Comment by dclowd9901 11 hours ago
How can we get away from this mindset as a society, where craft and art are sacrificed at the altar of "it's not monetarily worth it."
There's a fucking lot of things that are not worth it monetarily, but worth it for the sake of itself. Because it's a nice gesture. Or because it just makes people happy. Not to sound like some hippie idealist, but it's just so frustrating that everything has to be commoditized.
Centuries is stretching it. It’s central to industrialisation, Taylor, Ford, etc. The relentless pursuit of efficiency and technique. Its anti-thesis is art for art’s sake.
In modern tech circles, the utilitarian mindset is going strong, now that the hacker ethos is dead and it’s all about being corporate friendly and hireable.
> How can we get away from this mindset as a society, where craft and art are sacrificed at the altar of "it's not monetarily worth it."
Honestly, by weakening copyright protections. People who love the works will do the work to protect them when they don't have to fear being sued into bankruptcy for trying to preserve their own culture.
You can sit down and recolor the movie frame by frame and release it on torrent yourself, it'll make many people happy. It won't be worth it monetarily but since you're annoyed it doesn't exist and money isn't a factor...
It's always easy to complain about others not being generous enough with their time, but we always have an excuse for why we won't do it ourselves.
You can't do that since besides time you also need knowledge/skill. So the final difference could be between "an extra 1% of the budget" at a corporate level vs "and extra 10% of your life to become a professional and fix a video, and also break the law in the process". Pretty easy to see how it's not just "an excuse", but a bit more fundamental issue
I'm this particular instance though it's not really about time, it's studios not wanting to pay what I imagine would be a relatively small amount to do the conversion. It's not going to be a frame-by-frame laborious process.
> You can sit down and recolor the movie frame by frame and release it on torrent yourself, it'll make many people happy.
You can't, at least not if you want an acceptable result.
In photography, if you have a JPEG photo only, you can't do post-facto adjustments of the white balance, for that you need RAW - too much information has been lost during compression.
For movies it's just the same. To achieve something that actually looks good with a LUT (that's the fancy way for re-coloring, aka color grading), you need access to the uncompressed scans, as early in the processing pipeline as you can get (i.e. before any kind of filter is applied).
It’s really been the driving force of modern life for centuries at this point.