Jurassic Park trilogy - Page 56

There's a massive difference in changing, adding or subtracting elements and re-rendering the same effects at a higher resolution. It's no different than Pixar re-rendering their early movies for HD releases.

It doesn't change the movie in any way that would be different than scanning the film itself at a higher quality. I would consider it "clean-up" as long as the final image is the same composite and framing as the original, just with more detail.

We're not talking changing guns in to walkie-talkies or puppet Yoda into CGI Yoda here. It certainly isn't changing when Han shoots. Heck, it's not even "should we remove wires" territory.

As long as they don't start tweaking the actual look of the dinosaurs, I don't see why there should be any objection to going back to the original files and re-rendering them the way other films have gone back to camera or technicolor negatives to rebuild and recomposite a scene at a higher quality.

Is the same as removing wires

Y'know... I always considered myself to be as much a "purist" as they come, and yet I agree with this argument. (And that's coming from a guy who only watches the non-anamorphic dvd's of the original STAR WARS trilogy, and listens to all "original mono" tracks when given the option!)

And then are me the guessing one? How do you know that they've DNR and regrain it?
Are you sure? Beacause i have read in this Forum (or anyway this is what i remember) that the ILM Jurassic Park's VFX was rendered at something more close to the 2K...

That is how they specifically do 3d conversions, read their site and the many white papers on the matter.

Not a guess, but education.
Read the titanic thread on here if you didn't want to go looking, I quoted all the relevant information.

Not even close, in my book.

Removing wires that made it to the final film takes away something from the film itself. Buck Rogers wouldn't be the same without them. Simply increasing the resolution of the effects doesn't add or take away content. It cleans it up.

Not re-rendering the CGI to compare favorably with a higher resolution home video format would be like simply upconverting a DVD instead of creating an actual HD resolution master for Blu-ray.

Thanks for the info mike.

Anyway, if this it's what they usually do, i can be nothing less than happy, because i'm totally fall in love with the TITANIC conversion.

And every single Spielberg movie's BD.

Wow. This is first class horseshit of the highest order.

You do realize there is a 35mm final cut negative of this film, complete with special effects composited and printed into it? Just like every other pre-DI film ever made? And that 35mm final cut negative was printed to a 35mm interpositive, which was printed into a 35mm internegative, which was used as the basis for all the 35mm release prints which were shipped all over the world and projected on 100 foot screens?

That is the film Jurassic Park. Shortcomings in special effects and all. It doesn't matter that the special effects were digital or what resolution they were created at initially. The film is made. It's done. Re-rendering the special effects into anything other than what they are in that final cut negative is historical revisionism, plain and simple.

Do you want an authentic recreation of the film, as it was presented to audiences upon it's theatrical release, or are you just after something that "looks good on your HDTV"?

You do realize there have been plenty of lauded releases that have gone back to the original camera negatives (or animation cells) to reconstruct those films for home video release, don't you? In particular, several technicolor films whose 3 strip elements were then digitally combined, creating a more accurate registration than was ever accomplished for the original release.

Are you saying they shouldn't have done that? We're seeing a better product that was ever shown in the theater. Toy story, despite being a 3D movie, was shown on film in theaters at lower render resolution. Yet, we all gushed over how good it looked when they re-rendered it for the HD release. What we got on Blu-ray wasn't what people saw in theaters - and it wasn't what got the awards glory, either. By your logic, the technology at the time should have been the end of it for all time.

Further, when you consider how much loss there is from master to release print, perhaps we should stop this nonsense of mastering home video from masters and take them from release prints. After all, that's what people saw in the theater - blown up far larger than most anyone can see at home. Why should something look clearer and sharper at home than in the theater? Shouldn't we see all the shortcomings of the generation loss of those release prints?

Maybe the guys working on the Star trek releases shouldn't be doing what they're doing. TNG was never created in an HD format, yet the thread for it (disc issues aside) is full of praise for what their doing - and that includes recreating some of the effects that they couldn't find the original elements for (or for items created digitally back then, such as phaser fire).

Horseshit is right.

Everyone wants to be a purist until the screenshots hit the interwebs we all go "woo" when stuff looks pretty.

Personally I have no particular attachment to opticals or generation loss or whatever. To me, stuff like that has always been nothing more than an annoyance and a detriment to films. If Spielberg took the original vistavision plates and 3D effects and re-rendered everything at 4K resolution so it cuts seamlessly with the material from the camera negative, I'd be a happy camper. Obviously he hasn't done that, and that's okay too I guess... film history and all that crap.

The total ignorance on display here at AVS Forum is just mindblowing sometimes. Just "re-render" the effects at 4K. Right.

First, you'd have to find the original camera negatives and plate photography, and re-scan at 4K.

Then you'd have to find ALL the digital files for every single effects shot in the film. Have you all heard how hard a time ILM had a few years back just finding the Star Wars Special Edition project files (I think it was for the 2004 DVD Jabba the Hutt model revision)?

Then, somehow, using project files built in outdated twenty year old software which can probably barely handle 1K video, re-composite on to a completely different scan of the film negative, of which there are any number of colour/sharpness/geometric/edge cropping differences resulting from two decades of difference in film scanning technology.

This means almost nothing would line up with the film scan used for the effects in 1993, making compositing a nightmare. Every single shot would have to be composited from scratch, a costly and timely exercise. New matte shapes, new keyframes for every movement, etc. You'd have an easier time just doing the whole thing from scratch.

This doesn't even take into account the software used in 1993 has been obsolete for years, probably doesn't exist anymore, and has zero chance at rendering out at 4K.

I mean, do you think Adobe Photoshop from 1993 can be installed on modern computers and just magically work with brand new 4K film scans?

Ok, how about "cleaning up" and "refreshing" Da Vinci's "Mona Lisa" with some modern style? Because why not? It's just art history and all that crap, right?

Did you let a crazy relative know your username and password and let them post or something? What gives 42041?

You're being a bit disengenuous here. Digitally recombining 3 strip technicolor or B&W seperations is sometimes necessary when differential shrinkage due to age is too great to fix photochemically. In that case, it is a necessary tool to get the film back in the ballpark to what it looked like on original release. So yes, in those cases, those tools should be used. But in general, no, I don't think they should do that. The new Singin' In The Rain disc didn't and it looks more like what it did to audiences of the time. And it looks great aside from some questionable color timing.


You keep saying "we"

"We" does not include me. No I don't think what was done to Toy Story should have been done. No I don't think they should do what they are doing to Star Trek.

The difference between your attitude and my attitude is the difference between treating film as disposable entertainment products versus culturally important works of art.

I never said it was trivial, easy, or even feasible... how should I know what ILM can and can't do? I figure they would take greater care to archive their work and ensure backwards compatibility than some random guy with a 20-year-old copy of Photoshop. Maybe they don't.

Is 500 years worth of grime part of art history too, or something extraneous to the work of the artist? Personally, I'd want that to be (carefully) cleaned. Where is the line?

How about this hypothetical situation... DaVinci couldn't let anyone see the original Mona Lisa for whatever reason (say, it's extremely fragile and has to be locked in a vault in his studio) and the only way anyone could possibly view it is through a low-quality photocopy DaVinci made, because that's the only practical way to distribute it. And so they did for many years, growing used to the quality, the distorted colors, etc. Decades later, DaVinci figures out a treatment to allow his original painting to be viewed. Is there anything wrong with allowing that to supersede the photocopy version?

I realize that this might be an unpopular opinion among the more hard-line purists, but I don't think a film as a finalized work of art is created in the optical printer or laser recorder. I don't like when movies lose their original power and become increasingly quaint artifacts of decades past (or worse yet, camp). Something like JP or Titanic didn't elicit thoughts of "look at the 90s CGI, how far we've come!" when I saw them in original release. It made me go "holy s**t look at those dinosaurs!" or "holy s**t, that's the Titanic!". There's a big difference between a filmmaker transparently removing the seams in the original work (especially when these seams have been made increasingly visible by scanning the cut negative versus the 4th generation release prints most people saw), and adding singing 3D cartoons.
Edited by 42041 - 11/12/12 at 11:27am

John Knoll said that they couldn't re-render any of the effects for the 3D version of Phantom Menace because the software packages were completely out of date. It's nice to think of these folks being able to keep this stuff working in perpetuity, but it's the same story for the pros as it is for us mere mortals: **** gets old, bro. As it is, Lucasfilm were lucky that ILM still had the entirety of Phantom Menace stored in 2K digital, otherwise they'd have had to scan the filmed-out negative from scratch for the Blu-ray and 3D conversion.

Huh. When I saw Titanic in the theater in 1997, I sure did remark, "Man, a lot of this CGI sucks."

Oh, I don't know... if all materials had been lost and they'd had to re-make Episode 1 from scratch, would that have been so bad?

Yeah, I was shocked when it was revealed that ILM still had all the final renders for TPM still sitting around somewhere. When word got out last year that there was a "new transfer" of the movie, I assumed it was just a new scan of some sort of film element, not the filmout tapes themselves.

Has it yet been revealed what source is being used for the effects shots in Jurassic Park 3D??? Does ILM still have the filmout tapes for Jurassic Park after all these years????

For me, it's quite simple: release home video with quality as close to a pristine release print that the public would have seen in a perfectly setup theater at that time, but if the studios want to tweak or alter it in any way, then release that too as a separate Studio release so the consumer has choice. Do not make it either/or. The precedent has already been set with Directors Cuts and Theatrical cuts, or with Blade Runner's 3 different cuts, so I don't see what is so hard about always releasing an unmolested Theatrical version as a minimum. It preserves original artistic historical integrity as well as allowing alternate versions.

It seems as though all these arguments boil down to an alarming trend in reducing choices available to the consumer in favour of a "you will take what we give you and like it" draconian economic rationalist approach.

I agree with everything you said but I especially agree with this quoted part. It's really not that hard of a concept to understand.

George Lucas: trailblazer

Well, then how do you feel about multi-channel soundtracks for movies that were originally mono? Can you honestly say you've never preferred one of those mixes?

My point here, is not to say they should re-render the effects so much as to say that in a long line of tinkering that goes on with movies before they reach Blu-ray, this is a minor thing. It's still the same content, just with more visible detail.

I will say, my preference is to see it as it was in the theater - just like puppet Yoda. However, unlike CGI Yoda, this would still be the basic work of the folks who originally did the effects. They wouldn't be creating new dinosaurs here.

I'll take a CGI re-render over revisionist color we often get in these releases. That, too me, is far worse.
Actually, yes. I installed Photoshop 2.0 last night just to try it. I had to do some tinkering to make it work since file systems have changed a lot, but it loads up fine. The hardest part was finding my USB floppy drive so I could actually install it, since it came on several floppy disks (2.5 was the first CD-ROM version).

However, you wouldn't have to do that - nor would you ever want to.

All versions of Photoshop will open any file created in any previous version. The PSD format has been standard since the first retail version. The only thing you would need to do is convert the file to the newer standards to ensure full color, resolution and history support. However, all your layers and elements would still be there - assuming no file corruption has taken place after all this time.
Edited by NetworkTV - 11/13/12 at 12:00pm

I prefer whatever mix could be deemed "original." I.e. any mix an audience would have heard at the time the film was released. It's not about what I subjectively think sounds better. It's about experiencing something as it was made to be seen, at the time it was made, as closely as possible. Period.

Remix to your hearts content but include an original mix, ALWAYS.

I certainly appreciate your feelings - and I do agree. I was merely trying to play Devil's Advocate here and point out the many times people say they want the theatrical version, but really want the "theatrical" version.

However, there are plenty here who prefer the remixes. Many here are fine with removing wires that weren't originally seen in the theater, but now show up in the digital domain. There are plenty still that think Toy Story looks magnificent in it's higher resolution form. There are still others that prefer CGI Yoda over puppet Yoda. Finally, there are many here who are perfectly OK with mattes being opened up so the image fills their screens.

It's a tough call. Where is the line? Further, who should the studios aim to please: those of us who "want it exactly the way it was in the theaters" or those who welcome a few tweaks to remove "elements that pull them out of the moment" in the film?

The truth is, there are a lot more people who accept the revisions than there are of those that don't.

As a result, I'm more likely to pick and choose my fights - namely those that radically alter the content, such as those changes heaped on us by the likes of George Lucas.

The original jurassic park dts CD had been recombined with the film in certain circles

You are right on the button with this post.

This isn't a simple clean the negative and rescan job. There is so much obsolete technology that would have to be factored into a restoration/re-rendering job that the logistics would be a nightmare. I saw the new "remastered" trailer on the Apple Movie Trailers website, and while it didn't have that amazing "pop" to the picture, it looked heaps better than the junk that Universal released last year. With all of the compositing shots, it'll never look super sharp, but I wish there was more grain present; perhaps that it merely a symptom of encoding via QuickTime.

When the new Blu-ray is released, this one will be closely scrutinized and for all the right reasons.

For the record, I don't think re-rendering the dinosaur shots at higher resolution is necessarily a revisionist stance. As long as they don't change the appearance and/or texture of the dinosaurs I'll be happy. Yes, Toy Story was re-rendered for the Blu-ray release, but it still has that old '90s low-polygon look.

^^^^Wasn't Toy Story on BD renderd at a higher resolution than it was in the theater?