Comment by timenotwasted 11 hours ago
This makes so much more sense now. After having kids I've been watching my fair share of Pixar and I just never recalled how flat and bland everything looked but I would always chalk it up to my brain not recalling how it looked at the time. Good to know I guess that it wasn't just entirely nostalgia but sad that we continue to lose some of this history and so soon.
Things like this are being preserved, you just have to sail the high seas.
Yeah I clicked this link going “oh god it’s because they printed to film, I bet, and man do I hope it looks worse so I don’t have to hunt down a bunch of giant 35mm scans of even more movies that can’t be seen properly any other way”
But no, of course it looks between slightly and way better in every case. Goddamnit. Pour one out for my overworked disk array.
And here I was thinking it was just my imagination that several of these look kinda shitty on Blu-ray and stream rips. Nope, they really are worse.
Piracy: saving our childhoods one frame at a time.
When it comes to Star Wars, people are literally spotting them in Photoshop frame by frame. :)
I'm not sure why you're getting downvoted. What you're hinting at is that a lot of original 35mms are now getting scanned and uploaded privately, especially where all the commercial releases on Blu-ray and streaming are based on modified versions of the original movies, or over-restored versions.
These can be especially hard to find as the files are typically enormous, with low compression to keep things like grain. I see them mostly traded on short-lived gdrives and Telegram.
The main reason they are not shared as widely is that there's a bit of conflict within the community between those that really want to stay under the radar and not risk being targeted by copyright owners (and so try to keep things very much private between the donors who funded the 600-900 usd cost of the scans) and those who want to open up a bit more and so use telegram, reddit and upload to private trackers.
> with low compression to keep things like grain.
But you have algorithmic grain in modern codecs, so no need to waste so much space for noise?
You can’t trust corporations to respect or protect art. You can’t even buy or screen the original theatrical release of Star Wars. The only option is as you say. There are many more examples of the owners of IP altering it in subsequence editions/iterations. This still seems so insane to me that it’s not even for sale anywhere…
I don't understand why you're getting downvoted. So many beautiful things have been lost to perpetual IP, e.g. old games that could be easily ported by volunteers given source code, which can never be monetised again.
Sometimes people create things that surpass them, and I think it is totally fair for them to belong to humanity after the people that created them generated enough money for their efforts.
> You can’t even buy or screen the original theatrical release of Star Wars
You can actually, the 2006 Limited Edition DVD is a double disc version one being the original version.
However they are not DVD quality because they were transferred from LaserDisc and not the original film stock
Even those aren’t accurate to the 1977 film.
To pick an arguably-minor but very easy to see point: the title’s different.
"toy story film scan" on Kagi led me to a reddit page that may or may not contain links that might help you, but don't dawdle those links may not work forever.
Another one that's been hard to find is the 4k matrix original color grading release. Ping me if you have it! (Not the 1080p release)
It's kind of sad that what felt like a defining aesthetic at the time is now basically an accidental casualty of progress