Reconfirming a 2K DI to 4K

[Chewielewis]

Something that i've been thinking about lately is the restoration of films with 2K Digital intermediate, which is pretty much every film from the last 10 years. 

Lets say you have a film shot on 35mm but DI'd and mastered at 2K. How plausable would it be for a film to be rescanned at 4K, reconfomed to the 2K edit, and re-renderd with 4K elements. We know it can be done, Seinfeld, the Wire, Friends, all reconformed to original neg, going from video masters to HD masters. But what about 2K to 4K. 

I cant think of any 4K UHDs that have had such a treatment. We are pretty early days into the UHD era so that might change.

I think it wont be done, the improvement would be largely minimal for a large expense. 2K looks fine on every screen, even IMAX, and 2K UHDs are selling regardless. And for films with an obnoxiously complex image chain like Lord of the Rings, the process would be incredibly difficult (but id love to be part of it).

[Jetrell Fo]

I understand that the new GOTG (Guardians Of The Galaxy) Vol. 2 4K is an upscale from 2K.

[Chewielewis]

It gets a bit fuzzy for a film like GOTG, with 90% green screen over CGI, is it possible to render 2K CGI in a 4K composition with 4K plates? would it be worth it?

I also wonder how likely it is that a modern film like GOTG would cut straight from raw camera rushes (or use proxies and relink to raw camera rushes). Digital Intermediate seems like an outdated term when Redcode RAW ect is not that hard to work with.

[iguanaclerk]

O Brother, Where Art Thou (one of the first movies colored with a DI) has a new scan for the Bluray. And they are going to release 4k remasters of the Dark Knight Trilogy at some point. Obviously, films with extensive CGI work would be mostly upscaled, but I don't think it would be substantially more difficult than older 4k remasters other than cataloging what shots have effects work rendered in 2k. You mention Television HD remasters, and it would be mostly like that, only with most of the effects shots upscaled rather than recomposited or recreated.
The 3D Phantom Menace rerelease is also interesting. That movie, even though it has a 35mm final negative, is mostly limited to 2k resolution by the amount of CGI shots it has. For the 3D release they rerendered some CGI shots for better 3D effect. I don't think it was a large amount because re-rendering a films worth of old, poorly preserved CGI files is basically impossible. However, the shots they did redo could be rendered at 4k if they wanted to.

[Chewielewis]

Im not sure if O brother was rescanned from the original Neg or from the original 2K filmouts. Deakins suggests a new timing but that could be an adjustment of the original.

As for Phantom, not sure if thats correct, Heres what they say here https://www.fxguide.com/featured/art-of-...o-3d-2012/

Over a 10 month period John Knoll supervised the stereo conversion of The Phantom Menace, performed by Prime Focus. The film, while extremely effects heavy, was still primarily a live action film so it was never going to be practical to reload the course files and try and re-render or "do something that would have been done on Toy Story - restoring the scenes and re-rendering," says Knoll. "Our pipeline has changed dramatically enough since the work was started in 1997 that we don't have machines that use the same software anymore. It was all animated in Softimage and the RenderMan renders dispatched from iRender - packages we don't even run anymore."

Also interesting is this, regarding the Bluray.

There needed to be two new color timing parts to the show and Knoll used this opportunity to upgrade all the material, since when Episode I was originally finished, it was done on a per shot basis - "done sort of old style, final a shot, film out a shot, look at a print of that negative and that's what we would final". It went through a conventional negative cut. An optical timed IP was generated from that and then then master printing negatives were made from that timed IP. So everything audiences saw in the theater was two generations down from the original. "When the original DVD was released," Knoll says, "it came from scanning in the timed IP because it was the simplest thing to do. But when it came time to do [the conversion], we were going to take the movie and cut it up into 2,000 separate pieces, work on them and re-assemble it, we had an opportunity to go back to the original material. We could go back to the original film-out tapes that are a couple of generations better than what had been seen. So we figured let's do that. We made a concerted effort to collect all the bits, re-create all the dissolves and pre-wipes. So that was all pre-graded material, so we had to do all new color timing, just to have the new Blu-ray master.

[CSchmidlapp]

Great Thread

[iguanaclerk]

Looking at Deakins comments, it does seem that the 1.8k film out source was at least primarily the source for the new remaster, so I guess I was wrong.
Regarding Phantom, that makes more sense and must have been what I was thinking about. Rerendering decades old CGI files seems exedingly impractical and likely impossible in many cases.