Proposal: The James Cameron Project

[dvdmike]

With the 35mm scans and the corrected BD, I think I'm good

[dvdmike]

https://slow.pics/s/qxT2E5qD

Garbage

[Beber]

I just watched the whole Terminator UHD in Dolby Vision. Probably again fake Dolby Vision with static metadata. I'd say it's not as bad as I was expecting it to be. It's way better than True Lies, obviously, much better than Aliens, and about as "good" maybe even better than The Abyss. I'd say it's one of the lesser evils from Park Road. It's obviously the same master as the remastered Blu-ray, pixel for pixel, with degraining and Park Road rotoscoping AI that paints "details" all over it to give the illusion of better definition for those who aren't in the know. A thin layer of fake grain was added to give the illusion it's still a film. The highlights are still blown out, no additional detail in them, they just look brighter because of HDR. Color grading is about the same as the remastered Blu-ray. It's the same basis, but not as green, kinda like the DCP I saw years ago in DCI-P3. So some scenes do look like the 35mm print colorwise, as was also the case with Aliens, but on the whole, the majority of scenes do not. It very much lacks real blues.

[Beber]

At least, no digital erasing as he did in T2. No replacement of old visual effects either.

We can still see the tech guy, trying to hide in a moving wall of flames, pulling the lever with both hands to trigger the mechanism so that the animatronic rises:



As well as the thread pulling the puppet to roll over:



And we can still see the head of the guy holding the puppet from behind, in the bottom:

[Stamper]

I remembered the bottom two, but never noticed the first!

[dvdmike]

T2 was the last time he put in any "effort" the park road era is here

[Beber]

Even with quotation marks, I wouldn't call "effort" what he's done to T2. The result for T1 is still a 1000 times better than what he's done to T2 in 2017. T2 2017 was the beginning of the suicide of his career. On top of ruining the organic film apparence of celluloid, he turned T2 into a "1997 star wars special edition" without even labelling it as such, changing visual effects with technology that never existed in 1991.

[Stamper]

It's funny when T2 came out, I looked at the screen grabs on caps a holic, and went "there is some artificial processing going on there", but friends around me were like "nope, it's the o-neg!". My thoughts, when watching the caps where Arnold sit at the table at Dyson, and looking at his eyebrows was "this look remade with Avatar CGI algorithm". People I know who are working in the industry were like "nope, you're crazy".

Now with hindsight, it's clear the film was also processed, though with what we probably will never know. It looks completely similar to all the other JC UHD that came out since, with various levels of digital process. I'm guessing, JC used them as test for Avatar sequels rendering. (Also, to see how AI register humans faces, so that it can recognise them from shot to shot and fix them accordingly).

Also, it's weird that in some sequences of T2, there's zero additional information in the highlights, and the whites are burned at the exact same places in the image.

Really, this whole bunch of 4K "remastered" is a mess. The sad thing is it probably won't be fixed anytime soon, if ever.

[Beber]

I'm with you, Stamper. I suspect Park Road or something similar was involved in 2017 already. It looks too weird and artificial to be just the old combo of DNR and edge enhancement.

[Bigrob]

have seen this morning that they've added the blade to the scalpel now during the eye removal scene.

originally it was a blade-less prop.