Otro palo que le dan a Harris. El post es brillante.

Respected Mr. Robert Harris,
I understand why you might prefer the 4K of Titanic, but since your review, there have been countless posts in other forums which have pointed out telltale signs of problems with this transfer. The de-graining done on this film was absolutely unnecessary since the film was shot on the Eastman EXR 50D Film / 5245, 7245, which are described as "micro-fine grain, very high sharpness." There was no need to de-grain the negative scan or add further sharpness. But both these things were done and the results don't look good at all.

A movie shot on film should look like film; should have its organic granularity, even if fine-grained and should have the soothing image quality that you get from analog capture as opposed to the often harsh sharpness of digital. Yet, Titanic now looks like hyperclean digital video with excessive sharpness that hurts the eyes. The skin textures look excessively dry and rubbery, especially during closeups. The analogue richness of the film is completely gone. The 4K scan was done in 2012 for the 3D release and all it needed was colour correction and release, not this excessive manipulation. I have seen the raw 4-perf 35mm scans of Titanic as released by Lightstorm during 2012 and they had a beautiful veneer of grain without any of the processed look or artificial sharpness that plagues the 4K.

I am sure you know what Sony, Arrow and Shout factory are doing with 4K restorations. Those are exemplary, with organic grain retained and an overall analogue, filmic presentation that more or less everyone is satisfied with. That's how film restorations should be done. Park Road Post, which did the mastering on Titanic and all of Cameron's upcoming UHD releases (including the heavily condemned True Lies 4K), is notorious for heavily de-graining, artificially sharpening and using AI to alter films to make them look like modern video. This is an unhealthy obsession, I feel.

If such excessively processed mastering becomes the norm for film restorations or if well respected archivists such as yourself give glowing reviews to such shoddy work, then the future of film restoration is in jeopardy, I feel. As someone who has seen Titanic 9 times in theatres, including 35mm, I am appalled by the video quality of this "4K" release. This is a slap to all those fans that wait for authentic-to-source and organic restorations of such classic films. I just cannot reconcile your review with what I and several other have seen. Unfortunately, many viewers seem to prefer clean and grain-free video and so they will probably be happy with this. But this sends the wrong message to filmmakers like Cameron, Jackson and Lucas that they can keep altering their films or spicing it up without consequence. The consequence is the cascading effects on other film restorations and other directors/studios influenced by Cameron, Jackson and Lucas.

A film is a product of its time and must be preserved as close to how it looked back in the day; not transformed into "8K digital" video look. Manipulating movies without making the original unaltered version available, is nothing less than destroying film history and altering memory forever.