High frame rate or not at cinema?

On the contrary, you have to speculate as to what was in the hole to fill in the gap. You have to make a guess as to information which is no longer available. Ditto for color restoration of a painting. The original coloration is no longer there, so you have to do your best to make an inference to the original look.



Frame interpolation, at least, removes human idiosyncrasy and automizes the process, mathematically averaging the difference between two-frames, a mathematical inference to missing data. And it only works with what is there (the frame on either side).



There is an difference in intention, sure. Upping the frame rate polishes the original a bit and attempts to offer a smoother image, but the process is the same (making guesses inferences to missing data).

We're talking about a lot of things, among them film restoration (which is always film alteration). Even if, for example, your intention is to restore the film to look exactly as it was when it was originally released, this may also involve interpolating missing frames.



They Shall Not Grow Old is very nice in correcting the frame rate to the speed of life despite the imposition of a terrible faux-color on the image.






Upping the frame rate can make the past spring to life





Here is New York in 1993. It looks like it could have been shot yesterday because of the frame rate. Glorious.






Japan in the 1960s at 60FPS - like being there

Okay. Sure.



It's objectively awful to watch films that have no business being presented at the frame rate we're talking about. Or as close to objective as we're going to get. Because we can see with our own eyes what it should look like, and what that horrorshow of a smoothing process does to the image. Now....yes, some absolutely tasteless maniacs may prefer this....and maybe tasteless maniacs will prevail in the future. But I live in a present where there is still hope people have some kind of artistic sanity.


So this is what I'm arguing against?



Don't say things like this if you want to be taken seriously.




Thanks for the history lesson Mr. Movie. Or is that Professor Movie?






Yes. A thing they choose to do. An can prefer it or not prefer it, but at least it comes from them. Not your need to press that exciting button on your tv remote.




Restoration is generally done to return it to its original state. Sometimes there is guess work in this, but it is as good as we can get. But one thing we do know is that none of them intended their films to be watched at a faster frame rate that didn't exist at the time.




What does that have to do with anything?




I don't ****ing know. I imagine most would like it to look like they shot it to look though. And because it no longer looks like that on one of these rebellious televisions you're talking about, I imagine a lot of them would hate it.


Because it is obviously inferior.




Maybe, maybe not. And who cares? Shakespeare's English sounds funny to modern earns, but that's what we are stuck with, because that's how he wrote it. This is not a difficult concept to grasp.



This has already been addressed. It's a dumb point.



Hello!?! Earth to Corax. Who is telling filmmakers what to do in the future? That is their choice. And if they choose to go with faster frame rates, I don't want turds in the future slowing it down to 24fps. Watch what the artist intended, otherwise it isn't their vision. Again, not a difficult concept to grasp.



Ugh


[quote]In the future, I think, it will truly be an aesthetic choice. Some future auteur will be quite insistent that her film be viewed at precisely 38.33 frames per second. Horror films and war films, will be like to dip into lower frame rates for intense sequence. The default, however, will be to show life at the speed of life.

The central conceit of film is that you, the viewer, are really seeing it. For future audiences this will mean matching the refresh rates of video games and computer monitors. The expansion and contraction centers around the viewer as a viewer who is being "shown" something "real."


Since when were we talking about fiction? Oh, that's right, you're one of those people. I think I'll check out of this conversation right about now.

I think in some cases you can have meaningful evidence about what was there before, but regardless, whether records of that kind exist in a given instance, no record can exist, realistically, that would justify the insertion of more frames than currently exist in the film. This change always ensures that the majority of frames are additions and conjecture, which is a massive change. Damage repair, on the other hand, may or may not be (and is, anyway, always a much smaller alteration, and therefore almost always a much smaller violation if done incorrectly).

As you nod to re: motivation, there's a difference in posture here, too, between attempting to restore a thing (however imperfect) and adding to it. Yes, in a clumsily literal sense, you are exercising subjectivity when you, say, try to make out a smudged word in a manuscript, but it's still a different exercise than adding thousands of words you know, for a fact, were not in the original. Similarly, you could say that whether you've cut out half a film and replaced it with a YouTube video of a dog on a trampoline, or changed a single pixel in a single frame, you have technically violated the original artist's work in both cases. Even if the difference in degree is so extreme that it seems silly to put them in the same category, except as a purely philosophical exercise.

Anyway, you don't need to convince me that adding frames can improve the final product. Of course it can. But then, I have opinions on how to improve, well, every film I've ever seen in my entire life. But if I did that, I would not think the results reflected the original creator's vision, rather than my own.

All that said, I agree that our tendency to think of 24FPS as "cinematic" and higher framerates as unserious may just be pure emotional conditioning from decades of movie watching, and that future generations may find it silly. They'll have a pretty good argument for finding it silly, too. Objectively it's hard to make an argument against it. What? It's better to have tiny jumps in the action? And that just happens to coincide with the technological limitations in place during most of the films we grew up with?

But I will still push back on the idea that more frames are inherently better simply because they capture more of reality. Apologies for pimping one of my self-indulgent essays yet again, but one of my all-time favorite quotes (on any subject) comes from Frank Lantz, director of the New York University Game Center, who said this:

"Statues would not be better if they could move."

The limitations of a form are not necessarily (perhaps not even usually) weaknesses. They are an inextricable part of the form. It's a little more complicated with film by its very nature, but ultimately I think the rules are the same. That film cannot actually capture reality, and put you in the place the camera was, is a part of its fundamental nature. There are arbitrary boundaries on four sides already, and there's no reason to think of a fifth--time--as not being one of them.

60 FPS doesn't feel like the way things move in reality anyway. It's pretty much the opposite of 24, a sped-up version of real life. I think the truth is somewhere inbetween.

It's somewhere in there, yeah. The belief is the human eye sees in something between 30-60, which I guess is why (someone more technically knowledgeable than me can please correct this, if they wish) 60 is sort of the standard: because we're pretty sure anything beyond that isn't going to be noticed anyway.

That said, it seems clear we see at more than 24FPS, so I'm guessing 60 is probably closer to "reality," even though (for reasons detailed above) I don't think that really matters for this discussion.

I don't follow why TVs being able to do it automatically "shows that it is systematically rational." That feels like saying a process is objective because it's being done by an algorithm. But we can't launder our choices into impartiality through an automated process.

What if the film is damaged? What if there are missing frames or frames that are so faded as to almost be missing? If frames are missing, interpolation can restore the experience of the original frame rate. I don't see how such a patch is different from repairing a patch on an old painting. The function and intention are the same.




The original print might have been poor in the original release. What if the original print had a lot of grit or misaligned sprocket holes in the film resulting in a picture jumping around in a way the director and studio almost certainly did not intend? In this case, corrections would alter the original, because the original never had the intended framing.



This is not unlike improvements of editions of books. Some editions are rife with spelling errors or have poor bindings or fonts which were faint when they fell from the press. The new edition is restored with proper spelling, a strong binding, and legible print--as was intended for the original and which were only present because of poor editing and production on the side of the publishing house.





Every new release on new formats alters "pixels."



The metaphysical question (change a single period or pixel and the original is not the same) is not interesting, so I'll leave off it. The interesting question is aesthetic and for some, it appears to be an ethical question as is hinted at when words like "violated" are used--as if cleaning a print or a painting is a crime perpetrated by some villain. And this is a curious stance. A film, unlike a book, is made by many artists with competing and often incompatible intentions. And a film is a commercial endeavor (i.e., the studio wants to make a buck). And every new English translation Beowulf "violates" the original Old English of the Nowell Codex which is fire damaged and which is a undoubtedly itself a violation of the oral versions of the tale which it preserved in textual form.

It's not only that they are not weaknesses, but they are in many cases the actual strengths of any given medium. How an artist tends to the limitations in the equipment and technology he uses, as well as the limits in their own talents and abilities, is where much of the personality in the film or painting or whatever it may be comes from.



As for higher frame rate looking more life like, this is fairly true. But also inherently the problem. When I was at a friends house, who didn't know how to turn off the smoothing process on his television, and I was forced to watch A Hard Days Night at a higher frame rate, the illusion of what that movie is became shattered because it became too life like. 24fps preserved a mythology of The Beatles being somehow more than the average person. Existing in a space which could never exist on the same plane as a mere mortal as me. At a higher frame rate, I recognized their shape as decidedly human. And the rooms they were standing in, were hardly any different than the room I was currently sitting in. They were occupying the same space as me, in theory. It felt more akin to watching home movies of superstars where the veil comes down and we see these people are no different than us.



Now, there is more than a fair argument that it may be unhealthy that we place celebrities on pedestals. That we view them as somehow being more than what they really are. But at least in the world of film, can we at least preserve some kind of illusion. Can we at least preserve the manner in which these images were intially distilled to the public, which were part of what created the mythology?



This is why it doesnt matter much to me what happens in the future regarding this technology. Because this is how we will have always understood these images from not yet made movies. Even if I do not like the way they look, and their are legitimate ways to speak of what is lost in the depth of these images, if others prefer their films to look like that when they are making them...Fine! But something fundamental about the original experience is lost when we start tinkering with the very foundations of the medium they have been printed on. It is as heretical as it gets, and as said before, even though it isn't as in such florid bad taste as colorization, it is actually something worse. It is ****ing with the DNA of an art form. And its born out of this gross tendency of people to tinker with art forms until they specifically appeal to their tastes, when the value of art is us doing our best in the audience to move towards the ideas and aesthetics and tastes of some one else that isn't us.

Because it is not idiosyncratic. We don't have to guess "how" or "why" the television will treat the image. Thus, this is much more like a filter than "scribbling." You can get adjusted to a filter and see through it (which is its purpose) unlike simply scrawling on top of a canvass at random, which creates a new chaotic pattern with every stroke.


The legal system is simply the laundering of our collective choice into a systematized process--this what makes the legal code impartial; it applies to everyone equally, in principle. The only objective standards we have, save for the dictates of pure reason (e.g., a thing cannot be and NOT be at the same moment), are collective choices that have been laundered into a standard be that standard the Code of Hammurabi, 480p, driving on a particular side of the road or the Dewey Decimal System.



Indeed, Crumb was quite exercised by this very point, because we are losing an old objective filter of experience (everything else changes, but 24 FPS soldiers on!) and I sympathize with that, because I still love a good Cathode Ray Tube image humming along at 30 FPS--it's an aesthetic we are losing (e.g., PS2 games look great on a CRT and look like crap on a high definition monitor). But alas, times change. Old English gives way to the new. 480 gives was to 1080 and 4K. Hammurabi gives way to English Law. And so on. And so on.



Myself, I love having the option of watching at 1.2X speed. I love having the option to have a television interpolate frames. I love being able to change the aspect ratio in VLC. Art is to be consumed. The violation occurs when we no longer connect with the artwork (how many Beowulfs have been lost to history?), so I am all for scholarly updates of the original and I am all for restoration and presentation that cleans up the original print.



I'll grant that it is controversial to up the frame rate of an old film as this does change the aesthetic of it. And yes, I agree that Turner's colorization project was largely one of ruination. That stated, If 60 FPS someday helps someone get into Film Noir, I am not going to waggle my finger at a kid for not watching in the film on a screen at a theater flickering at 24 FPS.

It's not "idiosyncratic" to roll dice to make these kinds of decisions, either, but you wouldn't call dice rolling "systematically rational," would you?

It seems to me, logically, that meddling with existing art via a system can only work along two axes: either it adds random noise, or it moves the idiosyncrasies earlier in the process, IE: I subjectively choose these algorithmic inputs upfront and then a bunch of stuff happens, but ultimately the output is still the inevitable result of those inputs. Or some combination of the two.

Preemptively, if by "systematically rational" you just mean "done with an internally consistent system," then I agree that the process is systematically rational, but by that definition it really doesn't do anything to defend the practice.

I might be misremembering, but I think you're simply tacking on "at random" here, which is significant because without the "at random" there is no point left. And if I'm forgetting someone else saying "at random" you can easily change it to "purposefully" and address that point, which is the best version of the point, anyway.

...and yet we bear collective responsibility for its outputs, as the creators of its inputs, which is the thing germane to what we're discussing.

Yes, but you don't prosecute people under the old law retroactively, which is more or less what you're doing when you use new technology to alter works made without it.

I don't begrudge anyone these choices if they want them. I think the argument is about how we think of those choices: you seem to be arguing, either explicitly or implicitly (hard to say), that the interpolation of these frames leads to a fuller or more complete realization of the creator's vision, which is a totally different argument than just saying you prefer it or you think it makes some things better.

I'm a little curious as to why you're so rah-rah on frame rate increases but so down on colorization. An awful lot of the arguments you make (wouldn't most of them have wanted to shoot in color, if they'd had the option? Etc), though certainly not all, would seem to apply to both.

I agree. To reiterate, I'm pretty convinced the feelings most of us have for 24 FPS are mostly conditioning. I'll stop short of saying entirely conditioning (I can elaborate if anyone cares either way) but I mostly agree with you here.

But you're explicitly talking about films where this is not the case, yes? You're advocating we add them when there is no evidence of damage.

Yeah, nobody's disputing that films can have imperfections the creator did not intend, and obviously nobody can dispute the idea that you might alter them in a way that would have been consistent with their vision. But that's fundamentally unknowable, therefore any such choice is functionally a choice to override their judgment with (y)ours.

What would you think of someone who wanted to rerelease a Cormac McCarthy book with a lot of punctuation and capital letters?

The difference is that, with situations of dirt or damage, there is no case to be made that what is currently there is there by choice. It is already significantly different from the creator's vision whether we alter it or not. Therefore, we might as well alter it as best we can.

Alterations done in these cases are, I think, done with appropriate humility, and more importantly, with the goal of restoration and not "improvement," an initial goal-setting that presumably has major ripple effects in the types of choices made, even being pursued by imperfect people at all points. This seems fundamentally different than the more or less completely speculative "they'd probably want this if they had access to it."

I agree, and in fact this is usually one of the reasons I dislike the Art-Commerce spectrum, as if studio involvement always made things worse, or all artists would see a more perfectly realized vision with more money or time or whatever. Art is always working around constraints, and indeed only exists because of constraints, even if they're the inherent constraints of the medium as opposed to the ones which vary from one production to the next.

Everyone will have their own reaction to this stuff, and sometimes the logic here will work (like with The Beatles) and on other films it presumably would not apply at all. I don't think there's a rule. But I think it's pretty easy to intellectualize our gut-level reaction to this stuff after the fact, too. I say this as someone who has the same gut-level reaction as you, by the way. But if I were born today...

I think an interesting thought experiment is at what point this goes too far. Obviously nobody thinks lower frame rates are "better" as a rule. If that same film were in 12 FPS you'd probably find it unwatchable. And you might not notice if it were at 25 FPS.

It's possible there's some version of you out there in the multiverse, hanging out with John Mulaney's Spider-Pig, that watches the same film at 60 FPS and finds it deeply moving to be reminded of how human The Beatles were. That would be an equally interesting and valid emotional response, I think.

Some films benefit from this kind of illusion, for sure. But many benefit from the illusion of realism, instead.

If the roll of the dice selects for a coherent system which is universally implemented, then that is about as impartial as a decision can be. Moreover, the system selected is systemically rational in that it will universally generate, more or less, the same result (contingencies of viewing not withstanding). It is rational in the sense that it subjected to the same rules which generates consistent results. You know exactly what you're going to get.

If the idiosyncratic choice is standard and predictable, then it can be filtered like noise. It doesn't matter if the noise is random or a procedural "enhancement" (like stereo-widening, upping the bass on an EQ, changing the color settings on a TV). These we can filter out or adjust to, like hiss on an old cassette tape. On the other hand, cutting out half the film and replacing it with a dog jumping on a trampoline (or whatever your example was), isn't just filtering, because cannot tune out the dog to see what was once in the image.



How many logs can we change before we no longer have the ship of Theseus? Well, interpolation doesn't remove a single log from the ship. It doesn't paint over the ship in the drab zombie colors of the colorizers. On the contrary, it just lets us see what was intended to be seen, sailing more smoothly. That is hardly the vandalism or violation of a re-edit.



My argument is that it does not involve the obscuring/mangling which is feared, because it functions as a filter (like a noise we can tune out or an enhancement that allows us to tune in better).



It is impartial, because no individual is making odd choices which change a single frame of the original movie (it is just statistically averaging between frames). It is objective because it is an impartial standard (you know what you're going to get every time). The image moves smoothly rather than jaggedly.



My argument as to why it is better is not to be found here. Rather my appeal is to the old standard of J.S. Mill. Let people who are unbiased judges with experience of both decide for themselves whether to select a black and white television or a color television, a VHS or a DVD, at CRT or LCD, 24 FPS or 48 FPS. History has shown that people, over time, express a preference for more information, clearer information, and smoother information.



Right, it may be objective (in the mere sense that this is how it is everywhere), but you still can't derive an ought from an is. That this is objectively so does not mean it should be so. Even so, however, objectivity is a desirable thing to have for a standard, if it can be secured. And we can indeed, objectively/impartially bump up frame rates. And as for whether we should see J.S. Mill (above). If people with experience of both (without a lifetime of conditioning in either) prefer the new to the old, then the new is "better." And again, history has born out that people prefer to see more information, to see it more clearly, and to see it more smoothly. I expect that history offers us a plausible means of inference here, which means I have a warrant.


Every new translation of Beowulf prosecutes Old English under the new. Every "new edition" of the Original Trilogy of Star Wars was a retroactive re-writing under a new standard of SFX and sound and video quality. Moreover, judging the past by modern standards is quite the pastime these days.



Are there limits? Yes. What Lucas was doing with Star Wars was getting close to that dog on a trampoline. Upping the frame rate, however, doesn't change the aspect ratio, shot length, composition, sound, lighting, dialogue, does not change a single original frame. But again, it is not for me to judge, but for the great collective, with experience of both, and obligation to neither, to make their own decision as to whether we should move on from 24 flickering frames. And I think we both which side will win the contest in the long run.

I think it makes somethings better because it realizes the creator's vision at the speed of life, the very thing the filmmaker (in most cases) is trying to capture in the verisimilitude of film. The maker wanted to fool us. And for those of us who don't have 24 FPS "on the brain" more frames per second is more lifelike. Again, I agree that there are use cases (e.g., horror, war) where a more stuttered frame rate produces a desirable aesthetic effect which amplifies the theme of the film. In the main, however, the default expectation is for life on the screen to be lifelike, to achieve the magic trick convincing us that those images really are moving.
I see the two cases as being quite distinct. Upping the frame rate does NOT alter a single frame of the original. Colorization does. Interpolation just adds in averages to create the illusion of life's continuity. Everything that was in the original is still there. And you can still watch it at 16 or 24 FPS if you wish. Colorization, on the other hand, has destroyed some films - the preserved copy now a copy that does NOT have the original frames.



Moreover, colorization does NOT show us what the original virgin film stock would have "seen" as light entered it from the lens of the camera. The colors are not the colors that would have entered it from the camera lens, thus the image is not the image that the camera would have captured if the camera had been recording with color film stock. On the other hand, upping the frame rate with an algorithm simply show us what the film would have been exposed to if the film were being cranked at a faster rate. That's a big difference.



Finally, it damages information on the original print, muddying the contrast values.



If you find a flaw here, then by all means let me have it. I will either have to commit to endorsing colorization (which is about as likely as Crumb coming around to 60 FPS) or I will have to admit that upping the frame rate is a violation and should not be thought of as an innocent intervention with an old film (but what could be more innocent than watching an old film which can interpolate into a higher frame rate, if you desire--the original is not altered and you can switch back and forth).

Well, I would NOT opt for destroying or adding or otherwise altering the original Nowell Codex, the oldest token we have of that type (i.e., Beowulf). The text should be preserved in Old English, to the letter, and imaging of its pages should be exhaustive, so that we don't lose the original. The same thing should be done with film. Save the celluloid, if you can, and scan the image, with the root always being no more and no less that the best scanned images of the film as it was.



The Beowulf, however, that I want taught in high school and universities, the Beowulf I want on my bookshelf is the best most translation available. And for that I would want Heaney or Liuzza or Chickering, and I would leave the image scans of the original be. Ditto for the conserved film. Keep master prints of the best surviving tokens and also keep scans as back ups. Give the public, however, something that is cleaned of grit and scratches, something that looks as good as it did it the first time the first print went through a projector. And give the audience the option of their preferred frame rate (or let them watch on their own device, which increasingly amounts to the same thing).





No, we can totally clean of grit and scratches and restore audio. We know what the original would have looked/sounded like such that we can do this (e.g., information on the immediately anterior and posterior film frames). This is no great mystery, like the author's private intention for the audience to see a tenuously allegory to a metaphysical poet. A lot of what is restored is restored on the basis of a very good guess.


When the time is right? I am all for it. No Country for Old Men, for example, was a great adaptation for a generation which largely does not read. Moreover, English is always on the move and someday, when the language has moved on enough, translations will have to be made, even of this text (if history preserves these books). The new definitive translation of the Border Trilogy for the 23rd Century, preserving much of the 20th century originals, but updated for the great diphthong shift of the 22nd Century and updated into prose resembling neo-Gothic language of the Orange-Catholic Bible. Preorder your holo-memory today!





Yes, and we might also interpolate in a missing frame or two if the print was damaged.


It doesn't belong to them. They're dead. It belongs to us. And it is for us to decide what to do with it. There is always a new revisioning of Shakespeare in the works...

That "if" seems like a big deal, since it would be extremely unlikely for dice rolling to select for anything coherent at all.

Anyway, the question was whether it was "systematically rational." You defended the algorithmic stuff with that phrase, and then went on to say it was good because it was not "idiosyncratic," so I'm presenting you with a means of choosing (random chance) that is also not idiosyncratic, but is obviously not rational or sensible. So clearly there's got to be more to it.

I think I basically answered this here:

I don't begrudge anyone these choices if they want them. I think the argument is about how we think of those choices: you seem to be arguing, either explicitly or implicitly (hard to say), that the interpolation of these frames leads to a fuller or more complete realization of the creator's vision, which is a totally different argument than just saying you prefer it or you think it makes some things better.

Whether people will prefer it is 100% a different topic. And a very odd argument to advance given what I've heard you say in other threads about not throwing up our hands in surrender to cultural forces, as if they were inevitable.

I'm agnostic on whether objective-but-bad is better than subjective-but-good, or whatever we're meant to be comparing here. The point is only that supposedly impartial systems always involve judgments, and the fact that the judgments are applied consistently and/or indirectly, without specific knowledge of outcomes, does not absolve us of the results of those choices

There is no original English Beowulf, so the analog here is closer to the example of a burned or damaged frame, where subjective interpretation is unavoidable and we know for a fact the final product will not be, cannot be, objectively correct. So we do our best. This is completely different from "this film currently exists and is watchable in the same way in which it was released." You simply can't compare things where judgment is inevitable and no neutral, preexisting work exists, to something where it does.

And yet it changes the feel of every single second of the entire film.

The thing being discussed is your particular judgment here, unless I've somehow misunderstood it.

As for which will win, I've got my predictions, but they have little to do with the wisdom of any particular outcome.

Really? I'm honestly I'm not sure why you think this is even likely true, let alone self-evident. Filmmaking is such an incredibly controlled and inherently contrived process. Even filmmaking striving to achieve "realism" is really just striving to achieve the feeling of realism, and not realism itself. And even then not to the end of depicting it as accurately as possible.

I dunno, this kinda seems like the whole ballgame, right here. Those are examples where the benefit is obvious. Might there be many other examples where the benefit exists (or where the available technology influenced creative decisions at all), even if it's not obvious?

Yes and no. I think filmmaking is actually just trying to achieve the magic trick of making us care about things as if they were real. The seeming reality of the images we're given is only a means to that end, which is the real end. An end which can actually be damaged by confusing the two.

Adding words to a novel doesn't alter any of the existing words, either.

That a process can or will be abused is not inherently an indictment of the process, as I'm sure you know.

You agree lower frame rates are a crucial part of the impact of some films. Won't your preferred framerate "filter" be abused? Isn't some utter tool gonna watch Saving Private Ryan all buttery smooth and ruin it for himself?

But you've advanced "they probably would have done this if they had the choice" as a defense of retroactively higher frame rates. That defense would seem to apply just as much something like color. Probably more, actually: which do we have more of these days? People stubbornly using 24 frames per second even though they could shoot in 60, or people who shoot in black and white instead of color?

I don't think there's a flaw in making a distinction between the two in a vacuum, but I do think some of the specific arguments advanced throughout apply to colorization as well, and thus should probably not be made in defense of higher retroactive frame rates.

Well, what time is that? His books are perfectly readable as-is. "When the time is right" implies the time is not right right now, right? Why not?

I don't really follow what this means or how it relates to the discussion. There's no way to shoot a film without punctuation or capital letters because that's just a straight-up category error.

The key is the damage. I think I have to just repeat myself because it's the same response I want to give every time you try to draw an equivalence between dirt or damage and literally interpolating frames:

The difference is that, with situations of dirt or damage, there is no case to be made that what is currently there is there by choice. It is already significantly different from the creator's vision whether we alter it or not.

Totally confused by this response, because nothing in the bit you quoted (or any of my posts, I think) has suggested anything like "ownership." I haven't argued that we shouldn't do it because it "belongs" to them, I've simply argued that it's a functionally meaningful change from their creative vision. If someone doesn't give a damn about that, then I have little to say to them.

And anyway, arguments like this ARE us "[deciding] what to do with it."

The fact that Corax can't even acknowledge how changing frame rates or the punctuation in books fundamentally alters the authorship of the artist, makes the conversation pointless


But all the words are still the same! But all the original images are still there! Where's the foul?


Maybe some audience members do prefer this, but that is also why this world is my personal hell

Welcome to his world, where he decides what it is you are arguing




No one is claiming a person can't manipulate a piece of art in which ever way suits them. the history of art is filled with hacks and geniuses alike whose entire careers have been based on this premise. So, no, this is not what is being said. The claims have consistently been about how these changes alter how the art form feels and functions. Very simple concept that keeps being obfuscated just to keep the argument going.


Now do we all have our preferences? Yes. I prefer the idea that people watch it as close as we can assume the artist originally intended. But in Yarn world, this equates to people telling him not to fast forward through movies or not to smooth out his movie images. Because my preference is clearly seen as orders in this conversation.


It's maddening