The 4K Blu-ray remasters of "Jaws 3" and "Jaws: The Revenge" have been criticized for their heavy use of AI upscaling.
The 4K Blu-ray remasters of "Jaws 3" and "Jaws: The Revenge" have been criticized for their heavy use of AI upscaling.
Just when you thought Jaws 3 and Jaws: The Revenge couldn't get any worse.
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.
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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.
If you're complaining about the quality of Jaws 3 and Jaws 4, you've kind of lost the argument before you even get to the AI part.
As Michael Caine said about the latter, "I have never seen it, but by all accounts it is terrible. However, I have seen the house that it built, and it is terrific."
Not to mention, my joke at the beginning
hand-drawing upscalers
is: do you have objectively good upscaling algorithms? I'm not saying I like this upscale but it's not much worse than the original nor conventional upscaling techniques.
Shoddy remasters have existed all the time. As I said, I don't watch content above 1080p and even PAL DVD is usually enough for me so I can't judge movies but I very much agree with Tom Scott's video criticizing careless remasters, made before mainstream AI. Have you seen the awful widescreen version of early The Simpsons?
One of the very first DVDs I ever bought was of the Kubrick film Barry Lyndon, because it's one of my all-time favorite movies and I was looking forward to finally seeing it in the quality that DVD promised. This was, obviously, many years before things like upscaling. Instead, they just used a dirty print and it looked like shit. I was so disappointed. Worse, it was the same year Kubrick died.
Thankfully, that has since been rectified.
"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.