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  • > 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

  • 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.

  • > 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.

  • 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.
  • > 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.

  • 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. https://www.eff.org/issues/dmca-rulemaking
  • 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.

  • "“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.

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