#stop remastering films you moonballs

[stormofneurosis]

*ahem* let me be COmpletetely NOrmal about this for a minute

Take a good look at the 4K crowd shot. Swap between that and the HD one. Do you notice anything? It's subtle, but I bet you can feel something odd, about how your eye kind of slides away from things in the 4K image.

Who's the focus of the 4K image? You know.

The problem with 4K and its' ilk, it's so visible right here.

Focus. Too much Focus.

Look at something with your boring human eyes, what do you see?

is it a single point with everything a little fuzzier at the sides? Not by much, but the thing you're looking at is clearer. Do you know what that is?

it's focus.

The problem with 4K that people seem to skip right over is that it gives the background way too much focus, meaning our brains struggle to figure out "what am I meant to be looking at here" a.k.a. "what am I meant to be focusing on". This isn't just a little thing, it produces a MASSIVE disconnect between the viewer and the story. The viewer CANNOT parse everything in a single shot. You cannot look around your room and know everything all the time. Sure you can know the layout, and where your things are. You may even notice if someone moved it or changed a colour, but you don't look at it all at once or all the time.

The same way beats of silence or low intensity music, or filler episodes in shows, or quiet scenes in action movies, our brain needs these unfocused areas to put everything into context. Think of the classic shot where something is in focus and something is blurred in the background, then the focus pulls to the thing behind it, like we would when we look at things.

I also want to make it clear that these are not faults with the cameras. Cameras still use lenses, and those shooting these shots know how to do this, but a demand from on-high to make everything crisper is the problem.

Have you ever watched a 4K scene and been left cold, wondering why the story didn't feel real anymore? it's because that crisp constant focus lets us see the boring realities in any shot, the ones a slightly less crisp focus point lets our brain fill in without seeing it. I remember VIVIDLY seeing the Helms Deep fight in 4K, and it went from a mystical moment of chaos against a foe to "the kids are muddling around the treefort again" because I could SEE the shifting of the actors as they waited juxtaposed with the perfect stillness of the AI when it wanted to wait. The human element made it earthly rather than fantasy

It was even worse in the Hobbit with the increased framerate. I don't need every blade of grass visible to me, because my brain literally can't find the focus point, and as a result the one I watched in that elevated framerate is just a mess of nothing. The only moment I can recall much of anything about is when they're in the barrels, and that's because of a greenscreen behind-the-scenes

Please!

Stop making everything so crisp

it's ruining the way you tell your films

I am in love w the way pre 2000s films have that hazy feel to them. hd honestly kills the vibe