Sneakers (1992) – 4K makeover sourced from the original camera negative • Hacker News Board

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

#211

Post by [deleted] » Tue, May 06, 2025, 5:33 PM UTC

reverendsteveii wrote: post #194

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 sarcastic…

[deleted]

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

#212

Post by schlauerfox » Tue, May 06, 2025, 5:36 PM UTC

Aurornis wrote: post #115

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…

The X-Files went the opposite way: The streaming release was remastered from higher quality originals that had been prepared ahead of time for the eventual arrival of higher resolution TV. I’m not surprised that some shows were never archived at higher quality, though. The entertainment industry has a lot of people who just want to get their job done and go home, just like any other industry. Many classic series were…

I know most productions now run so tight they rent their stuff, so once the edit is done and shipped most of the raw footage is all purged. No outtakes or extra footage exist. Actors prefer this for their image, studios will not pay to store any of it, but what a loss.

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

#213

Post by dang » Tue, May 06, 2025, 5:38 PM UTC

mosselman wrote: post #10

dang wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Semi-manually, so I'm glad you included that option :) This question comes up a lot - here's an answer that goes over it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40564558

Wow that is cool! Any chance you could share that Arc extension?

I'd have to do brain surgery on it first, to disentangle all the moderation-only code from code that would be generally useful, but yes I'd love to do this someday. It makes reading HN (and posting) so much easier from a desktop browser (if you like keyboard shortcuts, that is).

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

#214

Post by myvoiceismypass » Tue, May 06, 2025, 5:40 PM UTC

One of my favorite fun facts about Sneakers is that their headquarters was the upper level at the Fox Theatre in Oakland! I think about that every time I go to a show there now.

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

#215

Post by Karellen » Tue, May 06, 2025, 5:41 PM UTC

Cyphase wrote: post #38

When I was a kid we had a VHS recording of Sneakers, with the beginning of an episode of Letterman at the end. I remember my mom liking it. Fond memories. I need to watch it again. A couple of scenes: Carl: We've got customers. Martin: Shoes? Carl: Expensive. Martin: *fixes tie* Look busy, guys. And another: *after apparently inconveniencing Liz, the group is walking out* Cosmo: We'll call you a cab. Liz: "Thank you.…

    Marty: Organised crime?
    Cosmo: Trust me, it ain't that organised!

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

#216

Post by wizzwizz4 » Tue, May 06, 2025, 5:45 PM UTC

schlauerfox wrote: post #210

ethbr1 wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I really enjoyed the original Valve's Portal BBS you could dial into Aperture Science and read on the history. The writers at Valve really wrote some great silly backstory about a shower curtain company developing quantum portals, as some sort of tool to get in and out of showers. I'm not sure that's cannon anymore though.

I think that still is (per Portal 2), but some of the original details aren't – like how Cave Johnson poisons himself, and how much his excellent decision-making was influenced by said poisoning.

https://www.moddb.com/games/portal/features/aperture-science... is a transcript of https://combineoverwiki.net/wiki/File:ApertureScience.com_ba....

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

#217

Post by RajT88 » Tue, May 06, 2025, 5:47 PM UTC

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…

For sure, Matt Groening and co. had no idea how much of a phenomenon The Simpsons was going to be early on.

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

#218

Post by wdr1 » Tue, May 06, 2025, 5:57 PM UTC

jackgavigan wrote: post #106

One of the great things about Sneakers is that the McGuffin's core concept still holds up as reasonably credible 30+ years later. I first saw this movie in the mid-90s, and it sparked a mild fascination with how cryptography (specifically, RSA) works, that arguably influenced my career path. Fun fact: Leonard Adleman (the A in RSA) drafted the words and slides used for the lecture scene: https://molecularscience.usc.…

> Fun fact: Leonard Adleman (the A in RSA) drafted the words and slides used for the lecture scene: https://molecularscience.usc.edu/sneakers/

One of the few movies to have a mathematical consultant in the credits!

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

#219

Post by bravoetch » Tue, May 06, 2025, 5:57 PM UTC

bink wrote: post #165

psanford wrote: post #162

I was shocked when I rewatched this recently just how good the cryptography technobabble is in this movie. Specifically the scene where the professor is presenting on breaking public key cryptography. The very first thing he mentions is a number field sieve. Nice work hiring whatever cryptography consultant that got for this scene.

I think the only part that really pulled me out of the movie was when they were testing the device and it was decrypting a dial-up feed random character by random character on the screen. It wasn't "Hackers" bad but it was still pretty unbelievable.

There are a couple of command line play-things to recreate that effect, here's one:

https://github.com/bartobri/no-more-secrets

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

#220

Post by tillinghast » Tue, May 06, 2025, 6:04 PM UTC

api wrote: post #199

nailer wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 eve…

> 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."

My head-canon explanation for this is that a good portion of the crew specifically were not astronauts -- they were experts in their field (geology, anthropology, etc.). And true-to-form, they were dismissive of other experts telling them NO, NO DO NOT REMOVE YOUR HELMET. And once the first few were exposed the others decided well, if there's a problem with it we're already screwed anyway.