Okay... today is "Mastering and Restoration Day" here at
The Bits. The reason will become obvious in a few minutes...
First up today, there's been a small degree of panic in some quarters online in the last couple days about director James Cameron's recent comments on the remastered
Aliens transfer. Cameron was video interviewed
over at Coming Soon.net about
Avatar, and about 5:30 into the clip he talks about the new
Aliens HD master for the upcoming Blu-ray. To quote:
"It's spectacular. We went in and completely de-noised it, de-grained it, up-rezzed, color-corrected every frame, and it looks amazing. It looks better that it looked in the theaters originally. Because it was shot on a high-speed negative that was a new negative that didn't pan out too well and got replaced the following year. So it's pretty grainy. We got rid of all the grain. It's sharper and clearer and more beautiful than it's ever looked. And we did that to the long version, to the 'director's cut' or the extended play."
As you might expect, all that talk of de-noising and de-graining has some fans freaked out that the release is going to suffer the same excessively DNR-ed fate as Fox's recent
Predator: Ultimate Hunter Blu-ray. Here's the deal: Everyone we trust who was involved, and/or has actually SEEN the new
Aliens HD master for Blu-ray, reports to us that the film looks terrific. To the degree that DNR was used, it was applied carefully and with a light hand, with an eye toward striking the proper balance between maintaining the detail and integrity of the image and the desire to reduce grain and address the deficiencies of the stock used at the time. There is apparently STILL grain left in the image, it's just no longer excessive or distracting. Plus, Cameron is no slouch when it comes to the presentation quality of his films on disc, and he approved this transfer and master. Look, there's a VERY big difference in digital mastering when the filmmakers are directly involved in the process, as opposed to when they're not. So we're told the disc looks great, we trust that it looks great and I'll personally work to directly confirm that. My own feeling is that
Predator was probably an aberration. Fox has generally been doing very good mastering work for Blu-ray in the last year or so, and I suspect this is going to be a non-issue when we all get our hands on the
Aliens disc. 'Nuff said for now. By the way, it's a good
interview at Coming Soon, so do check it out.
.
