I'm guessing about 10-15 years ago I was watching a documentary on the re-release of Ken Burns Civil War.
They were highlighting the digital tools they were using to restore and enhance the original film capture for new streaming services etc.
They showed one of the restorers using a fascinating tool where one window was a video feed of the original film's "first pass" to digital. One of the landscape scenes had a small smudge in the upper right hand corner so the restorer pauses the feed, goes back frame by frame and then was able to drag and drop the frame into another window where he used Photoshop like tools to fix everything and then drag and drop it back into the "feed". Seemed VERY efficient and shows how good tools can really accelerate a workflow.
I'm not sure if the above scene is in the below quick documentary but there are a lot of other cool "behind the scenes of restoration" moments: https://www.pbs.org/video/civil-war-restoring-civil-war/
I learned this from the older X-files DVDs, which have some unusually good special features.
Also, if you shot a movie but wanted it to look good in TV later, you put the most important action somewhere in a 4:3.
In 4:3 it looks good and like the original airing show, in 16:9 any non-digital/composite shot looks freaking fantastic. But once you get to any digital or composite shot it takes a nose dive in quality.
One of the first things I learned once I could hear music properly was that I had favorite "versions" of different albums. They truly are NOT created equally, but it's not something you can really appreciate on a crummy Bluetooth headset either. Once you can you really start to appreciate the work that folks like your friend do.
Some night scenes now take place during daytime and you can see booms and camera operators in many shots.
It never even got a blu ray release. The only way to watch it at home without egregious errors is still DVD as far as I know.
The only way to watch this show properly now is the 4:3 NTSC DVD release.
I think the recent streaming releases also have the music altered in many places. The show just got <bleep>ed up basically. It's a real shame.
Execs have less and less shame as the years go on. Pride in artistic endeavour? That’s not going to make the shareholders happy.
People in the business world seems to only know business, and that's the limit of what they care about. Place these people into the arts, and you quickly see how important it is to have at least a single ounce of care when you work on projects where you want some level of quality.
But I think HBO, Netflix and most TV/streaming services are run by business-people still, as they think it's a numbers game, not a arts game. Eventually someone will understand and take the world by storm, but seemingly not yet.
You’d think these people would go off and be executives at a ball bearing manufacturing company or something and leave the arts alone, but it never happens that way.
Because they are businesses? Just because something is art doesn't mean expenses can be more than revenue.
There was an enormous increase in the supply of entertainment over the last 20 years, in the form of Youtube, TikTok, Instagram, Reddit, WhatsApp, HN, video games, etc. Demand stayed the same, maxed out at 24 hours per day. One should expect changes in quality and quantity and price in a market with drastically shifting supply and demand curves.
Pretty sure all of that does make financial sense: - Being able to write 4k will bring people in to re-watching/watching the show for the first time. - Redoing the CGI, etc., would have cost a lot of money. - Very few people will cancel their subscription or stop watching because of stuff like that - So in the end, no one cares
I.e., it makes financial sense to do the minimum possible. Sure, if this were a project you care about, if it were your company that you are also emotionally invested in and maybe proud of, etc., things might look different. But your actual customers are shareholders, which in the end are predominantly giant ETF brokers and pension funds, that don't care about anything else but what your stock price looks like and whether you are in the S&P500. They probably don't even know what your company is doing.
Sorry, rant over ;P
Can someone explain what was wrong with that _Friends_ screenshot? I can't tell.
Set up a site for fans to point out errors and vote on them.
Then have HBO have just one editor interact with fans on the site, fix the most popular errors, and talk about them, maybe stream a little of the editing process.
>They've already been paid
HBO sells a subscription. Presumably, their goal is to be paid again, and again, and again.
Edit: and I'm getting flagged lol
The Simpsons > Details > Remastered aspect ratio > Off https://i.imgur.com/pQohgQp.jpeg
They were set up to shoot that scene that day and they were on a tight schedule. They started to set up and they realized they only had 12 feet of hose, or that the pressure dropped too much with a longer length of hose. They discussed all the options, and fixing it physically would take too long or be too expensive. Thus another "we'll fix it in post!" moment was born.
Given the volume of material these streamers are handling, I expect QA is minimal. I remember when I was watching Frasier on Amazon Prime, a bunch of the episodes had been configured to play in the wrong aspect ratio. Clearly nobody had ever bothered to check them.
Yeah, I expect QA is minimal for these shows that are past their prime. Only fans will really watch them again, it's probably not worth it to spend the extra time to review every single episode. (But of course, fans will care! I'm just saying it's probably not worthwhile for HBO to check)
Edit: I jumped the gun and thought we were talking about the Friends screenshot.
