very cool movie
love the e-commerce website for online purchase of said movie
Sneakers (1992) – 4K makeover sourced from the original camera negative
141–150 of 306 posts
Re: Sneakers (1992) – 4K makeover sourced from the original camera negative
#142Re: 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…
Shows like The Simpsons that were only made for broadcast never had a film negative. It was likely mastered to analog tape.
They're solidly pre-digital. Somewhere, the individual frames were drawn/painted on cel, were they not? In principle, remastering should still be possible.
Re: Sneakers (1992) – 4K makeover sourced from the original camera negative
#143Featured here often.- ... particularly sadly, at Earl Jones' passing.- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41493927 Greatest movie :) PS. The quote on "goowill not being something the government does" reads so poignant now ...
Part of my headcanon for Sneakers is that Agent Abbot (Jones) is actually Admiral Greer (Jones' character from The Hunt for Red October / Patriot Games / Clear and Present Danger ), set a bit earlier in his career, and going under a codename while working CyberOps for NSA ;-)
Same!
Re: Sneakers (1992) – 4K makeover sourced from the original camera negative
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
> you can tell so much from someone's shoes You can make educated guesses based on apparel of all sorts - but you are always guessing .
Yes but many times, these can be quite valuable inferences. Shoes are indeed a valuable source of information about a person. I knew at least one BH case manager who really paid attention to them. Shoes are expensive, very durable, and typically one of those items that people have only a few pairs of. So while someone can easily change their outfit to match a situation, place, or mood for the day, they may be less li…
> Shoes are expensive, very durable, and typically one of those items that people have only a few pairs of.
Maybe that used to be true, but modern shoes while expensive are not very durable, and most people have several pairs today.
Re: Sneakers (1992) – 4K makeover sourced from the original camera negative
#145I never understood the love for this movie, it just seems lame to see all of these caricatures being created that reinforce hacker stereotypes - and not even in a good way.
Do you love the movie Hackers? I submit there are two camps of moviegoing nerds: those who love Sneakers and those who love Hackers. I will admit though, many many years later I softened to the sheer goofness of Hackers (which offput me much initially).
I love both, for similar but different reasons. Hackers captures the naive idea of the scene really quite well. It's goofiness allows the naivety to remain, past the overwrought characters and Hollywood's downright misunderstanding.
It feels like it's accidentally great.
But then again, maybe it just tickles to the surface the sense of wonder I had way back then.
Re: Sneakers (1992) – 4K makeover sourced from the original camera negative
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
That, and its cousin the shaky cam. "Let's make things difficult to see and hear. That makes for better cinema!" Jackie Chan once discussed action scenes in US movies versus his movies. Western films: cut before the punch lands, maybe cut a few more times. Hong Kong moves: just show the action in one scene.
A great example of this is Hard Boiled 1992, the Hospital Shootout. I think audiences are beginning to appreciate continuous scenes and are becoming more frequent in western films. The most recent one I can think of is John Wick 4, when it goes top down. Some of the recent Michael Bay movies are so aggressive when it comes to cuts, the average shot length must be 2 or 3 seconds.
I once sat in on a TV production class, early in the schoolyear before my schedule got sorted out and it turned out I couldn't take it. So I was in it for one day.
But the teacher had the incoming students do a very simple exercise: He turned on some broadcast TV, and told us all to bang our fists on our desks every time there was a scene cut.
Then he changed the channel a few times. Soap opera. Newscast. PBS. Cartoons. Movie. Commercial break.
Our hands were sore by the end of it, but it stuck with me -- every time I watch older or foreign cinema, I am cognizant of how much longer the shots are.
Re: Sneakers (1992) – 4K makeover sourced from the original camera negative
#147Re: 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…
Speaking of, I am desperately trying to get hold of Then Came Bronson that is of reasonable quality. Great and well known TV-series that came out in 1969. It's simply impossible to get a good rip though. The only copy that exists (as far as I know) came from a VHS recording of a TV-channel in the 1980s. But surely the film rolls still exist?
A while ago I found a few episodes of a 1950s crime drama/noir series called M Squad (the M is for "murder") on Youtube. I don't recall exactly how but probably because someone mentioned it was a direct inspiration for short-lived Police Squad series and later the Naked Gun films.
Anyways, I went to see if there was an official DVD release of it, and there was but several of the episodes were sourced from off-air TV recordings from reruns in the 1980s because those were the only copies the distributor could find! They were originally planning to release the set without them but asked fans if they could source copies which is how they ended up with those recordings. I didn't end up purchasing it because even the episodes where they had a better quality source weren't mastered particularly well to the point where several reviews said they were borderline unwatchable due to the image getting crushed into murky darkness thanks to the noir lighting and DVD MPEG-2 compression.
Re: Sneakers (1992) – 4K makeover sourced from the original camera negative
#148Re: 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…
> can’t imagine the film masters were trashed, or that the show was composited to video tape The first few seasons were meant to be just a segment inside a sketch-based tv show (i.e. some of the most disposable, worst-aging, least-resyndicated material that tv studios will ever produce) and the budget was very small.
Nothing that anyone’s watching on Disney+ was from The Tracy Ullman Show. And by the second or third season of the show proper it was already a bona fide cultural phenomenon, so one would hope (hah) Fox might’ve been a bit forward thinking by then. Alas.
Re: Sneakers (1992) – 4K makeover sourced from the original camera negative
#149Anyone noticed that streaming services start to compromise on quality? With Netflix it's been like that for a while. Apple TV+ seems to be the best. I really want to get into Blu-ray now, looking for a decent player.
Yeah. I see overcompression on a lot of shows. Dark scenes and star fields tend to make it obvious. Three Body Problem was the worst -- I imagine it would have been consistently visually spectacular if they hadn't compressed it to shit. I've seen it on Apple TV too though-- e.g. really visible on Silo title screens. Love, Death and Robots on Netflix quality was great.
Disney's Coco did it for me. There were so many scenes with so much visual detail, streaming compression absolutely wrecked it. I've seen it on Blu-ray since and it's an entirely different experience.
How they allowed the release to streaming without manually adjusting the compression for those scenes, I don't understand, but someone was slacking.
Re: Sneakers (1992) – 4K makeover sourced from the original camera negative
#150I was pretty sad the other day when I chose 'Setec Astronomy' for a trivia team name & nobody got the reference
I have a sticker for it on my laptop. You're not alone out there.