The Spongebob Squarepants Movie - 35mm Re Creation (a WIP) — Page 5

chocopock said:

I think y’all are being fooled by the new 4K transfer. It is not a filmout. Film looks significantly worse than this especially for digitally composited animation. This is 100% just a digital upscale with fake film grain and fake gate weave. All the screenshots look exactly the same as the previous Blu-Ray but darker due to the HDR obsession. There’s no reason Paramount would go back to scanning a filmout when the digital elements are right there. Think of the Jimmy Neutron movie and how that’s a filmout. It looks like shit because that’s just how that kind of content looks.

I think the UHD is very clearly film out. Paramount isn’t as incompetent with UHD remasters as you or others are making them out to be they clearly put effort into the UHD format. They likely scanned a film element as it would be a better way to make a 4K master from a 4K scan of an element than a 1080p (or possibly lower) digital element to 4K. It’s very common practice.

Remember Paramount recently did amazing remasters of Wayne’s World, Truman Show, and many other films where they restored or fixed elements from their original Blu-Ray format releases. There is more care in the UHD division than there ever has been. There is no way they would fake gate weeve or fake film grain that’s just a bad faith assumption

chocopock said:

There’s no reason Paramount would go back to scanning a filmout when the digital elements are right there.

You’re presuming the digital elements are still there and weren’t corrupted or rendered inaccessible due to several factors. Few, if any, studios outside of Disney and Pixar were that careful with the preservation of their digital assets and the legacy software/plug-ins used to generate visual effects and composite the final frames. The Iron Giant, Cats Don’t Dance, The Prince of Egypt, all three theatrical Rugrats movies, and even Disney’s own A Goofy Movie were all film-sourced for their high-definition transfers because the digital sources and programs used to composite a scene were either misplaced, damaged, or the company simply did not see the need to re-render the film shot by shot due to missing assets or an unwillingness to put in that much time to retrieve data that may or may not even load properly.

This isn’t unheard of. Shrek’s animation files still exist, but the texture and effects elements don’t and would require recreating them scene by scene to bring the film to native 4K, which is why every high-definition release of the film sources 1828 x 990 JPEG-compressed image files. When Disney returned to the CAPS files for The Lion King’s 2002 IMAX re-release, they occasionally encountered a corrupt file or scene element that wouldn’t load up properly and had to debug it. Troubleshooting variables of this nature takes time and are considered when remastering a catalog title. It’s likely why Paramount opted for a scan of the best available archival film sources for TSSM.

chocopock said:
Think of the Jimmy Neutron movie and how that’s a filmout. It looks like shit because that’s just how that kind of content looks.

Jimmy Neutron looks the way it does, at least partially, because it was originally rendered at 914 x 666, not because Paramount’s HD transfers use a filmout. There needed to be more detail to work with in the first place to yield a sharper transfer.

chocopock said:

TonyWDA said:
You’re presuming the digital elements are still there and weren’t corrupted or rendered inaccessible due to several factors. Few, if any, studios outside of Disney and Pixar were that careful with the preservation of their digital assets and the legacy software/plug-ins used to generate visual effects and composite the final frames. The Iron Giant, Cats Don’t Dance, The Prince of Egypt, all three theatrical Rugrats movies, and even Disney’s own A Goofy Movie were all film-sourced for their high-definition transfers because the digital sources and programs used to composite a scene were either misplaced, damaged, or the company simply did not see the need to re-render the film shot by shot due to missing assets or an unwillingness to put in that much time to retrieve data that may or may not even load properly.

This is correct, however, when they made a transfer for the Spongebob movie on Blu-ray and HD broadcast they would’ve had an uncompressed digital copy made available. Disney and Pixar have done it but some of those machines likely don’t work any more. Once you do it once, you don’t need to do it again since it’s a perfect digital recreation. Disney has reused those same digital copies for their UHD releases which is why you’re stuck with altered versions of The Lion King and Beauty and the Beast. Those are the finalized versions they decided to backup and likely can’t access the originals anymore. None of your examples had digital to digital releases before, but Spongebob has.

TSSM already had a digitally sourced render at the ready, yes, but any number of technological or artistically motivated reasons could have led to the decision to use a film scan over the digital render. “Filmic” transfers and color grades are still something of a trend at the moment, and rather than fake the look, Paramount probably decided to scan archival intermediates for the most authentic transfer— rather than applying fake film grain and subtle gate weave to achieve the effect. That or the broader color space, bit depth, chroma sampling, and lack of edge-enhancement in the data used to strike the archival material superseded that of the only accessible digital out, and without access to the source elements for a render more suited for HDR grading, they deemed the 35mm elements the best material— even if the digital copy already had a substantial bitrate.

Without a Paramount representative or someone involved with the remaster to confirm any speculation, it’s impossible to know precisely why they opted for a film scan, but for better or worse, they absolutely did.

chocopock said:

Venny said:
Remember Paramount recently did amazing remasters of Wayne’s World, Truman Show, and many other films where they restored or fixed elements from their original Blu-Ray format releases. There is more care in the UHD division than there ever has been. There is no way they would fake gate weeve or fake film grain that’s just a bad faith assumption

Truman Show had wrong color grading and companies do fake film grain and gate weave. Studio Ghibli films do it all the time. Disney and Warner Bros. constantly use fake film grain especially in more recent remasters.

TonyWDA said:
You’re presuming the digital elements are still there and weren’t corrupted or rendered inaccessible due to several factors. Few, if any, studios outside of Disney and Pixar were that careful with the preservation of their digital assets and the legacy software/plug-ins used to generate visual effects and composite the final frames. The Iron Giant, Cats Don’t Dance, The Prince of Egypt, all three theatrical Rugrats movies, and even Disney’s own A Goofy Movie were all film-sourced for their high-definition transfers because the digital sources and programs used to composite a scene were either misplaced, damaged, or the company simply did not see the need to re-render the film shot by shot due to missing assets or an unwillingness to put in that much time to retrieve data that may or may not even load properly.

This is correct, however, when they made a transfer for the Spongebob movie on Blu-ray and HD broadcast they would’ve had an uncompressed digital copy made available. Disney and Pixar have done it but some of those machines likely don’t work any more. Once you do it once, you don’t need to do it again since it’s a perfect digital recreation. Disney has reused those same digital copies for their UHD releases which is why you’re stuck with altered versions of The Lion King and Beauty and the Beast. Those are the finalized versions they decided to backup and likely can’t access the originals anymore. None of your examples had digital to digital releases before, but Spongebob has.

Yes, companies do fake gate weave for NEW movies NOT remasters to give an old or nostalgic aesthetic. “Fake” film grain in remasters is actually not fake a lot of the time. It’s usually the grain from the actual film removed and replaced after clean up. It’s usually the real grain from the film. And if fake grain is used there are rarely any cases I’ve seen where it looks bad or out of place. It’s an essential part of remasters to degrain to digitally clean and restore film. Another thing is film scans a lot of the time have more than just FILM grain. They typically have noise from the scanner’s camera on top of grain from the film. Denoising scanner noise is imperative if you really want a true authentic picture.

Also, a note about Truman Show is from what I saw on a true 4K HDR display was fantastic. Not sure what you mean by “wrong color grading”. As someone who has watched the film about a thousand times and has had a lot of issues with the original Blu-Ray and DVD releases the UHD is the best the film has and will ever look