.0 was in the SDR image. This has the effect of the scene being overall darker in order to give more headroom for brighter elements to be brighter.
But what is the other option? Have SDR content be dimmer than what the HDR monitor would otherwise be capable of displaying? I doubt you will get as many sales as your competition with that approach because the TV that renders SDR as bright as it can will always look better.
(I do understand that there are some caveats relating to the fact that max brightness is different depending on the amount of the screen covered in brightness, but I don't think it's actually relevant to this argument overall)
For “real” HDR you want at least 800 nits, ideally 1000. Otherwise you have to do what is stated upthread, latch max brightness to whatever your maximum nits is and make everything else very dark to keep the relative contrast intact.
That should change over time: Blu-Ray is a format released about 20 years ago, and our streaming bandwidth (and encoding algorithms) keep improving.
Streaming isn't limited by the available bandwidth but by the margins the streaming service doesn't want to spend on it.
But every time a movie gets streamed, it costs the streamer twice as much if the file is twice as large. So streaming bandwidth will generally be minimized as much as possible to a "just barely good enough" quality level.
It's not about technology improving or how old Blu-rays are, it's about economics.
Compare eg Youtube videos today to Youtube videos 15 years ago.
I see no difference. Their 1080p is still the super-crummy 1080p they had 15 years ago.
In fact, if you pay for YouTube Premium you can get a separate "1080p Premium" with a higher bitrate. But you have to pay. Their free version hasn't gotten better at all. In fact, it's gone the other direction -- they've gotten more agressive about defaulting to 720p or 480p streams when they used to show 1080p by default.
Sure, a tiny handful of videos have 4K versions available, but that's only for a tiny proportion of streams. And YouTube even removes higher resolutions after a video has been published a bit. Which is why you see lots of YouTube VR videos described as 8K but there's no 8K stream anymore. There was when it was uploaded, but YouTube removed it.
So, no. Even if bandwidth gets cheaper, streaming twice the bits is still twice as expensive. Streaming services aren't going to stream more bits -- they're just going to take more profit, as long as it's still minimally good enough for the average viewer.
Oh, 1080p indeed been introduced in 2009, eg 15 years ago. I thought it was younger. However, just pretend I was talking about the next higher resolutions, or 60fps.
> [...] they're just going to take more profit, as long as it's still minimally good enough for the average viewer.
Competition will take care of that extra profit.
No it won't. I said "minimally good enough". Competition takes care of things up to "minimally good enough". And then it stops.
That's my point -- bandwidth getting cheaper is not leading streamers to increase the quality of their 1080p. Because not enough people care. Not enough people will switch services. Competition ceases because it's not a significant factor of differentiation.
(For the niche people that do care, that's why YouTube premium exists, but it's niche.)
Huh, why would it stop? People can freely switch between streaming services.
> Because not enough people care.
Yes, competition improves what people care about. That's a good thing. You don't want society to waste resources on stuff people don't care about.
Btw, your argument might demonstrate that video quality won't go up, if people don't care. Yes, I agree. But what does that have to do with profit?
People always eg care about price; and they will switch for price.
The cheaper bandwidth becomes, the more it makes sense for streaming services to give people what they want to pay for.
This is the main thing that has kept me from adopting HDR in my media library. I'd expect a feature like HDR would be progressive (if that's the right term that I'm going for), i.e., in a non-supported player, it would look exactly like the non-HDR version of the content, and simply adds more dynamic range when in an environment that supports it. Without that, I'm not going to grab a version of a media file that might look worse if I'm playing it in a non-ideal context.
Does anyone know why this isn't the case? Is it not technically possible for some reason I'm not thinking of, or was it really just a fumble of standards design?
The culprit here is that the non-AI screenshots are taken from presumably 1080p non-HDR sources, while all the AI screenshots are taken from presumably 4K HDR sources. The "AI" images are all displayed in the completely wrong color space -- the dark+green/blue is exactly what HDR content looks like when played on software that doesn't correctly support decoding and displaying HDR content.
It's a shame that the creator of the comparison images doesn't know enough image processing to understand that you can't grab stills from HDR content from a player that doesn't properly support HDR.
On the other hand, the state of HDR support is a mess right now in software players. Playing HDR content in common players like VLC, QuickTime, IINA, and Infuse will give you significantly different results between all of them. So I can't actually blame the creator of the images 100%, because there isn't even a documented, standardized way to compare HDR to non-HDR content side-by-side, as far as I know (hence why each player maps the colors differently).