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@wave

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wave
@wave

720p feels old now

recently i finally made the jump beyond 1080p when some 1440p IPS monitors came on sale. watching a 720p tv show on them, i started to notice how blurry that felt. 1080p source files look noticeably better. 1440p vids better yet.

Star Wars: Andor is among the first media i've downloaded in 2160p ("4K") and i'm glad i did: the increased clarity was put to good use on this show, which is full of detailed panoramas and interesting set dressings. successful experiment.

so for one thing, i'm probably going to refrain from downloading 720p going forward (a majority of the movies i have are in 1080p, but TV shows/anime are often lower).

that in mind i went to look for a 4K copy of Avatar (2009), since that franchise is in the air again. i was rather surprised to learn it hasn't been officially released above 1080p yet! i kinda thought the graphics were half the point, so huh. Search revealed a 4K blu-ray is announced, but no launch date yet. someone on reddit speculated that Cameron wouldn't want a great-looking A1 print distracting from A2. who can say. anyway, a bit annoying, since i actually see the point of such high res for certain material now.

oh yeah, i also grabbed a 25GB 4K encode of Lawrence of Arabia, as i'm well due for a rewatch. humorously, now i feel like my mediocre 2014ish 1080p HDTV is not up to that viewing challenge. maybe i should enlist a friend with a modern 4K OLED.

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in reply to @wave's post:

supcat
@supcat

With regards to Avatar… Could be worse, could be waiting for The Abyss and True Lies in HD (okay, this is half true now — they were streamed in HD but no “commissioned for Blu-ray/4K” transfer has made it out yet. The BR release of The Abyss has been “coming real soon now” for more than a decade!

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supcat
@supcat

Yeah! For The Abyss, without a doubt the delay is due to him overseeing the transfer himself, but it's been continuously bumped to the back burner I assume due to all the other stuff he's got going on. IIRC Cameron also oversaw and "directed" the 4:3 home video versions of his films too, including retrieving parts of the image from the open matte, so actually those are pretty fascinating to me as well (even though I haven't watched a non-widescreen version of any of his films in decades).

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wave
@wave

interesting.

[looks at files] i see that when i grabbed a 1080p Abyss in 2019 the torrent was labeled "HDTV," and i do recall trying to figure out if that was the only good source. i do not recall if that film has a director's cut or not and if it does whether it's recommended.

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supcat
@supcat

So yeah the 1080p one you saw was, I assume, ripped from the (streaming) TV broadcast, and (here's the kicker) it's not the director's cut. The director's cut is absolutely The Real Movie when it comes to The Abyss*, and so, afaik, there's no way to watch it in HD (let alone 4K). Someday?

*and I don't think this is controversial, unlike some other Cameron movies like ALIENS where you could argue that the "special edition" pacing is worse and big reveal less effective than the theatrical cut even though it has more neat stuff for fans.

The good news with The Abyss at least is that the deluxe DVD for it is amazingly comprehensive (but IIRC it's not anamorphic, which is a surprising oversight. Still a good looking DVD though!)

Edit: Sorry for derailing a little from the initial post but yeah okay I'm kind of a James Cameron fanboy and The Abyss is one of my favorite movies. Clearly it's about to be a big week for me with a sequel that even I didn't ask for hitting theaters.

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wave
@wave

Please don't apologize, very interested to hear your takes!

Thanks for the LD on the Abyss DC, I didn't know. I have never seen the movie at all so I'm tempted to watch the HD theatrical I already have and then someday there'll likely be a better version of the DC.

Aliens DC is definitely less elegant but some of the extra early scenes are very enjoyable.

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supcat
@supcat

Oh my gawd… Somebody asking the real questions to JC! Huge news, thank you (though… I think he’s promised it “soon” before, oof).

Also love that The Digital Bits is still around, I’m 99% sure I read their review of the DVD of The Abyss like 20 years ago. Gotta old school websites that are still at it.

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copySave
@copySave

720p will look bad when it's stretched to a higher resolution but it will look good on a native 720p screen. A good scaler like the Retrotink 5x will help sharpen things up to higher resolutions, or you can be a crazy person like me and pair consoles and displays. I still use a Panasonic plasma exclusively for 720p content

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wave
@wave

i think it's not scaling in this case (1440p is a clean 2x, right) but just 720p finally striking me as too soft.

that's really neat about the plasma. a cool tech that feels increasingly of the past.

as a CRT partisan i've successfully avoided buying any modern upscalers so far (no need yet). they're getting very impressive though.

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copySave
@copySave

Yeah displays and video output devices are developed in a symbiotic environment. Everything after the fact will have some caveats, such as bad built-in scalers and filters (which is where the Retrotink comes in)

Same here with the scalers. I have an OSSC and a RetroTink 2x mini but those are just to stream with. MiSTer basically makes me use them less since it can output scaled HDMI and native 240p over VGA for streaming and playing on a CRT

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