Jaws 3 might be the worst 4K ever released as of this very moment. It’s that bad and that horribly butchered with AI and awful DNR/Color Timing. The 2D version always looked a bit off due to the way that the film was shot specifically for 3D but with this abysmal 4K transfer it’s limitations and issues are blown up and become glaringly obvious. Then on top of that you have AI interperetation the likes not even god has seen.
The film legitimately looks like it was created with Midjourney on more than one occasion. Or entire frames look like the washed out color tone SNL bumpers. Remember those from the 70’s and 80’s that used to show the host for the night? Entire sequences of the film look like that. No film should look like that in 4K. People look like paper cut outs in more than one frame. This is abhorrent.
I said this in another comment thread but will post here too:
The bigger question is why is the upscale suddenly so much worse than it was before?
Plenty of films finished at 2K had 4K UHD discs put out that were nothing more than upscales with HDR grades applied, but they were never this bad. It’s like AI upscales became a thing and the studios tossed out whatever previous methods they used, that seemingly worked JUST FINE, in favour of new technology that has GLARING flaws such as this.
Shoddy upscale AI 4k releases are the new rushed 3D conversions. They never learn.
If I’m not mistaken they’ve been using AI upscaling in remasters for 10 or so years now, so it’s not like this is something new. If it’s honestly that bad then I’m guessing they tried to use “generative” AI like stable diffusion to upscale instead of using something hyper-focused on upscaling like waifu2x.
Upscaling has always had questionable results. There are some serious uses: for example, drawings upscale well if there is no more information than pixels anyway. For example, consider a low-res flag of Japan, say 24x16. You know that there are no vector strokes smaller than 10 pixels and the only such stroke that matches pixel values is a circle, so you can redraw it successfully at any resolution. It’s the Whittaker-Nyquist-Kotelnikov-Shannon sampling theorem. Waifu2x will do well too, reinterpreting the image with little distortion.
With photos and video, it’s a lot trickier. Things that appear noisy can be smoothed out or the noise can be sharpened and interpreted as some signal. Same with blur. Legitimate techniques such as averaging static areas in consecutive frames can bring noise down but only to a certain point. You can’t know how to draw a square of 16 pixels if you only know 4 and there is no limit on how sharp the original image could have been. It’s always been guesswork but AI is good at taking context clues compared to naïve sharpening or denoising.
That last frame in the underwater tunnel actually looks exactly how I remembered it. Just completely awful matte work throughout the film.
Maybe everyone is actually mad about being reminded how terrible these movies were? … And I say this as a fan of the franchise since childhood; these flaws are part of their charm.
seriously-- these films blew the first time around back in the day, and they looked like shit then, too. they weren’t going to look any better in 4K, lol.
It’s like AI upscales became a thing and the studios tossed out whatever previous methods they used, that seemingly worked JUST FINE, in favour of new technology that has GLARING flaws such as this.
i’m gonna go out on a limb here and say that they saved more money on the cheap method than they’ll lose based on the quality of the ‘remasters’.
If they do it properly this is actually a good use of ai. But of course instead we have to put chatbots into everything.
AI is gonna take the jobs of all the honest hand-painting upscalers!1!!!1
Now seriously, I looked at all the shots up close and there is indeed inconsistent focus in the crowd shot based on whether the AI was able to use its “knowledge” of the human face. Still, you need to compare it to the “before” image to really judge if the AI did a poor job. I think it is OK, at least better than conventional denoising and sharpening.
Also, do you realize that the pre-upscale version is still going to be available - if not on streaming, on old physical media and pirated copies? They may have wasted money on the upscale but didn’t literally destroy the movie. Vote with your wallet and watch a fanmade film scan, the 1080p Blu-ray or whatever. Or stream in 1080p quality to scale it back down, which should hide the sometimes overemphasized details.
Also, do you realize that the pre-upscale version is still going to be available - if not on streaming, on old physical media and pirated copies?
The complaint is that the commercially available 4k version looks like crap due to shitty AI usage, which hints at a future trend of shitty AI usage on other less popular movies Pirated and lower resolution versions existing is not a good argument against that complaint.
“the original is available illegally or secondhand” is not even a little bit reassuring. of course someone will preserve old media but a large barrier to access is obviously not ideal.
I don’t really care… In my opinion, these films have already been released on digital media in good enough quality (1080p) anyway and that will last forever; I don’t need 4K myself, as my screens nor eyesight (it’s not that bad, I just prefer watching movies at a small angular size) would be able to convey a meaningful difference. If you understand the problem of AI upscaling, you are probably savvy enough to get your hands on a pre-AI copy. This is better than George Lucas’s (O)OT erasure, which cannot be so easily mitigated and that started before HD digital media.
it’s nice that the issue doesn’t affect you, but acting as if it doesn’t affect anyone else is solipsistic and tone deaf.
obviously the problem isn’t with jaws 3 specifically, it’s with an ever-growing trend in the entertainment industry.
It doesn’t look that bad to me? Where’s the abhorrent? Upscaling doesn’t change colors
these kids just don’t remember how bad the originals looked, lol
these films were shit
There is a fan 4k restoration project of the original Star Wars trilogy which involves preserving the original film grain so that you see it as close to as what it would have looked like when it premiered in the theater.
By any measure, it looks a lot worse than any other version of Star Wars in terms of image quality. But I am still glad they did it because it’s fascinating to watch, especially to see how much the quality changed, especially in the Tatooine scenes filmed in Algeria because sand got into the film.
https://www.thestarwarstrilogy.com/
I have no doubt that if it were officially released, people would complain about the quality.
yeah, there’s a law of diminishing returns with that sort of thing. there’s only so much “original quality” i want in my films. i’m old enough to remember the transition to digital filmmaking and actually appreciating the crisper, sharper picture and more expansive colors. sure, film grain can add some texture, but, at some point, it’s too much.
And the people doing this project realize that this is not meant to be watched just to enjoy Star Wars. It’s to be watched to see what it looked like on opening night, warts and all. And it’s really interesting if you’re interested in filmmaking as much as you are in films.
What an awesome project! Spent some time reading through all the info and as someone with some knowledge in that area it’s super duper interesting. I need to get around to watching them.
You will have to sail the high seas to do so, but it’s definitely worth it for someone interested in the craft of filmmaking.
