\n<\/p>\n
Dan Best, the general manager at Park Road Post, acknowledged the debate around remastering movies. \u201cThe thing is, technology is changing,\u201d he added. \u201cPeople are viewing things at a lot higher resolutions at the moment. Therefore, a lot of recent films are being enhanced for these new viewing platforms.\u201d Traditional home video releases were adequate for the days of tube TVs and 1080p video, in other words. But in the era of OLED screens and 4K smart TVs, restorations need a little more to meet increasingly high standards.<\/p>\n
Burdick, who has been dealing with this kind of criticism since the \u201cTitanic\u201d days, seemed resigned to the fact that \u201cyou can\u2019t please everybody at the end of the day,\u201d though he accepted that the response to these Ultra HD Blu-rays was especially heated. The dissenters, he argued, were mainly just disappointed that \u201cAliens,\u201d \u201cTrue Lies\u201d and \u201cThe Abyss\u201d no longer look like they did in the VHS or DVD eras.<\/p>\n
\u201cPeople love these movies, which I think is great,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd they take that love to heart. So when the movie suddenly doesn\u2019t look like they remember it looking, or the way they think they remember it looking, or it just doesn\u2019t look the way they think<\/em> it should, they get upset. What can you do?\u201d<\/p>\n It doesn\u2019t help that there is a stigma around the technology: Dissenters not only bristle at the appearance of these restorations \u2014 they are also unhappy that it is A.I. being used to make them appear that way.<\/p>\n But, Burdick said, that disapproval is based partly on misconception: \u201cPeople hear, \u2018Oh, they\u2019re using A.I.,\u2019 and they\u2019re thinking about pirate ships and the cup of coffee,\u201d \u2014 a reference to a recent viral video<\/a> of a miniature ship sailing in a coffee mug, all generated with A.I. \u2014 \u201cand they\u2019re like, \u2018What are you doing to it?\u2019 But nobody is doing that to these movies,\u201d he explained. \u201cIt\u2019s not the same A.I., conceptually. It\u2019s more like, this piece of negative looks kind of cruddy, and we can use some software to improve it, carefully.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n