I’m reminded of the beginning of the movie Elf, where the book publisher is informed that a printing error means their latest book is missing the final two pages. Should they pulp and reprint? He says,
> You think a kid is going to notice two pages? All they do is look at the pictures.
I’m quite sure bean counters look at Disney kids movies the exact same way, despite them being Disney’s bread and butter.
With Star Wars you have a dedicated adult fan base that’ll buy up remasters and reworkings. Aladdin? Not so much. Especially in the streaming era, no one is even buying any individual movie any more.
I'm a 39 year old man who ground his VHS of Aladdin to dust in the 90s, and bought the Blu Ray because I can't say I can rely on streaming to always exist.
> With Star Wars you have a dedicated adult fan base that’ll buy up remasters and reworkings. Aladdin? Not so much. Especially in the streaming era, no one is even buying any individual movie any more.
I agree it was likely Disney being cheap, but there are tons of people who'll buy up disney movies on physical media in the age of streaming. Not only are there disney fans who'd rival the obsessiveness of star wars fans, but like Lucas Disney just can't leave shit alone. They go back and censor stuff all the time and you can't get the uncensored versions on their streaming platform. Aladdin is even an example where they've made changes. It's not even a new thing for Disney. The lyrics to one of the songs in Aladdin were changed long before Disney+ existed.
They care very deeply about this and devoted a lot of resources to (re)grading the digital versions that you see today on Disney+. The versions you see are intentional and not the result of cost cutting. (I was not directly privy to this work but I worked on Disney+ before its launch and I sat in on some tech talks and other internal information about the digital workflows that led to the final result on the small screen and there was a lot of attention on this at the time)
I think there's a discussion to be had about art, perception and devotion to the "original" or "authentic" version of something that can't be resolved completely but what I don't think is correct is the perception that this was overlooked or a mistake.
The vast majority of people will not care nor even notice. Some people will notice and say, hey, why is it "blurry." So do you spend a good chunk of time and money to make it look accurate or do you just dump the file onto the server and call it a day?
To speak nothing of the global audience for these films. I'm guessing most people's first experience seeing these movies was off a VHS or DVD, so the nostalgia factor is only relevant to small percentage of viewers, and only a small percentage of that percentage notices.
VHS resolution is total crap... yet: it's not uncommon for the colors and contrast on VHS (and some early DVD) to be much better than what is available for streaming today.
This is totally bonkers, because the VHS format is crippled, also color wise. Many modern transfers are just crap.
It’s really amazing how some Blu-ray do in fact manage to be net-worse than early dvd or even vhs, but it’s true.
An infamous case is the Buffy the Vampire Slayer tv show. The Blu-ray (edit: and streaming copies) went back to the film source, which is good, but… that meant losing the color grading and digital effects, because the final show wasn’t printed to film. Not only did they get lazy recreating the effects, they don’t seem to have done scene-by-scene color grading at all. This radically alters the color-mood of many scenes, but worse, it harms the legibility of the show, because lots of scenes were shot day-for-night and fixed in post, but now those just look like they’re daytime, so it’s often hard to tell when a scene is supposed to be taking place, which matters a lot in any show or film but kinda extra-matters in one with fucking vampires.
The result is that even a recorded-from-broadcast VHS is arguably far superior to the blu ray for its colors, which is an astounding level of failure.
(There are other problems with things like some kind of ill-advised auto-cropping seeming to have been applied and turning some wide shots into close-ups, removing context the viewer is intended to have and making scenes confusing, but the colors alone are such a failure that a poor VHS broadcast recording is still arguably better just on those grounds)
How can we get away from this mindset as a society, where craft and art are sacrificed at the altar of "it's not monetarily worth it."
There's a fucking lot of things that are not worth it monetarily, but worth it for the sake of itself. Because it's a nice gesture. Or because it just makes people happy. Not to sound like some hippie idealist, but it's just so frustrating that everything has to be commoditized.
Centuries is stretching it. It’s central to industrialisation, Taylor, Ford, etc. The relentless pursuit of efficiency and technique. Its anti-thesis is art for art’s sake.
In modern tech circles, the utilitarian mindset is going strong, now that the hacker ethos is dead and it’s all about being corporate friendly and hireable.
Yeah the industrialised world wasn't maligned by Blake as 'dark Satanic mills' or as Mordor by Tolkien because they found it an artistically fulfilling place.
> How can we get away from this mindset as a society, where craft and art are sacrificed at the altar of "it's not monetarily worth it."
Honestly, by weakening copyright protections. People who love the works will do the work to protect them when they don't have to fear being sued into bankruptcy for trying to preserve their own culture.
You can sit down and recolor the movie frame by frame and release it on torrent yourself, it'll make many people happy. It won't be worth it monetarily but since you're annoyed it doesn't exist and money isn't a factor...
It's always easy to complain about others not being generous enough with their time, but we always have an excuse for why we won't do it ourselves.
You can't do that since besides time you also need knowledge/skill. So the final difference could be between "an extra 1% of the budget" at a corporate level vs "and extra 10% of your life to become a professional and fix a video, and also break the law in the process".
Pretty easy to see how it's not just "an excuse", but a bit more fundamental issue
> You can sit down and recolor the movie frame by frame and release it on torrent yourself, it'll make many people happy.
You can't, at least not if you want an acceptable result.
In photography, if you have a JPEG photo only, you can't do post-facto adjustments of the white balance, for that you need RAW - too much information has been lost during compression.
For movies it's just the same. To achieve something that actually looks good with a LUT (that's the fancy way for re-coloring, aka color grading), you need access to the uncompressed scans, as early in the processing pipeline as you can get (i.e. before any kind of filter is applied).
I'm this particular instance though it's not really about time, it's studios not wanting to pay what I imagine would be a relatively small amount to do the conversion. It's not going to be a frame-by-frame laborious process.
Disney do pay for industry leading colorists. They chose to favour a more saturated look for Aladdin et al. It is reasonable to prefer either.
I can't imaging what happened to the greens in the Toy Story examples if they are accurate.
They could reduce the saturation with 1 mouse click if they wanted, but they didn't. They must have intentionally decided that high saturation is desirable.
Could your processing work in a webview? i.e. webgl or webasm or similar and you communicate with it via postMessage. Something like Polygen might help with the scaffolding, but I have not tried it personally
I've had good experience contacting canva support in the past who've checked things with engineering teams, you should be able to contact them about their new affinity sign-in
Yeah as someone who uses Claude code daily this feels like hype and marketing
CLAUDE.md and working memory only goes so far — it never religiously follows them and does not truly 'learn' from past collaboration. In fact the more you put into a CLAUDE.md the more it seems to degrade
Great writeup. There are other scaling axes of course, around data (even synthetic data) and improving AI generation at the 'software' layer (smarter design / training efficiencies / inference speed ups) — progress in those might make the the currently-unthinkable orders of magnitude $500b and beyond not as necessary?
Thank you , I am not sure if those dimensions will deliver the kind of generational boosts needed to keep the exponential going.
I could be quite wrong of course but it is not a certain bet that we will get fundamental breakthroughs from them.
There are specific areas which are always going to have major improvements .
In the semi conductor industry, Low power processors or multi core dies etc produced some results when core innovations slowed down during 2008-2018, i.e. till before the current EUV breakthrough driven generations of chip advances.
The history of EUV lithography and ASML’s success is an unlikely tale and it happened after both public and industry consortium funding of work for 2 decades that was abandoned multiple times .
Breakthroughs will happen eventually, but each wave ( we are on the fourth one for AI?) stagnates after initial rapid progress .
We are 100% going to get 'hey remember when LLMs were pure and not explicitly (or more dangerously: subtly) recommending things' nostalgia in years to come.
There are parallels to early web here I'm sure of it.
I think I'm a little more worried about AI being subtly influenced in its training data -- they can't explain why they give the tokens they do, and even chain of thought / explain your working thinking is similarly made up and hallucination-prone
