Why Some Films Can Never Be Remastered - Video Tech Explained

Those people would say whatever they want to say about this whole "A.I. upscaling" thing... "A.I. upscaling" will not work. All of those people that discuss about A.I. upscaling are way too biased. Regardless about what those people say about A.I. upscaling, A.I. upscaling will not work in any way. For any work that contains motion pictures, whenever it comes to a low resolution, it will remain that way as it was produced that way. That is only the case for any work for which its finished product is not on truly optical film. I have had enough of this bias about A.I. scaling.

Never say never.

How come Lucasfilm didn’t do a 4K remaster of 'Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith' by doing a 4K scan of a 35mm print. That would have been much easier than uspcaling the original 2K digital intermediate to 4K.

Interesting video, this was a video that I’ve been wanting someone to shed some light on this very thing. Thanks for the upload. Pretty informative, as I have often wondered why some movies look great and some look like s**t.

"Look better" is subjective, resolution isn't really the factor. But you can still make film prints out of prequels' digital files and scan them back in 4K.

I like that you used the proper logos for all the Star Wars movies.

and when we move to 8K we will be in the same boat with all the movies recorded with digital 4K cameras. There just wont be enought detail in the master to upscale to 8K.

* VHS had about half the effective resolution of a DVD, not even to mention the rather large amount of analog artifacts even on commercial prerecorded tapes. Acting like both mediums are the same quality shows a historical blind spot in the authors knowledge, with DVD's having actually been very popular exactly because of their amazing image quality at the time. On top of that DVD was mostly ok as a resolution for the TV sizes we had back then, up to the point that people argued at what TV size (vs. distance from it) HD would even be worth it. And this is coming from somebody that is virtually only watch 4K these days.

* I made it just short of the 10 minute line and the only information that I would consider new to what I assume is the average audience of this channel (but not to me thanks to way better channels...) was that old film has had a higher resolution than a BR, which is still not that uncommon of an information considering how long we have UHD BR / 4K movies and the discussion about what is real 4K and what not.

* Like, what about color timing, digital intermediates, chroma sampling, color spaces and all that? The fact that stuff looks better at a higher resolution isn't exactly rocket science. At least you could have talked about the scanning process and how / why movies often get scanned at a higher quality than the target medium has.

* BTW, many DVD looked bad (well, worse than what the medium can do) is actually because often those scans were still the ones done to make the VHS or the Laser disk. Yes, they were scanning at a higher quality than necessary back then as well already.

* More of a nitpick but actually upscalers can create additional details per frame by in cooperating temporal data. Both DLSS 2 for PC gaming as well as the camera software in many phones works roughly that way.

Are you sure it’s possible to re-render the efx shots done in the late 90s to 4k?

As with camera footage, weren’t they stuck in 2k land?

On a side note- Star Wars original theatrical release ran well into the 80s. Several generations of dupe print were made for years. I still recall the terribly dirty picture. 😅

I like that shirt.

Some 35mm can go up to 8k to 12k 😮 & 70mm up to 18k 🤯lol .

Better do a remake.

Correction: There's only SIX parts to the Skywalker saga.

HD format was a disaster 😅

Hey do you run Hollywood?

How did you completely skip the part where the 35mm films also had to be changed to a 4:3 aspect ratio from 16:9 for those earlier TV broadcasts, VHS and DVD? It wasn't really about rolling it through the pasta maker. No the prequels can't be easily upconverted to a higher bit depth. They look pretty good anyway.

You have it a bit backwards. The image quality or resolution of a 35mm film transferred to standard definition is indeed lower. But a high resolution video monitor/TV is less forgiving and shows more of the imperfections of the film emulsions and video noise. The oldert CRT monitors often helped smooth some of the roughness out of the image. Plus as a viewer you were often comparing the image to what you were getting off rabbit ears or your local cable system to the VHS or DVD rather than a side by side comparison of the film projected at a theatre and the video version or today's 4K video.

Most movies in the 2000s were shot on 35mm film. Until arri alexa came out, you can still enjoy the images of this camera (sometimes still used), although it doesn’t record in 4K.

When we're talking about things like Bluray or DVD, we use "disc", not disk. Fix yo captions.

Cotton Eye Joe. Delivered dead pan. Laughed out loud, literally.

Current advancement in AI also makes upscaling low resolution digital footage much more feasible now, added to the fact that 8K really don't offer much advantage in image quality at normal viewing distance compared to a 4K screen means that we are already hitting diminishing returns at 4K, and 8K at this point will only be beneficial if you are having a close up look at the details, which isn't really what people do when they are watching a movie, so I think 4K is all we need for rendering VFX and animations for the foreseeable future.

I really enjoyed that, thank you. Fascinating stuff, well explained.

I was hoping the use of DNR on the original trilogy 4K discs would be covered

Squeaky voice, erratic hand movement
But informative

Can’t the prequels be transferred to film then scanned digitally into 4K?

So, what exactly is expensive about re-rendering in 4K? If they already have the CGI elements, and they already have the computers, what are the costs? Electricity and lost opportunity-cost from not using the computers for something else? What am I missing?

Another great video! Really well done. So much great information in there. LOVE IT!

Keep in mind the infamous CGI and other changes from the Special Editions and The Phantom Menance would have been DCI 2K so that would make it impossible to be 4K without upscaling.

<cough> AI.

Every year, research in the field gets better at approximating missing content. So in the next 10 years, it will almost certainly be so good it could, with the proper training sets, cheaply/quickly upscale even SD into 16K video that would be effectively indistinguishable from what the original real world scene was (or what the rendered scenes could have been).

People who say "2K" need to be put behind bars. 2K refers to something that is approximately 2000 pixels wide, but the resolutions used for that is either 2560x1440 or 2048x1080, which basically nobody uses. It would be more fair to call 1920x1080 "2K".
But really, stick with saying 1440p.
Also, 1440p is more than enough, 4k is a massive waste. Anyone claiming otherwise is either on massive doses of copium or they're in an extreme minority that has gigantic screens uncomfortably close.

Very informative.

You look like a ten year old, yet you have more hair on your arms than a grizzly bear.

I am wondering however, how expensive it would really be to re-render those digital scenes.
The last prequel movie came out in 2005. A challenge will be to get the software running. But rendering time and cost... the cost of computational power has been reduced by a factor of 10'000 at least. Hardware has improved by a factor of 10'000 to 10'000'000 depending on the workload.

Still want 35mm film to make big comeback because I’m sorry but new movies cameras colors look awful

Thats exactly the information I was looking for, I'am trying to understand Nolans 70mm new movie. Thanks.

A lot of big studio movies are still mastered at 2k today. Example Avengers: Endgame was shot in 6.5k resolution but the post production and final master was made in dci 2k. 4K release are then probably upscaled from the 2k master.

A 35mm scan of TPM came out recently and it is probably the best-looking I've ever seen it.

AI can do it!

AI is already pretty good at extrapolating the un-captured details in a shot.
I expect in the near future we'll even be able to reconstruct new angles of a scene, or 360º perspective or even a 3D rendering of an Attack of the Clones scene allow viewers to move virtually through the environment of Kamino while an accurate reconstruction of Obi-Wan and Jango Fett fight around us.

Of course this option will be better for some remastering some media than others as it would dispense with all the creative choices originally made by the cinematic editor.
Still would be cool to virtually run alongside the characters trying to escape the Death Star, with an infinite amount of detail recreated as we choose to get close up to the walking carpet in our face.

This is still a better situation than Babylon 5 where the live-action bits were shot on HD video but all the effects were done digitally...in 240p. The CGI effects looked awesome in the '90s but absolutely horrendous today.

Ok, so 15 minutes just to explain that the main reason why they won't look good great as the other it's just because of the filming format...It fits within a sentence.

Why hasn't the unaltered original Star Wars trilogy been released on Blu-ray?

Well done. I enjoyed this. I appreciate your effort to bridge the gap between the imaging technologies and the consumer's understanding of these products. It's so interesting to think about how "older" technologies like silver-grain film retain properties that we had overlooked in the recent decades.

It's insane the amount of things I learn just by watching your videos! Keep up with the great work!

The thumbnail 🤓☝️

stop yelling at me!!!

Honestly, excellent explanation

If I remember correctly, there's an interview with George in the Star Wars Archive book about those Sony cameras. I'm not mistaken those camera models were pretty much the first ever made in conjuction with Lucasfilm based on specs they delivered to Sony.

So if everything is done at 4K now, will that cause similar problems if/when the standard reaches 8 or 16K?
"Future proofing" films at the current ideal quality sounds flawed to me.