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Plano man keeping Blockbuster alive

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Re: Plano man keeping Blockbuster alive

#121

Post by Dylan16807 »

scarface_74 wrote: post #84
roywashere wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks. Not only is the original link paywalled it is also not accessible from EU because GDPR and they think it is easier to block us than to not have so much third party cookies or such :sad:

Blame your government. The only thing that the 99 section/11 chapter GDPR accomplished was to make the web worse with shitty Cookie notices.

Websites don't need notices if they're not doing anything shady or unnecessary tracking, and just about every cookie notices I see is going against either the wording or the intent of the law.

If they want to be annoying on purpose, we should blame them, not the GDPR.

Re: Plano man keeping Blockbuster alive

#122

Post by amyjess »

rightbyte wrote: post #50
vlunkr wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's interesting that when we revisit older movies, all the way up to the 90s, we're watching them at much much higher quality than we did originally. Special effects, costumes and sets are all much more believable when you're viewing them on a little grainy screen. I think some older movies are unfairly judged by how they look on hardware that couldn't have existed at the time.

Theatres were a thing back then. But ye concerning TV you are right. My best example of that is playing Ocarina of Time on a big modern TV ... it was so much more impressive on a small ctr.

For video games, there's another factor: much of the artwork in old-school games was specifically designed to be altered by both CRT scanlines and NTSC composite effects. So many sprites in 2D games and textures in 3D games rely on NTSC effects to antialias the graphics and turn dithering into real gradients and you're missing out on so much with a modern screen.

The closest you can get to that experience now is to use an emulator and apply some heavy shaders (some emulators have built-in shaders, but if one doesn't I'd recommend installing reshade and setting up CRT-Royale and GTUv050).

Re: Plano man keeping Blockbuster alive

#123

Post by jvalencia »

usrn wrote: post #120
Johnny555 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

today's AI is pretty good It's pretty good at suggesting exactly the same type of movies you've watched before, but not so good at those "but how about something completely different, but something that I'll still like" suggestions, that's where a real human movie buff can help.

I haven't thought about it but most of the movies I've really enjoyed were recommended to me by my dad, girlfriend, or my brother in law. I can't think of anything I really enjoyed from a recommendation algorithm. The last movie I tried I certainly didn't enjoy.

The reality is likely that the algorithms are trying to increase viewership, not quality of views. So they are likely to feed you things that get you to watch another thing, rather than things that are worth watching, leave you satisfied, and off doing something else.

Re: Plano man keeping Blockbuster alive

#124

Post by SenHeng »

pessimizer wrote: post #102
reaperducer wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Special effects, costumes and sets are all much more believable when you're viewing them on a little grainy screen Can confirm. I recently watched Ghostbusters on Blu-ray. Wow. The special effects are really obvious.

> The special effects are really obvious. I've never understood this complaint. Almost all special effects are obvious, because they depict things that aren't real. I don't remember watching Ghostbusters in the theater and wondering if those were really ghosts.

Some people just cannot (or refuse to) recognise all the noise you can see around old/cheap/low quality effects. I often watched those silly Japanese horror varieties where they would show you a grainy video of some dark place, and then maybe a grainy shot of someone crawling out of something. But you know it's two separate things spliced together because the grains are of a different size, or when one area is gray-scale while another is simply decolourised to match. My friends could never tell the difference.

Re: Plano man keeping Blockbuster alive

#125

Post by SenHeng »

laumars wrote: post #74
tablespoon wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think we all forget though just how poor the quality was back then, and what we've become accustomed to, with VHS being 240 lines, DVD 480p, etc. It's like reminiscing about the first iPhone and then looking at one and realizing how damn small it actually was compared to modern versions. I think the "what we've become accustomed to" is the most important factor there. Back in the VHS/NTSC days, without experience…

Really? I did. - Tapes would get chewed by the player - Took an age to find the right recording (you’d spend an age constantly rewinding) - Tapes would degrade the more you used them - sometimes they wouldn’t even sync vertically with your TV. Requiring all sorts of fun and games tuning your hardware - audio was often muffled and sounded like it was played through a sock - if you shared a household there was always t…

Back here in Asia, aka land of the pirates and DivX, we could quickly moved to CDs, CDRs and VCDs. I think the huge proliferation of VCDs in Asia stunted the spread of DVDs for quite some time because they were just so cheap.

It was a hassle having to switching discs midway through a movie, but there were a few enterprising people who sold players that let you insert two discs!

Re: Plano man keeping Blockbuster alive

#126

Post by Anthony-G »

jefftk wrote: post #91
thanatos519 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Television that was made on film has held up pretty well. I'm watching ST:TNG at 1080p now and it's visually stunning. Everything else about it is still awesome, too.

Are you watching the original or the remaster? The latter was only possible because it was originally shot in film, yes, but it was also an incredible amount of work. They needed to reassemble every episode from film!

They did a fabulous job of the Star Trek transfers (I’m currently watching the original series).

However, some studios put very little effort into their film to HD transfers. Last year, I watched Buffy, the Vampire Slayer on Disney+ and its transfer from film is woefully bad. For certain scenes, the picture quality looked like upscaled standard definition and these transitions were very jarring. Also, whatever filter they used for grain removal made the flesh tones and facial features look “wrong”.

Even worse was the wholly unnecessary conversion from 4:3 to 16:9. The resulting composition of many scenes was distractingly bad. At one stage, they the second camera unit can be seen filming the action from the side!

Edit: Fortunately, Disney+ have made The Simpsons (another transfer from film) available in 4:3 – as well as the default 16:9. There’s a setting in the UI to play it in 4:3.

Re: Plano man keeping Blockbuster alive

#127

Post by larrywright »

vlunkr wrote: post #31
awacs wrote: post #26

Growing up in the 80s with VHS, Betamax, Laserdiscs (if anyone recalls), and being a dj in the late 90s when the thought of a "USB stick instead of traveling with all this vinyl was an impossibility", makes this whole nostalgia tour a fun one. I think we all forget though just how poor the quality was back then, and what we've become accustomed to, with VHS being 240 lines, DVD 480p, etc. It's like reminiscing about…

It's interesting that when we revisit older movies, all the way up to the 90s, we're watching them at much much higher quality than we did originally. Special effects, costumes and sets are all much more believable when you're viewing them on a little grainy screen. I think some older movies are unfairly judged by how they look on hardware that couldn't have existed at the time.

There’s a video floating around out there somewhere from the 80s show Knight Rider. One of the things about that car was that it could drive itself. I always assumed they used some sort of complex remote control system to film those scenes, but the video clearly shows that it’s just a guy wearing a suit that looks like the seat in the car. I guess simple wins out over cool.

EDIT: Here’s a link to the tweet with the video. https://twitter.com/BryanPassifiume/status/13356368964881203...

Re: Plano man keeping Blockbuster alive

#130

Post by jefurii »

Anthony-G wrote: post #126
jefftk wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you watching the original or the remaster? The latter was only possible because it was originally shot in film, yes, but it was also an incredible amount of work. They needed to reassemble every episode from film!

They did a fabulous job of the Star Trek transfers (I’m currently watching the original series). However, some studios put very little effort into their film to HD transfers. Last year, I watched Buffy, the Vampire Slayer on Disney+ and its transfer from film is woefully bad. For certain scenes, the picture quality looked like upscaled standard definition and these transitions were very jarring. Also, whatever filter…

I don't know about Buffy but some later Star Trek series like Deep Space 9 will be really hard to remaster because they were shot on video instead of film. The detail just isn't there to be enhanced.
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