Current Events > The James Cameron/True Lies and Alien 4K A.I. controversy

(+) Yeah! (+)

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/13/movies/ai-blu-ray-true-lies.html

In 1998, Geoff Burdick, an executive at James Camerons Lightstorm Entertainment, was hunched in front of a 12-inch monitor at a postproduction house, carefully preparing Titanic for release on LaserDisc and VHS. A state-of-the-art computer process had made it possible for Burdick and his team to scour the film frame by frame, removing tiny imperfections embedded in the original negative: little scratches, flakes of dirt, even water stains that smeared the image. The computer could erase these blemishes using a kind of copy-paste tool, concealing the defects with information from another frame.

Burdick, now a senior vice president at the company, told me that this process seemed like freaking magic at the time. And yet the results were not entirely well-received. There were a lot of people who said that this was the most beautiful VHS theyd ever seen in their life, because wed gotten rid of all that gobbledygook, he recalled. But there were a lot of folks who said, This is not right! Youve removed all of this stuff! If the negative is scratched, then we should see that scratch. People were really hard-core about it.

In the decades since, home video formats have reached higher and higher resolutions, with VHS and LaserDisc giving way to DVD and Blu-ray, and eventually to ultra high-definition 4K discs, known as Ultra HD Blu-rays. As the picture quality has improved, restoration tools have evolved with them, making it easier than ever for filmmakers to fine-tune their work using computers. Several of Camerons films, including The Abyss, True Lies and Aliens, were recently released on Ultra HD Blu-ray in newly restored versions that are clearer and sharper than ever before the product of painstaking attention from Lightstorm and Cameron himself. I think they look the best theyve ever looked, Burdick said.

....

Person is among a number of viewers who are skeptical of the need to use A.I. to enhance the appearance of films that seemed to look fine to begin with. Although he said that there were legitimate use cases for A.I. in restoration, such as when a films original negative has been lost or badly damaged, he suspected that with something like True Lies, they were using it just because they can.
The recent Cameron releases, and particularly True Lies, have become the subject of intense scrutiny and fervent debate online. Home video reviewers have described it as an overly sanitized presentation, with one faulting its routinely odd-looking images and another arguing that it appears almost artificial. Web forums are teeming with complaints, often vicious, while social media posts criticizing it have spread widely.

The A.I. can artificially refocus an out-of-focus image, as well as make other creative tweaks. You dont want to crank the knob all the way because then itll look like garbage, Burdick said. But if we can make it look a little better, we might as well.

For viewers like Person, the problem is what those minor enhancements entail: That uncanny smoothness, though perhaps more in focus, can look oddly fake. I dont want to sound anal, but it really is egregious, Person said. Its the same thing as TV motion smoothing they say its better, so you feel like youre the one person cursed with vision who can see that it looks bad.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/7/785438c8.jpg

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/6/602b45ad.jpg

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/b/b828f51c.jpg

tl;dr version = everyone except James Cameron says the "smoother" 4K releases for those movies looked like waxed dogshit due to extreme usage of AI restorative methods.

Oh, great. James Cameron is turning into George Lucas.

<_<

Maybe it's different in motion. In these stills they just look darker

The first one might be an improvement but the rest seem to be a step backward.