> Painting out these movie mistakes as part of a restoration is wrong. What's in the movie is in the movie, and altering the movie to this extent is a form of revisionist history. Cinema is worse off when over-aggressive restorations alter the action within the frame. To me, this is equivalent to swapping out an actor's performance with a different take, or changing the music score during an action sequence, or replacing a puppet creature with a computer graphics version of the same creature decades after release.
It's really not the equivalent though. I don't see anything wrong with fixing a license plate or removing a reflection or a modern-day wristwatch.
It's the equivalent of fixing a spelling error in a novel, or a wrong chord in sheet music. None of the filmmakers wanted those things there. They weren't done with intent. They were just mistakes.
Changing music or replacing a puppet with CG, of course I'm against. That's changing the art of it. Different music makes you feel different. A CG creature has a different personality. Just like you don't want to replace vocabulary in a novel to make it more modern-day.
I think it's usually pretty easy to distinguish the two. The first ones would have been corrected at the time if they'd noticed and gone for another take. They take us out of the movie if we notice them. The latter category is a reflection of the technology, resources, and intentional choices. They keep us in the world of moviemaking as it was at that time.
>> Painting out these movie mistakes as part of a restoration is wrong.
> It's really not the equivalent though. I don't see anything wrong with fixing a license plate or removing a reflection or a modern-day wristwatch.
I think it depends on the primary objective of the restoration. If I’m trying to preserve history, I shouldn’t fix errors. If I’m trying to make a (by implication derivative) work that maximizes enjoyability for (new) audiences, then it’s ok to fix.
e.g. a long time ago, I once transferred vinyl recordings of an extremely amateur community musical group to CD.
After thinking long and hard, I decided to fix recording technology flaws (a bad hum) and vinyl degradation flaws (crackles, dust, etc). But I didn’t fix any of the musical performance flaws.
Bottom line: I decided to respect the history of the performance, and disrespect the history of the recording and playback technology/medium.
In 100 years (probably sooner), the vast majority of people won't be watching our films anymore. Those deep catalogs of IP have lower value with each passing year.
Films are becoming less and less popular with new forms of entertainment that are more immediate, more democratized or individualistic. Our dopamine is being juiced and our attention getting sucked into games, social media, and all other kinds of long tail attractors. Influencers are bigger than Hollywood stars. They simply cater to more interests. Distribution and production are no longer hard problems, so you don't need to build up a Hollywood star.
Film is becoming what radio used to be. It may never become as niche as the radio drama is today, but it certainly won't have the same limitless trajectory we thought it would have pre-pandemic.
Whatever we do today to "fix" films or make them more accessible is accomplishing one thing: extending their lifespan for as long as most (average, non-film connoisseur) people might still be interested in watching.
I also found this take interesting coming from someone at ILM where they grafted Hayden Christensen into Return of the Jedi.
Though in this day and age I can’t help but ask “why not both?” It feels easy to add a choice to your viewing experience. If they can do it for Black Mirror then they can certainly ask up front “which version would you like to see?”
> I also found this take interesting coming from someone at ILM where they grafted Hayden Christensen into Return of the Jedi.
Presumably the author would be opposed to that as well. Just because his employer did it doesn't mean he approves of it.
I literally just finished watching Episode IV, the one with the CGI makeover. The extra alien CGI in Mos Eisley is awful. It doesn’t stand up at all, with the one exception of the Jaba scene which gets away with it because it is pretty fun. I wish we’d watched the original version.
Is it easy to find the original? I’d love a copy of each on my Plex server, but I have had trouble finding an original copy. I admit I may not know where or how to look; advice is welcome!
What you are looking for is this - https://www.thestarwarstrilogy.com/project-4k77/
"97% of project 4K77 is from a single, original 1977 35mm Technicolor release print, scanned at full 4K, cleaned at 4K, and rendered at 4K."
Opening scene comparison - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1b47UP6ZGI
I’m a lot more bothered by the change to the color grading in the “after” of Alien than the minor change to the effect, and by the picture looking way shittier in the “fixed” Goodfellas shot (the first is blu ray, the second “blu ray and streaming”, so hopefully the example was taken from streaming and that’s why it looks so much worse)
Oh yeah. Totally agreed on not changing the color grading. That's as big as changing the music.
With blogs that take screenshots of 4K content though, sometimes that's using a media player with poor HDR color decoding though. Bad HDR always winds up with a green tint, that's the telltale sign. VLC is the worst with that.
But I don't think that's the case here. There are definitely a lot of rereleases with badly done color.
> VLC is the worst with that
So, what would you recommend instead? This is waaay outside my wheelhouse to judge.
It was taken from streaming but that’s the “new” color grade
There is some value in the mistakes and limitations of older movies, I am sure if you look it up people who can explain it far better than me can give lots of examples, I saw a video once about the growing trend of analog horror where people intentionally watch older horror movies in older storage and display formats like VHS and CRT televisions, because in many ways the high def modern tv screens and 4K mastered prints actually take away from the atmosphere of the original movie that was made keeping the limitations of the technology of the time. Wes Anderson also talks about how watching the fur pattern constantly changing on the model of King Kong in the black and white stop-motion movie due to the puppeteers touching the model to manipulate it inspired him to do the same in his Fantastic Mr Fox movie
Are they watching made-for-TV movies? Otherwise I’d think the movies would have been made for theater viewing, and watching it in 4k on a big modern TV would be a lot closer to how the creators wanted you to see it than using VHS and an old TV.
It's similar to how old games look so different on modern hardware: the pixel art on a current-day screen looks like high-fidelity perfectly sharp uniformly colored squares, while the "pixel art" of old games rendered on a CRT didn't look like "pixel art" at all but rather like high-fidelity art rendered on a low-fidelity screen. There's a lot of detail implied by the way CRTs render what's encoded in software as perfect squares.
Illustrative images: <https://imgur.com/gallery/SSpcDzA>
> It's the equivalent of fixing a spelling error in a novel,
I was surprised to learn that this is a thing and has been for a long time.
The trouble with spelling errors is they drop me out of the immersion in the story. I recall reading one that averaged 2 spelling errors per page. The story and writing was fine, but reading it was like driving on a beautiful country road and hitting a pothole every hundred yards. I finally just gave up on the book.
Spelling errors also are sometimes not introduced by the author, but by the typesetter or publisher. In a preface to the Lord of the Rings, Tolkien complains about how many revisions it took to get typesetters to type the book correctly, especially with the words that he had made up or created new conventions for (elves vs. elfs, for example).
I believe it was a historical mistake to have so many white men in cinema. Like correcting a spelling error, we shall use AI to edit these films to recast them with black and brown women who represent the global majority.
> It's the equivalent of fixing a spelling error in a novel, or a wrong chord in sheet music.
Your analogies don't pass a simple self-check-- they are vastly different in scope.
At worst a spelling error will create a single alternative spelling in history. Wrong chords, however, typically create entire branches of full pieces of music that include allusions to and variations upon the wrong chord. For example-- there's no way to "correct" the C major chord in Rachmaninoff's Variations on a Theme by Chopin. What are you going to do, change every single variation in Rachmaninoff's piece to reflect the correct chord (C minor) from Chopin's prelude?
It gets even more complicated in jazz where chord substitutions are not only expected but often supersede the original chords. Even more to the point-- a lot of the die-hard Charlie Parker fans not only love the recording he made while obviously drunk, they love it in spite of Parker's wishes for nobody to ever hear it it (much less repeatedly play it and talk about it).
That's all to say a) correcting an entrenched wrong chord is no simplistic task, and b) in any case it's wrong to assume that the artist's intentions are always the chief concern.
The analogy was fine, you're just stretching it too far.
Of course there are times when it's better to leave a "wrong" chord in music, but it's incredibly common for sheet music to have unintentional errors, especially in an ensemble setting. If trumpets are playing a unison part but 1 and 2 have a Bb and trumpet 3 has a B natural nobody thinks twice about fixing the trumpet 3 part. That's the analogy, not jazz and Rachmaninoff
Why oh why did the music for Rocky & Bullwinkle change for the dvd release? It's horrible. The R&B on VHS have the original music.
They didn't have the license and actually got sued for the VHS release.
https://old.reddit.com/r/FrostbiteFalls/comments/1flr8ue/fra...
Thank you, at last I have an explanation!
As for the people responsible: You Maniacs! You blew it up! Ah, damn you! God damn you all to hell!
Its almost always a rights issue with changes to movie and TV soundtracks.
And video games too. GTA 4 has had that issue, and digital copies of the game have had music (which Rockstar no longer has the rights to) patched out.
If you have wide taste in film and TV, at some point you have to turn to piracy (and/or fan edits) to get the “real thing”. Impossible or impractical to get it any other way.
Because of expired licenses to use the original music. You can see the same thing happening with later releases of media. As an example, DVD releases of Scrubs were known to have switched out many songs in the entire show.
This happens in the streaming days too. I believe Arrested Development was one where when it came to streaming they had to change the music.
agree to disagree
Yeah, I knew there must be a debate about this in the comments the moment I saw it.
Honestly, I personally disagree with the sentiment on all levels. Meaning, I agree with your observation that there are degrees to "restoration", and fixing a mistake is just not the same as changing music.
But then, I also have no sympathy to your objection of changing music or replacing a puppet with CG. I mean, I may like the old take better, but whatever, I'm not the one who made the movie. The people who made this particular cut for this particular release made it (duh). And these may or may be not the same directors and producers that made the cut you consider "the original one". It's their vision. Surely, it may seem surprising to a naïve viewer that it's not the director the movie is attributed to who "made it" in its entirety, but this is just never the case and obviously any cinema enthusiast knows it all too well anyway.
(But then I should probably mention that my fundamental disagreement with the sentiment spreads way farther than that, and I myself consider it kinda extreme. I often would be fine with the kind of "restoration" that essentially destroys the original thing. This would be off-topic to explain it here, because it wouldn't be about the movies anymore, but I just think that too much respect for the great things of the past often leads to losing sight of why these things were made in the first place. They were meant to be great at the time, not to be respected as a very old pile of rubbish a couple of thousands years later.)
The only thing I am kinda objecting to is when changes made reflect the current political agenda in one way or another (i.e. censorship, be it taboo on display of tits on TV, cutting out statements that seem "politically incorrect" at the time and place of the release, removing some persona non-grata who made a very minor cameo appearance in the original movie or anything else like that). But, again, I don't really object to that because "they don't have the right to do it", but because it's just irritatingly stupid and makes me roll my eyes. It doesn't necessarily make the movie worse or even substantially different (I might not even notice), but unlike with remastering of the original movie, the intent clearly isn't to make it "better" (in their opinion), but just acting out of fear to cause trouble by displaying today something that was fine yesterday as is.
What I think is kinda lacking is very clear and non-ambiguous versioning of movies. I am not that much of a movie enthusiast myself, but some people obviously care if you can see the original number-plate falling off the car, and it would be nice if these people could easily refer to that particular edit they like better. They kinda always do it anyway, but that only happens if they need to specifically mention this number plate falling off, and normally they try to pretend that 10 edits made for 10 releases on different media in different countries are all the same movie, which (almost by definition) is not the case. I mean, for books we have versions and ISBNs, and it's normal to reference specifically that, not just one of the authors and the title. Should be standard practice for movies too.
Seeing the original live action footage reminds how challenging these productions must have been for the actors. There's nothing around you but green screen and a stunt rigger. The dialog sucks and you're little more than a puppet in these action sequences, week after week of shoots.
Lucas wanted to push the digital envelope, but the contemporary Harry Potter films also by ILM have aged much better because they relied on physical sets and practical effects as much as possible. You can tell the actors are actually within a world.
I hate editing mistakes more. The Aviator has quite a few of these where for example in cut A two characters talk by walking side by side, in cut B they stop and turn towards each other (still talking), and in cut C they continue the talking but you can see cut A and C are the continuation of each other and cut B was inserted in the middle https://files.catbox.moe/dljiiw.mp4
And that's just one example that film is full of those. Here is another jarring one https://files.catbox.moe/9m3gjq.mp4
Despite that it won the Academy Award for Best Editing...
You might be interested to know that in terms of editing skill, physical matching/continuity is the least important thing to get right:
https://www.studiobinder.com/blog/walter-murch-rule-of-six/
Anybody can edit a scene so that there are no inconsistencies. The art of editing comes from maximizing emotional impact, then the story, then rhythm. When editors sacrifice matching for those, it's not a mistake -- it's intentional.
The fact is, editors work with the footage they're given -- reshoots happen when new scenes are needed or footage is unusable, but not for continuity errors. If the most emotionally impactful combination of shots has a continuity error, the worse for continuity.
I’ve managed to make myself so sensitive to this that I get all tense when there’s a multi-camera setup for a conversation, waiting for the moment when they cut from A to B and someone’s hands or head have teleported to a slightly (and sometimes not slightly!) different position.
Very few such sequences complete without my noticing some spot where shots don’t match up.
Another one is key lights reflected in eyeballs. Nearly ruins Jackson’s LOTR trilogy for me, it’s in basically every damn scene. In several shots you can practically diagram out their whole lighting rig from a the reflections on an actor’s eye, so many lights are plainly and distinctly visible. You see it some in lots of movies but OMG it’s bad in those.
I have always considered it an actors job to ensure their hands or cigarette or whatever are in the same position when they hit the same word during multiple takes.
It's never going to be perfect or identical. Actors' #1 job is to give an emotionally believable, powerful performance. A thousand little details are different in every take, and your movements will change to reflect what is authentic in the moment. In fact, editors want emotional variety so that they have more options in assembling the scene.
Yes, things are blocked ahead of time. You'll stand up at the same moment, you'll stop walking at a particular mark. But there are limits, especially with things like hands and cigarettes. If you look for continuity errors around those, you'll find them everywhere. Actors, directors and editors have more important things to worry about.
Oh, I have a similar pet peeve but for watching live sports. Sometimes they’ll cut from the ‘main’ camera angle to a different one mid-action but it will be slightly out of sync and noticeable. For whatever reason this is super noticeable to me and bugs me to no end.
There’s a really funny duality to mistakes in recorded art that is vastly different when viewed as a fan and the creator.
As a music fan, I really love little mistakes in incredible albums. They’re humanizing, they show that the recording was made by people and it makes the highs feel so much higher.
As an artist, I loathe mistakes in my own work and I will spend a basically limitless amount of time fixing annoying performance quirks in software — I’m talking things that I can do but didn’t get quite right — so I can listen to it without distraction or regrets. I know that nobody will notice these except me and the type of listener who does catch them will either not mind or appreciate it the way I would. But when it’s my own work, it’s different. I’m sure it’s the same for filmmakers so I understand the impulse to fix it later.
The only one I've ever noticed on my own in a long life of watching movies is the compressed air tank to overturn a chariot in Gladiator (2000).
I was told about the pole that causes the truck to flip in Raiders of the Lost Ark and now I can't unsee it.
—Warning to those who enjoy 2001 A Space Odyssey with their blinders on...—
2001 made a big impression on me as a kid and I've seen it many times. There was a point when watching for the Nth time in middle age that I first noticed that all the anti-gravity shots show the actors bodies carrying their own weight. Especially in the aisle scene with the floating pen, which itself is rotating about the center of the sheet of clear plastic it's attached to rather than its center of mass. Later in the same sequence, food trays are brought to the bridge after the long scenes of a flight attendant, who picks up trays as they slide downs from a dispenser, and as she hands the trays to the crew, one of them instinctively puts his hand out under the tray to helpfully catch its weight. In the next scene an officer joins other crew by coming up from behind them, leaning over and resting his arms on their chair backs as the scene cuts to details of anti-gravity meal consumption. Finally Floyd stands in front of a toilet reading a 1000 word hard-printed list of instructions after the viewer has been shown electronic displays used everywhere else. The self-consciousness of that clip provides a lovely relief from all the previous cognitive dissonance. I'm not able to unsee any of this now and it detracts from the spectacle. But at the same time, it makes the orchestration and ideas of the movie seem all the more artistic, so nothing lost except innocence. There are many other oddities to find in the movie working on different planes of awareness, including proprioceptive assumptions about reality, intelligence, progress, and spirituality.
> Later in the same sequence, food trays are brought to the bridge after the long scenes of a flight attendant, who picks up trays as they slide downs from a dispenser, and as she hands the trays to the crew, one of them instinctively puts his hand out under the tray to helpfully catch its weight.
Is this one clearly wrong? As you say, it's essentially an instinctive motion, so one can easily imagine the reflex taking over even if the scene were genuinely in zero gravity.
I too have seen 2001 countless times, and I missed some of these! One you missed is when food is sucked from the tube, the food flows back down into the container.
We had very little experience with zero g at the time, and surely Kubrick and his crew had zero. They did a remarkable job despite that.
> Painting out these movie mistakes as part of a restoration is wrong. What's in the movie is in the movie, and altering the movie to this extent is a form of revisionist history.
How many times has Lord of the Rings been revised? Dune? <Insert other long-lived actively managed novel>. Is the active management of these novels "wrong"? Is fixing grammar, spelling, or clarifying story beats "wrong"?
I personally don't think so, and I'd rather read something which has been corrected, especially if done for story clarity.
All of those are absolutely wrong.
In the vast majority of cases it’s “fixing” the original in this sense;
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/nov/18/painting-match...
Also, it’s important to be able to see these works as originally published. Otherwise, you are passing off a forgery as the original.
I’m not necessarily opposed to all fixes like this, but in film most of these strike me as totally unnecessary and making the movie strictly worse.
Normal viewers almost never notice these things, and movie nerds like little glimpses behind the curtain. So it’s doing almost nothing for one sort of viewer, and making it worse for another.
That’s absurd. The incident with the fresco was an outrage because it ruined the original. If the well-meaning vandal had merely defaced a copy, nobody would have cared.
If you want to see works as originally published, get a copy of the original publishing. Buying a re-issue and expecting it to be identical in every way is silly.
How are they wrong? Which ones are wrong? Which spelling correction, grammar correction, story clarity is wrong?
Is the Blade Runner Director's Cut wrong?
George Lucas had an especially hostile stand against the unaltered versions though.
I noticed watching the recent 4K release of The Terminator that the garage attendant in the final scene has a piece of paper in his top pocket with "There's a storm coming“ written upside down on it.
Did you notice the Terminator counts his kills in floating-point numbers? I'd hate to see the studio correct these things.
So T800 is indeed coded in Javascript, I knew it! What else to expect of devs in 2029
It’s because JavaScript has the most example code in the LLM’s training data that writes the Terminator source code.
Of course not! As is well known, T800 is coded in COBOL ([1]).
[1]: https://www.theterminatorfans.com/the-terminator-vision-hud-...
"Casualties", not kills. Perhaps using floating point is for working with another Terminator, or the decimal value being calculated based on the wound inflicted, with a whole number being a kill.
Or really, just to Look Cool And Technical And Shit.
To nobody's surprise, Skynet is a strict utilitarian who has rationally concluded that plucking one billion eyelashes is equivalent to one murder.
There's a lot of camera-eye real estate for zeros!
Maybe it is fixed point though
Looking at the green screen shots of that Mustafar fight in Episode III: If that was the actual lighting of the in-camera scene, then it's not a mystery at all that everything in that movie looked so fake.
I want to believe they've improved the process by a lot since then, including getting the lighting right. Although I'm sure most of that is done in post-processing.
The making of The Mandalorian is interesting though, by using a projected screen as the set rendered in realtime, they can get the environmental lighting on the actors correct as well without much post-processing.
The Volume is pretty cool. A practical version of this that's often overlooked is Oblivion (probably because the plot is naff). The "sky tower" set is physical with 270 degrees of front projection to handle the sky. It would have been a lot harder to convincingly re-create all the optical effects and not worry about what light would look like scattered off glass or other occluding objects.
https://www.fdtimes.com/2013/03/29/claudio-miranda-asc-on-ob...
Another example is the motion simulator/projector setup from First Man, which makes the cockpit and landing sequences look so good. They won best VFX.
https://youtu.be/sw57ORTgGG4?si=NjRNt551HJhL_l9k&t=193 (relevant footage starts around 3:13)
By Episode II, Lucas had decided to make damn near everything green screen. They weren’t even building chairs and benches the actors sat on. Green boxes in many cases.
It looked like complete shit even by the standards of the time, and of course hasn’t aged well.
I watched a “film edits” fan edit of the Clone Wars CG cartoon, and one of the odder things about the experience was the end, where the editor cut together the final arc of that show, another shorter 2D cartoon, and the live action (well… mostly also just CG) Revenge of the Sith in roughly chronological order (including some nifty simultaneous action bits).
What was so odd was how very much worse and less-real-feeling the “live action” film was than the wholly CG cartoon. The writing, the line delivery, the sets, the action, the editing—it was all worse and came off as far more fake than a literal cartoon.
Finally! I’ve only been casually following this over the years, so this is a great write up!!
Does that Civil War movie have a modern electrical box in the background? Because that's what it looks like to me - totally distracted me from the watch.
I watched Aliens at least half a dozen times (still one of my all time favourites), and only noticed it when a friend pointed it out to us as it was playing at New Year’s party.
I have to agree with the article's author that what he calls "overzealous" removal of movie mistakes seems wrong. It wouldn't matter so much if the original movie was still readily available, but it's often the case that only the latest "fixed" version remains available.
With Star Wars in particular, Lucas' incessant meddling has long have gone far past the point of diminishing returns, and frequently making the movies worse.
More in general, I like watching the original movie, warts and all. I often disagree with the corrections, especially when they restore scenes that were left out for a reason, make color correction choices I disagree with (e.g. Blade Runner's "green tint" is inferior to its original bluish tint), etc.
Agree 100%. In addition to fixing mistakes and changing the color palette, I also object to the use of DNR and similar techniques to remove the film grain from older movies, in order to make them look more "modern", like films shot on digital. Unfortunately Cameron's recent 4k remasters of his classic films all suffer from this problem.
It's a travesty. I was sourcing video for an Alien/Aliens watch party (for a couple of adolescents who had never seen either) and I had to hunt down a copy of the older HD Bluray of Aliens because the 4k remaster looked so awful.
(By contrast, the 4k of Alien looks fantastic.)
I get it though, it’s crazy that I know so many people who now say “I don’t like old movies” or “I don’t want to watch this movie, it looks old” when what they see and are really saying without realizing it is , it was shot on film.
It’s especially worse since the hit rate of actually good, creative movies is so much lower in the digital era.
My big pet peeve now is these “ew, this movie looks old” attitude.
I was watching Sum of All Fears the other day and my partner had this attitude. Funny though as soon as people in tuxedos showed up on the screen she changed her mind and started watching. Tuxedos are one of those movie magic things.
Weird how what we grow up with influences our tastes. To me the look of films shot on old school film signals “high quality” and overly digitally edited movies signals “cheap” in the sense of being shot on a green screen lot to save on shooting on location.
I think people who start to get into the craft of film-making (even academically, not making their own films) even a little tend to open up a lot to older films.
It’s so much more impressive when they had to actually arrange for the thing you’re seeing to exist, at least in some sense, in real life, so light could bounce off it and hit the film. That is a real landscape that the actors and crew had to travel to! They really made horses jump off that train car! They really had two thousand extras for this shot! That kind of thing. If there was a set at least they had to build it, and even if the results look a little janky it’s usually interesting and the craft impressive.
They shot with environmental lighting? They had to rig their other lights just so and maybe just work with what was available to get a good shot. The light is the light. The constraints on their options often seem to improve, rather than harm, the final product.
Now it’s like oh they couldn’t even be bothered to film on a real damn street. Ugh. All the location shooting is just getting backgrounds to composite in later. The light on the actors didn’t even exist when and where the background was shot. It sucks and is boring.
Learning how to light my home office/ zoom background really made me pay 10000x more attention to lighting design in movies.
I agree with you. I can't stand any of these modern superhero movies because they are all hyper digital / green screen. For all I know they might have amazing acting and storylines etc, but I'll never know because they are basically unwatchable to me.
This is why archiving is such a worthwhile endeavor. We could end up losing the original movies otherwise!
It’s the artistic equivalent of Stalin erasing disfavored figures from Soviet photographs.
Toasty!