(A comparison between the 2009 Blu-Ray of A Matter of Loaf and Death and the new 4K edition of the same film)As a DVD collector, I have often had people over the Internet try to convert me to the shiny temptations of 4K Blu-Ray. They promise that the goal of capturing true cinema quality on home media has finally been achieved, that the range of colors can't be comprehended by the human eye, that you can see every single molecule of grain individually. And I'm sure that very often, they're right. But there are a few reasons that I am skeptical of adapting to new technologies. The first is that I often just don't get around to it (I only started gathering standard Blu-Rays relatively recently). And the second is the fact that with new technologies often come ways to shoehorn everything into them.
This is my big problem with so many 4K releases these days. Every distributor is trying to cash in by putting their entire backlog onto 4K. Sometimes, these cash-grabs are as inoffensive as taking the regular 1080p master and color-correcting it to trick people into thinking they're getting more detail, or scanning a 35mm print of a film that was made digitally to begin with (looking at you, The SpongeBob Squarepants Movie).
And then sometimes they're borderline dystopian, like the absolute atrocity that is the new Shout Factory 4K release of the Wallace and Gromit films.
Yes, that's right people, the company that explicitly stated they had no interest in using AI on their film remasters has now gone ahead and used AI on not just anything, but a series of films where a large part of the charm rests on how beautifully handmade they are. How you can see minor details like fingerprints in the plasticine. A film where every single frame was physically touched by a human being in order to bring it to life. That's not what you're getting with this new release. The new 4K is simply an attempt at having a machine attempt to recreate this handmade quality. You're not getting real artistic and technical mastery, you're getting ones-and-zeroes guesswork. It obliterates real detail and then hallucinates fake detail to compensate for it. This can't be what Nick Park wants for these.
That is why I'm never letting go of my Wallace and Gromit DVDs, and why in the future I'm going to be avoiding watching the shorts on Amazon Prime to the extent possible. They could have already replaced them without us knowing. I know I'm getting lower resolution and a smaller color range on DVD. But at least when those discs were produced, generative AI didn't exist. At least I'm getting a portion of the actual human-made detail that 4K bros aren't.
The stupid 4K AI upscales have been around for far too long, and as long as people support them, they'll keep being made. After many years of the film being confined to low-quality DVD releases, James Cameron recently released True Lies on 4K, along with his films Aliens and The Abyss. All of those movies got the AI upscaling treatment, and, well...I don't have to tell you how that went. But people, somehow unable to look past a less-than-ideal DVD transfer, snapped it up and now this thing is going to the moon. I hope you're prepared for a world where all films look like ChatGPT generated them frame-by-frame, and the only way to see a movie as the director intended is piracy. In that case, well, there go the last remaining strands of my opposition to sailing the seas.
AI is just inherently a bad way to remaster movies. There is a great 1972 film called The Heartbreak Kid, that is owned by pharmaceutical company Bristol-Meyers Squibb, who has refused to release it following a couple of low-quality DVD releases in the 90s and early 2000s, both of which now regularly go for around $75 from resellers (by the way, speaking of piracy, pirating this movie is 100% morally okay). Almost all uploads of it are rips of the crummy, heavily compressed DVD. But Gus Lanzetta, an amateur preservationist, made some waves in 2022 for releasing a 4K version made with AI "enhancement" technology.
With all due respect to Lanzetta and the hard work he put into this project, I find it nearly unwatchable. Looking at the opening scene, it's very clear the AI has difficulty rendering superimposed text, with much of it becoming fuzzy and unable to tell where it ends and the rest of the scene begins. Additionally, it sometimes emphasizes detail that was de-emphasized and blurred to begin with. Between the two viewing options for this film, the crunchy, color-banded DVD rip is absolutely the way to go. Because, for all of its flaws, it looks like an intentional movie. It looks like a movie made by an editor who knows how to superimpose text. AI does not know how to do that.
The point I am trying to make is this: 4K is not better if it means sacrificing actual craft. I don't care that this is supposedly the best the movie's ever looked. I care that I am getting something that is even close to accurate to how the movie looks. I don't think there's much of an argument to be made, looking at the pictures above, that owners of the 2009 Blu-Ray of the Wallace and Gromit films aren't getting the better end of the deal here.
AI has lived surprisingly longer than your average tech-bro fad, which is unfortunate, because it is also the most dangerous. Dangerous to professionals, dangerous to creators, and dangerous to our cultural heritage. AI can't do its job as well as a professional restorationist can, but studios will still go with AI because even if it's worse, it's one more dollar the CEO can pocket. I don't want to live in a world where I have to check if a movie is AI-upscaled before I buy it. That's the nice thing about abandoned technologies: at least we know they're safe from the creep of the new.
