241–250 of 270 posts
The AI upscaled 4K UHD version of Aliens is freakin' amazing. I know the main complaint with upscaling older movies is that it can remove most of the film grain and that can give people a waxy, mannequin like look. But they really found a nice balance in Aliens. I watched the non-UHD a few months ago and just recently saw the 4K version and the difference was pretty stark.
The AI upscaled 4K UHD version of Aliens is freakin' amazing. I know the main complaint with upscaling older movies is that it can remove most of the film grain and that can give people a waxy, mannequin like look. But they really found a nice balance in Aliens. I watched the non-UHD a few months ago and just recently saw the 4K version and the difference was pretty stark.
What? I have both discs and I hate how the 4K looks. Overly smooth, and edge ringing artifacts everywhere...
I think HD Blu-ray was good and I didn't have any complaints but the 4K version looks much better to me. I also watched it on a projector with an 120 inch screen which I think benefits a lot from the increased resolution.
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Remastering can screw up intent with something as simple as color grading. But there is a line here. An editor that's using simple tools knows exactly what they're changing, and if they're using simple frame-global tools then they're not introducing anything that wasn't already there. If you throw an AI at things, it will try to guess what things in the image are, and make detail adjustments based on that. So that's…
No, "AI" is absolutely not uncontrollable magic that does something you don't want sometimes. It's not an issue really, you always have arbitrarily granular control of the end result, with ML tools or not. You can train them properly, you can control the application, you can fix the result, you can do anything with it. It's the usual VFX process, and it's not the only tool at your disposal. The problem is that remast…
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But it's not all. Just a lot of the ways. Too many of them. 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.
Maybe people should stop publishing HDR content if it worsens the viewing experience for almost everyone then?
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.
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> ANY Blu-Ray version should be much better than streaming. That should change over time: Blu-Ray is a format released about 20 years ago, and our streaming bandwidth (and encoding algorithms) keep improving.
> 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.
It used to be that (rational) people would be fairly in agreement that one cannot extract information which is not there. That's why we laugh at the "zoom -> 9 pixels -> enhance -> clear picture -> zoom ->.." trop in movies.. AI does not change this.. It adds stuff that's not there, sure, it adds stuff that might be there, or could have been there, but it literally cannot know, so it just paints in plausibility.. Whi…
There’s also the laws of large numbers here. When you make hundreds and thousands of guesses, even with really high accuracy, you’re going to get some wrong. For a 4K movie at 24 frames a second, you’re talking millions of guesses per minute, perhaps billions or more over the length of an entire film. It’s inevitable you’re going to get weird glitches, artifacts, or just parts that look “off”. It’s better to use a li…
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> 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 ele…
I'm not really convinced by this argument. 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 headr…
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> ANY Blu-Ray version should be much better than streaming. That should change over time: Blu-Ray is a format released about 20 years ago, and our streaming bandwidth (and encoding algorithms) keep improving.
> 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.
The cheaper bandwidth becomes, the more it makes sense for streaming services to give people what they want to pay for.
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> 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.
Exactly. Making a Blu-ray super high quality involves no additional marginal cost. The disc space is there to begin with, so might as well use 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-…
Compare eg Youtube videos today to Youtube videos 15 years ago.