Press Release Criterion Press Release: Inland Empire (2006) (Blu-ray) (1 Viewer)

[Dennis Gallagher]

I can't wait to hear Robert Harris' take on the finished product. (FWIW - I have the DVD of this and never got around to watching it. Wouldn't that be the highest resolution this title merits? My projector upconverts everything to 4K but I don't typically use the full screen for DVDs.)

 

[Josh Steinberg]

"From these tests, director David Lynch chose the upscale made using the GaiaHD algorithm and footage that had first been downscaled back to SD in order to throw away false detail introduced during the original HD conversion and allow the most effective use of the AI upscale (footage upscaled directly from the HD was less noticeably “4K-looking”)."

My head is positively reeling trying to make sense of that paragraph!

It actually makes sense to me.

The movie was originally shot on SD videotape. That SD videotape was upscaled circa 2006 to HD for editing and post-production.

In a perfect world, you’d return to the SD videotape and start from scratch, but a) who knows if that even exists anymore and b) that would require essentially re-editing the movie from square one to re-assemble it, and that’s probably not feasible two decades later. (This is equivalent to the way movies shot on film and completed as 2K digital intermediates get upscaled from 2K to 4K for UHD, rather than rescanning the original film elements - for all intents and purposes, it is the DI that is the finished product, not the raw materials that went into making the DI.)

When the SD footage was upscaled to HD back in 2006, that upscaling process introduced artifacts into the footage as part of the conversion. That’s just a necessary side effect of that process. There’s going to be some artificial sharpening and other such stuff to make SD material work in an HD realm.

By downscaling the 2006 HD master back to SD, they’re able to throw away all of enhancements added in 2006 to get that SD footage into a format that could have been printed onto 35mm film. It’s not as good as going back to the original raw SD footage but it’s the next best thing.

Once that’s done, they’re left with a complete SD copy of the movie that’s as close to the unmanipulated raw footage as possible.

That SD footage is then upscaled directly to 4K, and the remastering is done on that new 4K copy of the movie.

What they found through testing was that upscaling the 2006 HD master directly to 4K yielded something that basically looked indistinguishable from the HD master. That’s analogous to how some 4K UHD discs made from 2K digital intermediates appear essentially the same as the Blu-ray editions. In this case, the reason for that is that the 4K upscale process would be upscaling the look of the 2006 HD master and all of the characteristics therein, rather than upscaling the appearance of the raw footage.

This is a tricky thing to try to explain and I’m not sure I’m able to do so effectively without being able to do a visual demonstration (which I don’t have the tools at hand to do) but I hope this makes some sense.

 

[JoshZ]

When the SD footage was upscaled to HD back in 2006, that upscaling process introduced artifacts into the footage as part of the conversion. That’s just a necessary side effect of that process. There’s going to be some artificial sharpening and other such stuff to make SD material work in an HD realm.

By downscaling the 2006 HD master back to SD, they’re able to throw away all of enhancements added in 2006 to get that SD footage into a format that could have been printed onto 35mm film. It’s not as good as going back to the original raw SD footage but it’s the next best thing.

Downscaling may make some of those artifacts less noticeable (due to having less detail in the image altogether), but it won't remove edge enhancement or similar problems.

I still think this is a really weird way to go about "fixing" the look of the film.

Well, in any case, it's not like the movie could possibly look worse than it already does. As far as I'm concerned, Lynch can toy with it however he wants. The worst that can happen is that it just looks a different shade of bad.

 

[Richard Kaufman]

Technical aspects of the process of creating the new master aside, the film is a kind of fever-dream and you either surrender to it or not. I choose to surrender, and thus find it interesting and worthwhile. And as proof positive that I'm a masochist, I always watch the ... what ... 75 minutes of deleted material.

 

[Josh Steinberg]

Technical aspects of the process of creating the new master aside, the film is a kind of fever-dream and you either surrender to it or not. I choose to surrender, and thus find it interesting and worthwhile. And as proof positive that I'm a masochist, I always watch the ... what ... 75 minutes of deleted material.

This is probably my least favorite Lynch film but I still find something worthwhile about it. The first twenty minutes really hook me and then it gets a little muddy after that, but like you said, it’s best to surrender to it and go with it - and if that doesn’t sound like an enjoyable proposition, it’s probably not the film for you. There are a lot of films where I think rewatching them can change someone’s opinion but I don’t think this is one of those. If you hated it the first time, no amount of revisiting it will change that.

As to the photography, the standard definition video doesn’t bother me. It is what it is, and in its own unique way, conveys a sort of immediacy that 35mm might not have.

 

[titch]

As to the photography, the standard definition video doesn’t bother me. It is what it is, and in its own unique way, conveys a sort of immediacy that 35mm might not have.

Immediacy - akin to watching live CCTV footage. Actually, that was probably what David Lynch was aiming for.

 

[Vincent_P]

I actually find the look of standard-def DV shot on nighttime city streets to be oddly "appealing". Something about the way those small DV camera chips "see" the night streets as lit by streetlamps. The scenes in INLAND EMPIRE with Laura Dern outside at night in the snowy streets of a Polish city are a good example.

Vincent