Fan Preservationists Are Outpacing Studios at Saving Cinema's History
Pirating the Pirates
Home video releases of classic films are often marred by revisionist restorations, remixed audio, and altered aspect ratios. While boutique labels like Arrow and Kino do their best, legal and budgetary constraints limit them. Amateur preservationists, operating outside copyright law, have created superior versions of films like The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and Star Wars, offering historically accurate cuts that studios won't. Their work fills a critical gap, but it comes with legal risk under the DMCA.
People who alter or destroy works of art and our cultural heritage for profit or as an exercise of power are barbarians, and if the laws of the United States continue to condone this behavior, history will surely classify us as a barbaric society.
- alexpotato
> Spencer Draper—best known as the Damn Fool Idealistic Crusader on YouTube, where he reviews the technical and historical aspects of digital releases with a rigor usually reserved for scholarly peer review
I will occasionally think about various topics "I'm really into <thing> but is anyone else in to <thing>??"
And then I read a quote like the above and I realize that, for lack of a better phrase, "it's a big world out there" and people have many varied interests.
Plus, if folks are REALLY into <thing> then they want different perspectives about <thing> even if it's a sub-topic that has been covered before.
In other words, write blog posts and make videos. Someone will consume that content and you never know where that leads.
- schlauerfox
One thing to note, is that the library of congress has the power to create the exceptions to the DMCA. The EFF lobbies for expansion of the exact powers the article is advocating for.
- javcasas
Kinda related, but I hate how the big studios go after old videogames and try to take them down. It looks like, in the future, this era will be called the "digital dark ages", not because all the stuff got lost to bitrot, but because all the stuff became illegal to own so that the studios could sell the new stuff again and again.
- dewey
> When I came to work for Arrow, I was bringing a lot of awareness of the methods of fan preservationists on the torrent sites
Very smooth way of using your torrenting skills on your CV.
- thewizzardofnl
"“To me, it [the original Star Wars trilogy] doesn’t really exist anymore. It’s like this is the movie I wanted it to be, and I’m sorry you saw half a completed film and fell in love with it.” - George Lucas, 2004
It is insane how much George Lucas has edited the original Star Wars trilogy. I think no movies have had more edits over time than Star Wars.
- cosmic_cheese
I've only barely skimmed the surface of the preservation world, but the irreverent attitude taken by the industry towards audiovisual media releases frustrates me greatly. That more accurate older releases are made unobtainable in favor of newer botched versions just adds insult to injury.
I'm grateful that diminishing returns were hit earlier with audio, though, which limits the blast radius for music releases. Most classic albums have a range of different masterings available on audio CD, many of which are available cheaply secondhand, which makes getting ahold of a good/accurate release considerably less daunting.
Movies and especially TV shows on the other hand are a mess. It shouldn't be a miracle to get a high-quality, faithful official remaster like the one Star Trek: TNG got.
- Insanity
Tangentially related, I've been toying with the idea of just buying all my film and series content again rather than maintaining subscription services. My SO and I watch TV maybe once a week yet we maintain a subscription to Crave & Netflix.
I'm pretty sure it'd work out cheaper to just buy box-sets of a series when we start watching it but haven't done the deep dive yet.
- mahboi
> Beyond Star Wars, an illicit cottage industry has sprung up to patch the holes in any given film’s digital representation.
I've thought about making an Oppenheimer except all scenes are in chronological order and the cringe ones are gone Edition
- softskunk
> Of particular note is the “remux” community, dedicated to seamlessly stitching together the best video and audio streams from different releases without any generational loss of quality.
That’s not what “remux” means. A remux is the original data from, for instance, a Blu-ray disc, transferred into a new container without re-encoding. What the author is referring to would be called a “hybrid remux”.
- Groxx
I quite liked the Despecialized editions when I watched them quite a while ago, for anyone who hasn't seen them - the audio remastering is very appreciated (VHS rarely has good audio), but certainly not the poorly-fitting CGI additions.