The Matrix looks dramatically different on Hulu versus on HBO Max

https://www.echevarria.io/blog/the-matrix-looks-different-hulu-hbo-max/index.html

by ivanech • 5 years ago

218 167 5 years ago

carabiner• 5 years ago

lol "dramatically different." To most, it just looks greener, that's it. It won't affect an average viewer's enjoyment of the film. This reminds me of a typography article that says a g with excess kerning in some font is a devastating flaw.

schappim3• 5 years ago

The “looks greener” is actually a central part of the filmography (not sure if this is the right word), as the colours are tinted green whenever the characters are in the matrix and shift back when they are in the real world.

colechristensen3• 5 years ago

Cinematography would probably be the appropriate word.

xeromal2• 5 years ago

Not in the first film. The green tint was added in the 2 and 3rd movies and retroactively applied to the first.

fullshark• 5 years ago

This is the type of complaint that carried more weight back when we viewed films as genuine works of art and not just a variation of grist for the content mill.

abfan1127• 5 years ago

cinematographers and others go to great lengths to get colors right. They choose different film mediums (or digital equivalents). The great cinematographers go to great lengths to get colors, angles, perspectives just right. Average movie goers notice the greatness, but they don't know the "how its great". Font Designers go to great lengths to get just the right kerning, serifs, etc too. Average people notice great fonts, but often don't know why.

fortyseven2• 5 years ago

A word's intensity can vary by context.

For example, most of the time when I describe an event as "awesome", rarely is it literally targeting something that inspires "awe".

colechristensen3• 5 years ago

It is a trend of language that words lose intensity of meaning over time. Perhaps the only reason “fuck” still means anything is that we make it a taboo for children to say.

fourseventy• 5 years ago

Too bad they never made any sequels...

fortyseven2• 5 years ago

Animatrix helps with that pain, thankfully.

seanicus7• 5 years ago

Certainly none of them are a patch on the original, which stands alone as a totemic duck press of action/sci-fi cinema, but Reloaded has some really fun wtf ideas that twisted my brain in the same way that the original did, as well as a set piece (the highway chase) that's on par with Matrix 1. I've tried to find value in Revolutions but it's a harder task for me.

I've seen Resurrections once and it's too early to say. I really enjoyed it but it hasn't sat well with me since viewing. Hoping to pop it on this weekend and get a better impression.

yaksha13• 5 years ago

The scene color is quite important to the storytelling. Most often I think of Green as being in the Matrix and Blue as being in the "real" world/ Zion

pmlnr• 5 years ago

No, not in the first, 1999, original release. That color shift is retrofit.

FreeFull• 5 years ago

In the first movie, they tried to achieve it practically, by giving all of the clothing and props a green tinge. Certainly not as effective as doing it in post-processing, though.

jeffbee• 5 years ago

Reminds me why I maintain all those DVDs, Blu-Rays, CDs, records, and tapes. They're the same every time I play them. No streaming services to "remaster" my favorite records, change all the colors, delete scenes, add characters, letterbox the damned Simpsons, for crying out loud Disney+!!!

whynotminot• 5 years ago

But this is highlighting that the problem actually lies potentially in the sources you're declaring as immutable--there is a bluray release that hews closer to green, and an UHD bluray release that hews closer to blue, which apparently is more in line with the theatrical release.

Your disc is just another snapshot in time reflecting the decisions of whoever handled the master for the disc--not all that different than whoever made the choices for the streaming version.

jerf4• 5 years ago

The point is that it is indeed a snapshot... nobody can come in later and change it. If I want the changed thing, I can go get it. It doesn't guarantee I get the best version of whatever, but at least what I have won't change out from underneath me.

brnt• 5 years ago

At least we know which snapshot we're talking about and are free to buy (and sell) the snapshot of our choosing.

Streaming is just another form of broadcast. What you see now, isn't what you're going to see tomorrow.

denimnerd42• 5 years ago

A much more significant problem to me is when streaming services don't preserve the original aspect ratio. Like cropping to make a 4:3 show 16:9 or a 2.35:1 movie 16:9.

bsimpson• 5 years ago

They're both crimes against film.

cronix• 5 years ago

No films were harmed in the making of this digital product.

jwlake• 5 years ago

Movies usually have several terrible cuts, tv versions are usually much much worse than the bluray versions. Streaming is a mixed bad, sometimes better. Disney+ actually bringing out good versions (IMAX) hopefully will force others to improve.

seanicus7• 5 years ago

And don't even get me started on the effect of these vendors' compression methodologies. I watched the Burton Batman movies when HBO MAX debuted and I couldn't believe how dogshit they looked due to their dark palette not playing well with the very aggressive compression. Esp. wild when you consider the amount of money the the Batman movies have brought in for WB. It's their flagship franchise and I assume the highest brand recognition of any IP they own (sorry, Bugs).

HBO didn't roll out 4K content until months later, though, so things may have improved since then.

grumbel• 5 years ago

Taking a show originally cropped for 4:3 and expanding the image to 16:9 can also lead to fun results when microphones, lightstands and crew are in the parts of the picture that where originally cropped out. Buffy was a famous victim of that.

And fitting for the topic, there is a Matrix - Open Matte trailer on Youtube, was never broadcast in that form, but an interesting watch at what is in the full picture:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8GdG4Ryt9ro

deadbunny• 5 years ago

That's the least of the Buffy upscaling sins. They replaces sfx with objectively worse ones, they wrecked the colour balance, the cropping is insane. It was also always intended to be 4:3 for the entire run.

https://buffy.fandom.com/wiki/User_blog:BuffyHD/What%27s_Wro...

Now that Matrix trailer is how I remember it from my 3 visits to the cinema and dozens of times on VHS! Much less green tint.

muz754• 5 years ago

Babylon 5 had a terrible widescreen release on DVD, that cropped all CGI. For once, a streaming service did it justice - HBO Max remastered it and re-released it in all of its 4:3 glory in 2021: https://www.reviewgeek.com/68825/babylon-5-returns-to-hbo-ma...

stormbrew2• 5 years ago

The annoying thing about B5 is, according to JMS (the showrunner) it was shot with an intention to be compatible with widescreen framing, and the digital effects people were supposed to be making effects similarly compatible, but they didn't. So it left things in a really awkward state for people making a DVD release in the peak "BUT MAH PIXULS" era.

It wouldn't be so bad if it was just the entirely (or mostly) CG scenes that weren't composited to widescreen, but it was also stuff like when they shot one of their plasma weapons. The DVD releases wound up switching to really nasty upscales of broadcast footage cropped to 16x9 for just those shots. Was particularly bad in the first season.

post_break2• 5 years ago

Baywatch was remastered and unfortunately went 16:9 instead of keeping 4:3. It looks really good but I don't think it should have been cropped.

kuon2• 5 years ago

Well, online platforms do not care a lot about the content.

For example, on disney+, the simpsons are cropped to 16/9, which removes a lot of the image. Hopefully, I found an original version on torrent, but that's really a bad move from disney.

slickdork2• 5 years ago

Disney+ actually has both versions of the Simpsons. There's an option to use the original aspect ratio you can check (of course that's opt in - the default is the wrong ratio).

Seinfeld on Netflix on the other hand only has the cropped aspect ratio (booooooooo).

tomjakubowski2• 5 years ago

Seinfeld was actually filmed on 16:9 and then cropped to 4:3 for broadcasts in the 90s. So the 16:9 Seinfeld is showing you more, not less.

The good seasons of the Simpsons are so full of sight gags. The crop (or worse, when the crop consciously pans and scans) totally spoils them.

beached_whale• 5 years ago

Thanks! I did not notice that in the past

Latty• 5 years ago

This was true originally, they added support to watch the original aspect ratio ages ago though: https://www.theverge.com/21273476/simpsons-original-4-3-aspe...

kuon2• 5 years ago

Well, that's good the option is there, but OMG who came up with that UI? They should put a ratio button on the player, not some hidden option in a details tabs I never opened.

It is still very bad that the default ratio is wrong, I see zero reason to watch it in this cropped ratio.

Anyway, thanks for pointing that up.

salamandersauce• 5 years ago

Disney+ has both versions, there's a setting to tick to change it. Fox previously did this change and IIRC these might be the HD versions they sold on iTunes and other places for seasons prior to the simpsons going widescreen as well.

rscoots2• 5 years ago

This has always really mystified me.

So many 4:3 shows are rendered unwatchable by these companies, most of which fancy themselves as having a cutting-edge tech stack.

You’re telling me no one at Netflix can build a toggle option allowing the user to select the aspect ratio?

schappim3• 5 years ago

Edit: Moved off the dead parent comment

DeepYogurt3• 5 years ago

As I recall the green tint was added to the second DVD release. The theatrical release had a more balanced color palette.

Edit: Seems that the UHD release removed the green tint as well

https://www.avforums.com/reviews/the-matrix-4k-blu-ray-revie...

neogodless2• 5 years ago

Also from paragraph 2 of the article:

The initial DVD release had a neutral-warm color palette while the 2008 Blu-ray added a heavy green cast to match the sequels. The Matrix's 2018 UHD Blu-ray release apparently hews closer to how the film looked in theaters with a more purple-blue tint

marci• 5 years ago

Maybe they went heavy on the green for subsequent releases, but according to "The Matrix Revisited", the green tone was an integral part of the filmmaking process (for those interested, it's around the 20min10sec mark).

globular-toast2• 5 years ago

The green tint was definitely there in the initial DVD release and, presumably, 35mm cinema release. For the sequels they made the tint way more obvious and then regraded the original to match. But the tint was always there.

jerf4• 5 years ago

If the representation of blown-out highlights on Hulu is accurate, something else beyond just color grading has gone wrong. That's cinematographically-relevant detail loss. A lot of people might not be able to put their finger on why that's a change, but most people would experience it as a small but noticeably different tone.

I qualify my statement because there's a lot of things that could have gone wrong between not just the studio and Hulu, but Hulu and my viewing of the images on my screen here.

kevinventullo2• 5 years ago

To clarify, Hulu’s version is fine. HBO Max’s is the one that’s blown-out.

NovemberWhiskey• 5 years ago

Yeah - I am sure the Wachowskis are on record talking about the green cast of the scenes that occur in the matrix. It's meant to recall the idea of old green-phosphor monochrome monitors; and I also distinctly remember some discussion about this from the director of photography, maybe in a DVD commentary or something.

The matrix is green-tinted and the real-world is blue-tinted.

ref. https://www.matrixfans.net/movies/the-matrix/wachowski-broth...

jbverschoor• 5 years ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KEdgmNZnLs4

Very cool!

fsagx• 5 years ago

I've seen it many times and had no idea. Mild red-green colorblindness.

oauea• 5 years ago

Edit: Moved off the dead parent comment

How does one move their comments?

hammock• 5 years ago

Seems like this wasn't added until after it was out of theaters.

Why do so many filmmakers go back and mess with classic movies after the fact (Star Wars)?

The confusion I had in understanding which scenes were in the matrix, and which were in the real world, the first time I watched the movie, is a huge part of the movie's appeal to me.

johnchristopher• 5 years ago

I just rewatched trailers for the matrix and it doesn't play that angle. It's revealed early on in the trailer that the matrix is a simulation and the movie itself is not trying to blur the lines, the matrix being a simulation is an accepted fact by both characters and the viewer.

Maybe I watched DVD trailers though. I remember whatisthematrix and while the concept of a simulation was emphasized and heavily discussed there was no confusion about what is real and what is not. `What is the simulation` though...

With that being said I agree that I rarely see improvements when movie makers revisit their creation (I also have no interests).

swivelmaster• 5 years ago

Cinematography is the word you're looking for.

isleyaardvark• 5 years ago

Everyone in this particular thread should watch the video linked in the footnote of the article. (I had forgotten this post was a link to an article and not the video, and was scratching my head at why people were even having this discussion).

Edit: tl;dr of the video:

- The Matrix had some green tint

- the sequels had even more green tint

- a remaster of The Matrix used the sequels as a reference and remastered The Matrix to be much more green than the theatrical release

- the 4k remaster is less green and looks more like the theatrical release

From the article it looks like on top of that HBO Max somehow got a bad version of the less green 4k version

71a54xd• 5 years ago

Yep, this is certainly noticeable at higher bit-rates, for instance when you watch on a real blu-ray or a raw blu-ray rip. It's incredible how much color depth you lose with x625 encoding even with their purported "10-bit" color depth. My blu-ray library never disappoints even if it feels like 2013 actually loading discs into a player.

EigenSpectrum• 5 years ago

The clips in the below playlist seem to be from the print used for the original DVD master.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aLbdfgY_IhM&list=PLrT4uvwaf6...

Although I only saw the film once in theaters, I watched the DVD religiously, and these clips seem consistent with that version.

Note: The film was shot on Super 35, and cropped to 2.39:1 for theatrical distribution. This is the 16:9 "open matte" version (more information on the top and bottom), probably intended for cable television.

Edit: The clips in the playlist uploaded in 2016 (i.e. clip 1, and clips 6-14) are consistent with the original DVD release. The rest seem to be from some other release.

quercusa2• 5 years ago

It never occurred to me to wonder what streaming services use for their sources. Do they send an intern over to Best Buy to pick up a Blu-Ray?

pavlov• 5 years ago

Judging by the picture quality on many of the older shows and movies, an intern at the studio digitized a big stack of dusty NTSC Betacam tapes into MPEG-2 files with all encoder settings left at default low-bitrate CBR, then uploaded it to Amazon and everywhere else where it got further mangled by re-encoding at various H.264 levels.

deergomoo2• 5 years ago

Even newer shows often have appalling picture quality on streaming services. Dark scenes especially—I watched Mr Robot on Prime Video a few months ago and the blocking and compression artefacts in dark scenes (which, if you’ve never seen the show, is a lot of them) were unbelievable. I’ve seen 700MB DVD rips with better handling.

mikeryan• 5 years ago

No there's a whole industry, with MPA driven security standards around getting digital source files from the studios to the streamers (or usually actually directly to the streamers DRM system)

That being said there are likely multiple "masters" of a film that are available to the streaming service to choose from however.

If you're interested details of the MPA Content Security Standards can be viewed here (PDF)

https://www.motionpictures.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/MP...

quercusa2• 5 years ago

Thanks!

allenu• 5 years ago

Some people genuinely like the green cast of the 2008 Blu-ray.

I never did the see the original Matrix movie in theaters (I watched on a "DivX;)" rip provided by my roommate at the time). Did the original theater version not have a green tint to it? The rip that I saw did and to me that feels like the "definitive" look of The Matrix. Am I misremembering and it was only added to the 2008 Blu-ray?

ModernMech• 5 years ago

I had it on a VHS circa 2000. It was my favorite movie at the time and I must have watched it 100 times. Definitely had a green tint in that version (I remember being concerned it was my tv and adjusting the colors).

unbanned2• 5 years ago

Download an old cam or telecine and have a look?

ugjka• 5 years ago

Download where?

ceejayoz• 5 years ago

Download an old cam

Are these noted for their high color fidelity?

alternatetwo2• 5 years ago

There is actually a 35mm scan with iffy colors, but absolutely no extreme green tint. For example Neo in the office is just basically normal colors, same as the new 4k remaster.

Edit: Here are some screenshots: https://imgur.com/a/f8630kc

ivanech3• 5 years ago

Looks like the 2004 DVD also had a green tint

Maken• 5 years ago

The green tint was always there, but was more subtle and the "Matrix" sections had also washed up colors. It become way more obvious in Reloaded/Revolutions and for the BD version they used the same color grading to contrast reality/real world sections in all three movies.

Kranar• 5 years ago

The green tint was not part of the original theatrical release. The green tint was used in the sequels and then added back to the DVD/Blu Ray release of the original movie.

You can go on Youtube and watch trailers for the original theatrical release and compare them to clips posted from later DVD releases. For example here is a comparison of the original theatrical trailer to a fan made trailer using clips off of the DVD using the infamous "Guns... lots of guns..." scene:

https://youtu.be/tGgCqGm_6Hs?t=91

To this:

https://youtu.be/atqOCj3qzzA?t=110

You can compare other scenes as well, it's clear the original film had no green tint and in fact I personally like it better without the tint.

post_break2• 5 years ago

I wonder if this person has the incorrect settings on their TV for HDR content or color space.

ascagnel_• 5 years ago

This was my first thought as well -- HBO Max has a new Dolby Vision version, while Hulu continues to be bottom-of-the-barrel in terms of its image quality (they appear to routinely use the lowest bit-rate for video, and have historically been late to move from older interlaced or SD transfers to progressive & HD transfers). Hulu is likely serving up a feed based on the DVD, theatrical, or original HD TV release.

seanicus7• 5 years ago

I have the Matrix 4K disc that ostensibly HBO MAX is using for it's 4K version and it's one of the most pristine discs I own. It was the first disc I loaded up on my home system post-upgrade and featured a level of quality of image so high that at one point I stopped to see how many of Keanu's pores I could count.

It looks so blown out in that post that I thought that it was an iphone shot of the writer's screen... I'm still not convinced that it isn't frankly; all those screengrabs look weird to me.

But definitely not impossible that these just looks like crap; streamers seem keenly aware that for the most part their audiences are happy to consume their media as low-contrast Tasty Wheat slop that they half-watch while scrolling insta/tiktok.

notatoad• 5 years ago

it kind of looks like they took the blu-ray version that was streaming on hulu and desaturated it to make it less green, rather than going back to the original version.

neogodless2• 5 years ago

From the article:

The Hulu version had a strong green cast, and I suspect it used the 2008 Blu-ray version at its source. Meanwhile, the HBO Max version is more purple and blue, so it seems likely that it came from the 2018 UHD Blu-ray.

Lammy• 5 years ago

The industry term is "color grading" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_grading

CarVac3• 5 years ago

HDR content to not-full-brightness-capable display autoconversion was a terrible idea.

Take the color grading away from someone with an eye for aesthetics and give it to a dumb algorithm.

gruez4• 5 years ago

agreed. I have a SDR monitor and given the choice between a 4K HDR release and a 1080p SDR release, I'll always go for the 1080p release. The colors in the HDR always look off compared to the SDR. I tried a bunch of fixes (eg. different media players, tweaking tonemapping settings, etc.), but it never works. Does anyone know whether it's still an issue on HDR400 (ie. "fake HDR") monitors ?

MaxBarraclough3• 5 years ago

I do the same. UHD Blu-Rays with HDR look terrible on my non-HDR 4K TV. The colours come out terribly 'flat', and no amount of tweaking the display settings is able to set it right. I'm careful to go with ordinary Blu-Rays instead. Ideally of course I'd rather a non-HDR UHD Blu-Ray but these are increasingly rare.

You'd think the disc players would be smart enough to do a good job mapping HDR to SDR, but here we are.

deergomoo2• 5 years ago

The entire home cinema market is a colossal fuck up right now.

For a start you’ve got multiple mutually incompatible HDR standards. Even if your TV supports everything, a step in your setup might not. e.g. my LG C1 supports Dolby Vision but my UHD Blu-Ray player (Xbox Series X) can only output DV from games and apps, not Blu-Rays. And that’s not considering that the TV, while incredible, doesn’t actually get anywhere near bright enough to display the full range of HDR.

Audio isn’t much better: my receiver supports every audio codec under the sun but the TV can’t passthrough DTS for some reason so I have to have the Xbox decode it and just send plain stereo instead. The receiver can’t pass 4K 120Hz back to the TV so connecting the Xbox to that is a non-starter.

Now the HDMI folks are following the insane lead of the USB guys and have decided that there is no longer a HDMI 2.0, and instead all HDMI 2.1 features are now just optional. So working out what your TV supports and may support in the future involves trawling spec sheets or even looking at the raw bandwidth of the HDMI ports.

On top of that, TVs still ship with bananas default settings that make everything ultra-blue and motion interpolated so unless you have the knowledge and inclination everything just looks like crap anyway. At least Filmmaker mode is gaining some traction as a one-click way to get a decent picture.

It’s a shame that the vast majority of people will never see the full potential of their AV systems.

CarVac3• 5 years ago

I'm just not even bothering with surround. I have a 2.1 setup with a mixer so I can have my computer, TV, and turntable all outputting sound simultaneously in theory. In practice it's just so I never have to switch sound inputs.

ben7799• 5 years ago

It's been so long since these were in the theaters I wouldn't remember which was most accurate.

I saw them all in the theater but I watched the original so many times on the original DVD that to my mind the DVD release would be "correct".

I haven't seen any of them in a long time but I sure loved that first movie for about 5 years.

My feeling that it should be more green when they are in the Matrix and less so outside of the Matrix matches up with other commenters though. There were very very obvious filmography/cinematography/color grading choices the directors made to show the contrast between the Matrix and the Real as you watched the movie.

One of the example scenes with Agent Smith pointing his gun is NOT in the Matrix though, that's in the construct.. can't remember but I think those did not have the green tint.

larusso• 5 years ago

I was not able to watch the first movie when it was released in cinema because I was a year to young to watch it (Germany late nineties and no PG-13 madness as it is today). But I watched a double feature when Matrix reloaded was released a few years later. And I still remember that I saw the color grading of Matrix Reloaded and was really annoyed by it. For me Matrix before the sequels where released was blue (you can also see this in the movie poster, which you can find green graded versions now as well ;)). With the release of the sequels everything became green. I’m also the owner of the blu-ray release and was not amused by the color changes.

ramadis• 5 years ago

For those interested, there is an interesting video [1] that explains how/why the different versions with different color gradings came to be.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KEdgmNZnLs4

turdnagel2• 5 years ago

I did not see the film in theaters as I was 12 at the time, but I racked dozens of plays of the DVD version, which has the green tint and looks "correct" to me.

(Edit: Apparently the 1999 DVD did not have the tint, but I that's not what I remember...)

It would be interesting to do a comparison between the green tint version and the "untinted" / neutral without the issues with highlights/whites.

alternatetwo2• 5 years ago

Here are a couple of screenshots I made just a few days ago:

https://imgur.com/a/f8630kc

The original colour timing is very certainly NOT the green bucket they spilled over the masters for the original bluray release.

turdnagel2• 5 years ago

Thank you for sharing that. I just watched the 2018 UHD Blu-ray and compared with an earlier Blu-ray 1080p release. To my eyes, everything is shifted to be a bit more blue, not green, and specifically in the skin tones. There is definitely a tint in both versions, but skin tones aren't as affected in the earlier versions vs. the later ones.

jdavis703• 5 years ago

Many comments here are clamoring for immutable masters. We also see comments elsewhere complaining when historic buildings receive a an addition in a contemporary architectural style etc.

For most of human history art has always been mutable. If you tour the National Gallery of Art there are plenty of paintings that have been changed throughout out the years to match changing and politics or theologies.

In fact, most performance art has always been somewhat unique. Every show Shakespeare put on was slightly different.

sircastor• 5 years ago

See Also: Star Wars.

ivanech3• 5 years ago

Oh geez the Star Wars special edition is one of the stronger arguments in favor of immutability

anonu• 5 years ago

Interesting

Luke's lightsaber During the training scene aboard the Millennium Falcon, Luke's lightsaber—which in some releases had erroneously appeared green—was corrected to blue for the 2019 release.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Changes_in_Star_Wars_re-releas...

jart3• 5 years ago

See Also: Lord of the Rings Extended Edition. That's a good reason to not take a hardline stance on film immutability.

brandonmenc• 5 years ago

Every show Shakespeare put on was slightly different.

And it would be awesome to have each and every one on film.

Many comments here are clamoring for immutable masters.

Which are essentially free. We can't do this with buildings.

supernovae• 5 years ago

I don't really see the point for immutable masters since no one ever sees it in that state. No one tv or cinema is calibrated 100% to the master and it would be too expensive to do so.

Ardon• 5 years ago

I think we can have both things. There's no particular reason why the various revisions of a digital product can't be kept available.

For example: I keep both the Star Wars Despecialized Edition and the blu-ray release on my jellyfin server and then you can just pick your preference with a drop-down menu. I'd love to see the same setup on official services.

x86_64Ubuntu• 5 years ago

Did the instance of the painting change? Or did what was in the art collection change? I don't care of the collection changes, but I might care if people are scribbling on the paintings for whatever reasons. Unlike a Shakespeare show, digital media can be reproduced perfectly for little cost, the fact that multiple unique instances of a theme can be different doesn't mean that we should.

SethTro• 5 years ago

In practice yes, Museums occasionally clean & restore their paintings which shifts the color balance, grain, texture similar ways.

There's a some great pre/post conservation photo in this article: http://blogs.getty.edu/iris/as-layers-of-old-varnish-are-rem...

karaterobot• 5 years ago

For most of human history art has always been mutable. If you tour the National Gallery of Art there are plenty of paintings that have been changed throughout out the years to match changing and politics or theologies.

Interesting point. The reason people object more strongly to this, then, may have something to do with the different relationships people have to popular, commercial movies and fine art, or to the difference between touring a museum and watching a movie in your home. More research needed as to the reasons why, but in any case people do feel a certain way about it.

cbsmith• 5 years ago

I love that people think that an immutable master would help. Because an image projected from film in a theatre in 1999 is of course going to establish how something should be rendered on an LED/OLED flat panel today.

globular-toast2• 5 years ago

I think the problem is that choice is a burden. When there's only one version of a film available, it's great. But then a "better" version becomes available and all of a sudden it's not great. Or is it? Now you need to think twice before you watch that film as you wouldn't want to miss the better version.

I believe this the subject of a book The Paradox of Choice. I've only read a synopsis of it and it seems to match my own experience.

jart3• 5 years ago

For most of human history vandalism and violence has always been common.

jeegsy• 5 years ago

Consumer Complaint: we would rather "X" Response: ACKSHULLY, {everything} has always been "Y" so the "X" you want as a consumer is kinda invalid

This argument sequence is a special kind of infuriating

titzer3• 5 years ago

A fun mind-twist is to think of the film itself every time one of the characters in the film mentions "The Matrix". E.g. "No one can be told what the Matrix is". Indeed. Nobody can be told what this movie is. Ha!

It makes it even more meta than it already is. The Matrix was shot in 1999 and takes place in 1999. It was purposefully shot with the technology of the time; cellphones, computers, etc. As such, it serves as a perfect time capsule of that period. So in a sense, The Matrix (the movie) is indeed a simulation of 1999!

dml2135• 5 years ago

Oh man, just wait until you see the new sequel.

titzer3• 5 years ago

I did. Twice. It's...different.

FroshKiller• 5 years ago

It doesn’t take place in 1999. The plaque aboard the Nebuchadnezzar says it was built in 2069, so it’s at least that far in the future and almost certainly further since it probably wasn’t the machines commemorating the date.

titzer3• 5 years ago

https://matrix.fandom.com/wiki/1999

subsubzero• 5 years ago

I saw the first matrix the night before it came out in 1998 in san jose ca. I remember the whole film had a bluish tint to it, it was filmed in Australia(alot of it) and remember not loving the tint. In subsequent films (reloaded and revolutions) they went to the green tint and then applied the green tint to future dvd releases of the original matrix to preserve a continity to the series.

Avery3R• 5 years ago

Just a theory, but it looks like it could be caused by differences in the tone mapping algorithm used to convert the HDR masters down into an SDR palette.

AndrewUnmuted• 5 years ago

When you steam The Matrix, you don't know which version you're going to get, and that stinks.

You know which version you get, ironically, if you pirate the film from the private torrent tracker networks out there.

Fuck Big IP! Pirate your favorite film today!

seanicus7• 5 years ago

And sadly you may end up getting a higher res version than what you'd get on streaming.

boffinism• 5 years ago

Great use of the word 'hews' in an article about hues.

ivanech3• 5 years ago

Haha I almost said that the 2018 version hews closer to the theatrical release's hues but that felt too cheesy

zelias• 5 years ago

One thing I could never figure out about the Matrix is why they would write all the code on top-to-bottom lines. You'd think it would be left-to-right or right-to-left even if it's all written by machines!

saltcured• 5 years ago

To me, it implied a bit of the "future is east-asian" styling of Blade Runner. Vertical signage from a digital chinatown.

But it also made it seem both familiar and alien to see green phosphor characters fill the screen top to bottom, but with an extra bit of ghosting and smearing as the different columns seemed to flow at different rates. It also reminds of older electronic sign boards of airports and stock markets, with large fields of characters flipping in loosely synchronized ways.

aenis• 5 years ago

I am sorry for asking such a basic question but did anyone here figured out a working hw/sw solution for playing blue ray uhd/hdr videos on macbooks? I spent considerable amount of time researching and found nothing that would not crash on my mbp w/ m1 max.

aeturnum• 5 years ago

It's interesting to compare this to Ghost in the Shell (1995) a key influence on the Matrix. It also had a re-release in 2008 which brought the color palette in line with the GITS extended universe, but that re-release is consistently referred to as 2.0 and is understood as a separate release.

This kind of sloppy mastering across different platforms suggests that whoever is in charge of ensuring the original films are available in high-quality formats is not doing a great job.

0_____0• 5 years ago

IIRC each streaming service has a different set of acceptance criteria. I haven't read about color grading in this regard, but Netflix, Disney etc. do control things like audio levels to ensure that the experience is even across their different media titles -- having to crank up the volume on one title, only to be blown away when starting another one is a poor user experience. Requirements around mean audio level can have non-trivial impacts on the experience of a film -- ones with a lot of quiet/loud contrast may be affected differently from ones with less peaky audio tracks.

I hadn't thought about it before, but it makes sense that this would apply to the visual aspect as well.

35mm_guy• 5 years ago

Let's just sort out the color grading versions:

The one with the blown out highlights and leaning often way too much into the blue is the most recent remastered version done for the UHD BD release. Beside a few scenes outside the matrix it is the version furthest away from the theatrical presentation. It's the only one currently available in UHD though.

The green tint version is the color grading that was done to bring the first movie in line with the planned look of the sequels. This is the HD version most people know and was widely available on DVD and of course on BD. It was not well done, as digital color correction was in its infancy back then and there are many issues with the color grading overall - but never received an official correction. This is version was also used for digital screening later on.

Now onwards to how the movie actually looked theatrical:

The theatrical release looked very close to the first R1 NTSC DVD (well as far as telecining goes of course) - and only this one (VHS and LaserDisc are naturally more off). Cannot speak for other than US releases though. Also the same version as on the initial R1 DVDs was broadcasted on cable at least back 2000/2001 in HD. Minor differences, but more off than the DVDs (looks like color space conversion round trip from Rec.709 to 601, back to 709), though unless you have a trained eye for color grading and a reference like display you probably won't notice the sublte differences here at all.

Anyway, the theatrical release does not have the the strong green tint as released later. It has a slight green and an amber vibe instead (to reflect amber and green monochrome monitors), but not as pronounced as the later release most people know from BD and streaming services or later DVD releases. In fact the green is very sublte, but giving you a monochromic vibe back in the days and the amber is more pronounced, sometimes almost yellowish, but not reddish. Some scenes are almost neutral. It gives you the best impression how the movie looked in cinemas when it came out, though due to telecine it is naturally a bit off. Some of the green is getting lost and the amber is tad more pronounced than it should be. How do I know that exactly? I have an EK print in my collection.

Don't get fooled by some scans of 35mm you see on youtube. Even though you can still the absence of the strong green tint, the print from which these scenes came are way off in color as these prints already deteriorated. And most companies offering scan services do some color correction as the prints are often really bad that people buy.

What is the best version? Take your poison. None is probably how it was envisioned. For theatrical they couldn't achieve the look with classic color timing and digital color correcion was not really feasible in 99. Then with the sequels they overdid it, with the new toy "digital color correction" and the recent UHD remaster when totally overboard emulating a bad 35mm scans often for whatever reason. The vision probablty lies between theatrical and BD somewhere. I personally always prefer theatrical, but well what do you expect from people collecting actual prints...

Melatonic2• 5 years ago

I saw an actual original 35mm print a few years ago projected - not deteriorated and official. Your mostly correct but within the Matrix there's also an element of a "bleach bypass" kind of look that ends up actually blowing some of the highlights slightly in the brighter scenes such as with the helicopter. I would guess a chemical process using some type of transfer film from the original negative.

Blew away all the other versions IMHO

Havoc• 5 years ago

I thought the parts that take place within the matrix are intentionally green while the outside ones are blueish. eg the scenes where their nebuchadnezzar flies through the old tunnels is completely blue even in the greenish shade edition

Melatonic2• 5 years ago

In the original theatrical release the color correction within the Matrix was intentionally a sort of "bleach bypass" look - not as dramatic as what you see amateur photographers doing but definitely quite different than the heavy green hue. Personally preferred this look myself and I wish they had kept it for the subsequent films. If the Matrix is supposed to look like "our" world then why would it be heavily green ? It still contrasted very well with the cold, metallic muted colors of the "real". The greens were mostly only in the shadows and very subtle and in some scenes more subtle than others.

The reason the original looked so good and is hard to replicate now in post is that they were very likely applying actual chemical color corrections to the original negative film. Probably using some kind of transfer film and a variation of the bleach bypass or similar method.

seanicus7• 5 years ago

There's a great statement in the color palette of Matrix 4; the world inside The Matrix looks great! Pairs well with the ending of Matrix 3 - the terms of the détente between the machines and humans is that anyone who wants to leave the matrix should be able to do so. So surprise surprise, the machines have manufactured a matrix that looks like a postcard.

The Matrix looks dramatically different on Hulu versus on HBO Max

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