The "Mad Men" in 4K on HBO Max Debacle
fxrant.blogspot.com87 points by tosh 2 hours ago
87 points by tosh 2 hours ago
A side story on the techniques for restoration:
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/
Stories like this regularly make the rounds when movies or shows that the original creators put a lot of love and thought into are "remastered" on the cheap. The last one I saw was the story about the garish colors in digital versions of old Pixar movies - amongst others, they intentionally exaggerated green hues in the digital original to compensate for the transfer process to analog film stock which was less sensitive to green. When Disney transferred the movies to digital formats and streaming, they took the digital original 1:1, so the colors now look off (https://animationobsessive.substack.com/p/the-toy-story-you-...)
The did something similar to Buffy The Vampire Slayer when "upgrading" it to HD. It lost all/most of the color grading and was cropped to 16:9.
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.
I have the PAL DVD release, and I have to say the color grading has never been great, although it obviously at least has the correct effects applied.
Fun fact: The X-Files production team foresaw the coming of 16:9 home entertainment, so they made some effort (increasing with later seasons) to try and "protect" a 16:9 frame, which allowed for an unusually good (not perfect) Blu-ray restoration.
I learned this from the older X-files DVDs, which have some unusually good special features.
Great article, I really thought it was a recropping like friends (and many others). So weird that they just forgot about CGI.
It's even weirder when you consider how big of a deal this was for Star Trek only a few years ago (well maybe more than a few...). You would have thought people in the business would know about this.
Everyone is underpaid and overworked. All things considered the companies probably think it’s worth the trade off, they’ll just fix it and republish. Might even end up with more viewers in the end! How many people have learned that Mad Men is on HBO Max as a result of this?
Execs have less and less shame as the years go on. Pride in artistic endeavour? That’s not going to make the shareholders happy.
> You would have thought people in the business would know about this.
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.
Unrelated: does anyone else experience huge lag with HBO streaming app? It’s easily the slowest I regularly use on Samsung smart tv.
On an Apple TV with first gen Homepods connected it is incredibly laggy. Specifically rewind and fast forward take sometimes up to 10 seconds to respond. And even then they never seem to get me to the correct location. It’s pretty maddening.
Great article.
Can someone explain what was wrong with that _Friends_ screenshot? I can't tell.
They never intended to show anything to the right of the doorframe on TV, so there's a random sign on the wall and a big hole in the wall (which makes sense if you are a camera crew wanting to film a sitcom in the apartment, that doesn't make so much sense in the fictional world that anyone would have a big rectangle cut out of the wall between their apartment and the hallway).
New York apartments rarely have holes in their walls opening to the hallway.
There's a window-hole in what should be an exterior apartment wall facing a hallway. Right side of the screen.
I think it is the open hole in the wall next to the door -- which no real apartment would have. I think that part was meant be cropped in the final frame, maybe?
haha. Take a look at the massive unfinished window into the hallway =).
Damn, that's terrible. Reminds me of The Simpsons being cropped into 16:9 for Disney and obscuring the joke that all the Duff brews come from one pipe.
You can switch to the original 4:3 though
Edit: and I'm getting flagged lol
The Simpsons > Details > Remastered aspect ratio > Off https://i.imgur.com/pQohgQp.jpeg
I've had people make the Duff argument about real beers. Putting bad batches in a different can is a great way to do quality control on your main brand though.
It's weird that they'd have the crew in the frame anyway. Was it really not possible to have them out of frame? I guess being able to "do it in post" makes people lazy?
Possibly some issues with the hose length and the ability control the flow? Or perhaps it’s just an off the shelf up chuck chucker that doesn’t have a longer hose?
Probably more a function of "shit happens" when doing something new (making and using a "vomit hose") in a big, multi-functional project (shooting a TV show).
I guess the crew has to stay pretty close to the end of the hose or it becomes hard to time the... flow... correctly. Likely, they still had to process the frames anyway to make the... flow... look like it comes out of Sterling's mouth, not from the side of his face, so it was basically no extra cost.
If it can be fixed in post, what's the problem? The only flaw here is that they completely screwed up and forgot post for these scenes (in the remaster).
They were out of frame. Out of the 4:3 frame.
No the original was 16:9, you can see they have been digitally removed in the shots from the Blu-ray.
But it was never intended for 4:3. They were always in frame, just digitally removed.
