Money/demand. Streaming platforms were not really pushing to license UHD content for anything other than their original productions prior to around 2019. That means that if what you want to watch was originally released prior to 2019 it is likely the series/feature would need to be remastered in UHD now. If the studios don’t see demand for a product in UHD they are not going to spend the money to remaster.
this post was submitted on 08 Mar 2024
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
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Another way I think about this; Many people have 1080p displays on their devices. So simply no need to download media content, that exceed these specifications. Just waste of resources with further annoying complications.
Rights holders change because companies go under, are sold, or liquidate their library (the movies and stuff they own or have rights to). The library is purchased by somebody else. Easy enough. But when producers, directors, actors, etc. and other studios who have partial ownership or distribution rights of the movie, things can get complicated during that library transfer.
Further complications arise when people die or they sell the rights to another person or company. Then you can have this knotted mess of home video and theater distribution rights (those can be separate and owned by different entities too!) which can culminate in lengthy lawsuits, or disinterest, conflict over money and percentages of profit, original contracts with the director/producer/actors/etc. getting in the way somehow, misplacing or destruction of film negatives (by far the worst case scenario), or straight up people not even knowing they own a movie's rights.
Then there's the stuff other commenters said. I missed some stuff I'm sure, and am not an insider. Just love movie news and movie production.
For reference for other purist UHD snobs like me;
https://www.digiraw.com/DVD-4K-Bluray-ripping-service/4K-UHD-ripping-service/the-real-or-fake-4K-list/
It's surprising how many relatively recent movies were upscaled to 4K rather than natively shot in that quality. While it's something I'd expect for movies from the early 2000s, having neither the benefit of rescannable film reels nor high quality digital cameras, it doesn't make sense for more recent film series such as Maze Runner, The Hunger Games, Now You See Me, Divergent, and Jurassic World, among others. Especially odd is that some of those series have one movie natively shot in 4K despite the rest being upscaled.
Leaves me undecided on whether it's worth keeping releases with such a large footprint in my media library if they're not in true 4K...
I think about the same ...
I wonder whether you can compress fake 4K better than true 4k
Is there a list like this for fake HDR? I hate when I grab an old film movie in 4K and they shoehorn in annoying faux HDR effects.
Thanks!
Because fuck you, that's why. /j
Really though, like the one person said, it's a whole process, and probably costs money that the studios don't care to spend.
Just because something is shot on film doesn't mean the video files produced have been mastered for UHD/HDR. That's a level of processing that still has to happen before it reaches the consumer.
If a film has already been mastered for DVD, it has to be re-done for Blu-Ray, and re-done again for UHD/HDR.
Not all films are popular enough to justify that repeated processing. "Ah, DVD looks fine..."
Plus, a lot of companies don't bother going back to the film when they do rereleases. A lot can't due to all the post processing and special effects dome digitally. So most upres'd releases make significant compromises in one area or another, to the point where for some you can have better quality just stretching the video and using some shaders.
One classic example being the Babylon 5 TV show... They thought ahead enough to film all the live action in widescreen, but all the CGI was done in 4:3 for expense and rendering time.
Looked fine on TV in the 90s, not so much on DVD/Blu Ray. But short of re-doing all the CGI from scratch, not much else they can do.
The new HD version available on streaming is an HD 4:3 scan of the film the episode masters were finalized to.
I feel like x-files is like that too. It mostly looks great on Blu-ray but the CGI shots don't hold up lol