therewillbeblus wrote: ↑Sun Apr 07, 2024 6:05 pm
It's surprising to see
Titanic listed as Disappointing. It looks marvelous to my eyes. Actually, all the Cameron discs seem fine except
True Lies (which is the only one not worth owning anyways!) I'm sure some tampering is there, but isn't as obvious to me in the dark muddy depths of
Aliens and
The Abyss, while it shines obnoxiously in a brighter movie like
True Lies - still,
Titanic is fantastic
The 4 Cameron remasters are all different shades of problematically obtained.
Titanic, and Abyss to a certain extent, "looks" good only because both the photographies and most likely the original scans allowed for the Park Road Post treatment to work relatively well with them. They do remain, however, problematic reworks of past works that lack what a traditional new work would allow. In the case of Titanic and Aliens, there even is legitimate grounds for recommending to keep the BD and upscale it, since in the end, considering the new remasters are reusing them, and they're reusing them in an intrusively filtered way at that, it makes for a more transparent result anyway.
Even in the case of Titanic, the Park Road algorithm do create a few issues, basically turning an already filtered picture into something even more unnatural, both smooth and sharp but in a select way that doesn't match anything achievable photochemically. On top of that, HDR and WCG are limited because no upstream work has been redone to allow a wider use of their capacities. And on top of that, Titanic has a couple of missing lines on its Atmos track. As such, if Picnic at Hanging Rock goes into the disappointing section, it seems fair (though maybe a tad on the harsher side) for Titanic to end up there too.
The Abyss is quite close in aspects, though there is no backup BD, but at least it seems like the underlying scan allowed for a better result (and also a non-limited use of HDR and WCG).
Then, Aliens is an obvious rework of the previous master, that wasn't even 4K, and whose scan wasn't even 4K. Not only there is a backup BD, though the 2009 master was already a Lowry-processed-obtained one (meaning the new master is filtered on top of a filtered source), but it says a lot as to the quality bar setup for such a result, and how you can even achieve it with a 2K master.
And then True Lies is just a mess that nobody should ever defend.