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Sneakers (1992) – 4K makeover sourced from the original camera negative

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Re: Sneakers (1992) – 4K makeover sourced from the original camera negative

#191

Post by myself248 »

bink wrote: post #168
myself248 wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Accidentally great, yeah. If I allow myself to believe that the producers of Hackers knew they were making a spoof of Hollywood hackers in general, I can sit back and enjoy it as a masterpiece. But at the time, that was not at all clear. And I'm still not actually convinced. It certainly wasn't marketed as a comedy; it seemed to be drinking the same drama-aid as The Net and other breathless wankery at the time. In wh…

It's really hard to believe that anyone took "The Plague" seriously as a character.

You haven't watched movies with my grandma.

Edit to add: Now consider the age and tech-savvy of most lawmakers.

Re: Sneakers (1992) – 4K makeover sourced from the original camera negative

#193

Post by doublerabbit »

dylan604 wrote: post #138
xattt wrote: post #82

Re: negative re-masters I can’t help but notice that a number of older and very prominent shows on streaming services are clearly ripped from a video cassette. For example, the older Simpsons episodes on Disney Plus. Some of the episodes have very prominent dot crawl which is unacceptable for a digital format that you pay for. I also can’t imagine the film masters were trashed, or that the show was composited to vide…

>I also can’t imagine the film masters were trashed, or that the show was composited to video tape. So many shows very much were composited to analog video tape. I personally worked on edit sessions where multiple film-to-tape transfers were composited to 1" then BetacamSP then digital formats like DigiBeta and everything that followed. I get it is hard to grok for eople without direct experience only ever knowing di…

O/T: I've discovered that the animation studio I had a gig for has shut it's doors recently to liquidation.

They had a killer render archival server with archives from 2000-onwards show casing what the studio had studio made. Cartoons, Movies; a collection of praised possessions.

It pains me to think that the studio has handed this over to the liquidators only for it to be shredded and now how many OG copies have now been destroyed.

Re: Sneakers (1992) – 4K makeover sourced from the original camera negative

#194

Post by reverendsteveii »

greasegum wrote: post #189

All I remember from seeing this as a kid is that, in the final scene, River Phoenix asks the hot government agent for her phone number. The number she gives is a real non-555 number--pretty sure it was 818 area code?. You could call that number and hear a message from the character for many years. Was this the only movie ever to do this?

You're gonna love the answer to that. Disney's 1994 family holiday treat, The Santa Clause, starred Tim Allen as a guy who (I'm remembering this as I'm typing it and holy cow) sort of kills Santa Claus by startling him into falling off the roof. He then puts on the Santa suit and becomes the archetype himself. But in that movie, there's an off-hand reference to a phone number: 1-800-SPANK-ME, meant entirely sarcastically. Turns out, either that was already a real number or some enterprising pornographer recognized that there's no such thing as bad publicity, and precocious youngsters who called the line after watching the movie were invited to pay $5/minute for "the hottest phone line in America".

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/santa-clause-deleted-scene...

Re: Sneakers (1992) – 4K makeover sourced from the original camera negative

#195

Post by doublerabbit »

hylaride wrote: post #186
xattt wrote: post #82

Re: negative re-masters I can’t help but notice that a number of older and very prominent shows on streaming services are clearly ripped from a video cassette. For example, the older Simpsons episodes on Disney Plus. Some of the episodes have very prominent dot crawl which is unacceptable for a digital format that you pay for. I also can’t imagine the film masters were trashed, or that the show was composited to vide…

Over the years I’ve met several people that worked in the cartoon industry because where I live (Toronto) used to be an outsourcing market for many 1980s/1990s cartoons. The vast majority of the people that commissioned them, including very successful series, wanted it done as fast as possible to get it to TV ASAP. Often they had toys lines up for Xmas that needed to be synced up with schedules. I know people that ha…

Does it need to be fixed though? If children got on with it then, why cannot we now?

Re: Sneakers (1992) – 4K makeover sourced from the original camera negative

#196

Post by ethbr1 »

greasegum wrote: post #189

All I remember from seeing this as a kid is that, in the final scene, River Phoenix asks the hot government agent for her phone number. The number she gives is a real non-555 number--pretty sure it was 818 area code?. You could call that number and hear a message from the character for many years. Was this the only movie ever to do this?

Tossing a few ARG links here, since the heyday of larger games (and especially ones with PTSN connectivity) is old enough some HNs might not have experienced them.

https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0119174/

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_alternate_reality_ga...

It's a shame too, as they were unique. Would love to see a nationally-accessible Meow Wolf tie-in.

PS: ilovebees

Re: Sneakers (1992) – 4K makeover sourced from the original camera negative

#197

Post by dylan604 »

jboggan wrote: post #181
dylan604 wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I also can’t imagine the film masters were trashed, or that the show was composited to video tape. So many shows very much were composited to analog video tape. I personally worked on edit sessions where multiple film-to-tape transfers were composited to 1" then BetacamSP then digital formats like DigiBeta and everything that followed. I get it is hard to grok for eople without direct experience only ever knowing di…

This is spot on. I had a friend working on early streaming license deals, and a typical pattern was getting the streaming rights to a show and then going on a lengthy adventure to find a higher quality master, if any existed. If you see bad transfers or old SD resolution in a digital format I want you to know that someone tried but the originals were in fact lost.

In the early days of streaming, content owners only had what they had sitting on the shelves. Most of those were SD masters that were formatted for broadcast. In the US, that meant 30i sources. Most TV was shot on 24p film, transferred to 30i in a telecine, edited without any regard to that film cadence, and that was that. The opening/closing songs were typically cut from that same footage, and doing an inverse telecine on that content was a nightmare. Everyone of us that dealt with that to supply the early days of streaming content had "so much fun".

Content owners suddenly had a vested interest in making their content look better, and now there's a way to get compensated to have better sources made to provide to those streaming platforms. To find the original film from old SD TV shows would be very rare. Feature films have been scanned from negative many many times. I was part of scanning a studio's entire library to HD. They've since gone back and scanned (or are scanning) again for 4k. Each time the scan is done, money is spent (and it's not cheap).

Now, the streaming platforms have the clout to refuse "subpar" sources now, and can demand that these restorations are the preferred source

Re: Sneakers (1992) – 4K makeover sourced from the original camera negative

#198

Post by ethbr1 »

meifun wrote: post #71

This movie helped me: 1. Relate to a blind student in our school when they could hear things differently than the rest of us. 2. Realize that social engineering is thing and I tried to practice it in high school to gain access to computer rooms where the "fancy" computers were. 3. Realize that a government can steal or in general can be sneaky/secretive.

> Realize that social engineering is thing and I tried to practice it in high school to gain access to computer rooms where the "fancy" computers were.

We realized that door bolts are easy to manually jimmy if not precision-fit.

Thankfully, our computer lab overseer was a hacker at heart, congratulated us, and got the door fixed.

I miss the 90s.

Re: Sneakers (1992) – 4K makeover sourced from the original camera negative

#199

Post by api »

nailer wrote: post #157
api wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't fully remake it. It's a classic. Just watch it with that explanation in mind. It makes it more plausible. Maybe what the mathematician did was crack a gigantic outstanding problem in scaling quantum computers that allowed e.g. extraordinarily effective quantum noise reduction at scale.

I do the same thing with Prometheus - I watch the Weyland TED Talk before the film and view the film as a man that considers himself a god trying to meet god.

That movie was so weird. It had flashes of brilliance but also a really dumb "idiot ball" plot in a lot of ways. Astronauts would never be as stupid as they're depicted in that film, things like "oh gee I think I'll take my helmet off around all this potential biohazard."

It also doesn't really work in the Alien universe at all. It would have been much better had it been set in an entirely different 'verse, maybe even its own things.

IMHO the Alien canon should be: Alien, Alien Romulus, and Aliens, in that order (since Romulus is in fact supposed to occur between those other two in-world). Maybe the sequel to Romulus (and Aliens) could be an updated adaptation of the William Gibson script that begins when Rain reaches the "non-Weyland colony" (which would kinda fit with Gibson's script).

My opinion on Interstellar is similar. It had brilliant moments (and visuals!) but overall I didn't like it. I couldn't get past things like: okay, so we are in a kind of semi post-collapse world apparently run by milquetoast descendants of the Heritage Foundation. Where exactly did they get a starship? Did they just have, like, a warp drive sitting around up on concrete blocks in someone's lawn? What? Also they had to lift off from Earth with chemical rockets, but somehow they're able to lift off from much larger planets later without thinking about delta-V budget at all. Sorry but if you're gonna say it's hard sci-fi it's gotta at least try to know something about physics and have coherent world building.

Yes I'm a sci-fi geek.

Re: Sneakers (1992) – 4K makeover sourced from the original camera negative

#200

Post by happycube »

doublerabbit wrote: post #195
hylaride wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Over the years I’ve met several people that worked in the cartoon industry because where I live (Toronto) used to be an outsourcing market for many 1980s/1990s cartoons. The vast majority of the people that commissioned them, including very successful series, wanted it done as fast as possible to get it to TV ASAP. Often they had toys lines up for Xmas that needed to be synced up with schedules. I know people that ha…

Does it need to be fixed though? If children got on with it then, why cannot we now?

Because children watched them on 13"-25" tube TV's that were designed to make those imperfections look acceptable (for the time), that a modern display blows up to proportions never seen during production even with the best studio displays of the era.

semi-related: I'm visiting my parents with a Sony OLED, and the frame interpolation made parts of Monty Python and the Holy Grail look like it was shot on an HD video camera.

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