If a CD or DVD is "Remastered" a number of times, what is actually happening?

[Mike 03]

Example: Say some movie is your favorite movie or CD, and it was remastered in 1999, and again in 2003, and comes out this year as "remastered", does each new "re-master" actually represent a significant change, or is are these improvements so minor that they would most likely be undetectable to the average listener/watcher?

I ask this because there are some acquisitions I keep making, every time they are "remastered."

Am I just being a sucker?

I mean, how many times can Coppola's "Apocalypse Now" or Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of The Moon" or the works of Paul Simon be remastered, and are these legitimate improvements?

[Fire Walk With Me]

1. Sometimes they're just making money.

Sometimes there is an improvement.

[Amerigo Vespucci]

2. They supposedly have found "higher quality source tapes."

When CDs first took off, the demand exceeded the supply, so many record labels CREATED masters from vinyl albums.

Then, they found master tapes that were used to CREATE the vinyl albums, so they used those tapes to create "higher quality remastered CDs."

Then, they'd find a better-quality tape...or the musicians would go in the studio and re-record portions (Zappa HAD TO do that...some of his original Mothers of Invention masters, especially "Cruising With Ruben And The Jets," were DUST)...

Warner-Atlantic-Reprise was especially guilty of double-dipping (and then triple-dipping) consumers with things like the Jimi Hendrix and Led Zeppelin catalogs.

They would occasionally "sweeten the deal" with "unreleased bonus tracks," but more often than not, you could understand why these "gems" never made it into the first cut.

Same thing with films. It all depends on how well the original "masters" were preserved, and if they were used to generate the first-to-market CDs / DVDs/ etc.

:toast:

[MicaelS]

3. Technology keeps improving and

The original source may have been in bad shape to begin with. Film can and does deteriorate over time. So the original VHS tape or DVD may have been made from poor film elements. Film restoration didn't start to hit it's stride until the demand for more home video started to increase and people told the studios they wanted better copies for home use.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Film_preservation

Film restoration issues

Main problems in restoring film

* Dirt, dust
* Scratches, tears
* Color fade, color change
* Excessive film grain - a copy of an existing film has all of the film grain from the original as well as the film grain in the copy
* Missing scenes and sound; censored or edited out for re-release.
* Shrinkage: linear and "across the web" (width), as well as localized puckering around large 1 to 2 perforation film cement splices, most common in silent and very early sound films. Highly shrunken film, 1.5% or higher, must be copied on modified equipment or the film will likely be damaged.

Modern, digital film restoration follows the following steps:

1. Expertly clean the film of dirt and dust.
2. Repair all film tears with clear polyester tape or splicing cement.
3. Scan each frame into a digital file.
4. Restore the film frame by frame by comparing each frame to adjacent frames. This can be done somewhat by computer algorithms with human checking of the result.
1. Fix frame alignment - Fix jitter and weave - the misalignment of adjacent film frames due to movement of film within the sprockets. This corrects the issue where the holes on each side of a frame are distored over time. This causes frames to slightly be off center.
2. Fix color and lighting changes - This corrects flickering and slight color changes from one frame to another due to aging of the film.
3. Restore areas blocked by dirt and dust by using parts of images in other frames.
4. Restore scratches by using parts of images in other frames.
5. Enhance frames by reducing film grain noise. Film foreground/background detail about the same size as the film grain or smaller is blurred or lost in making the film. Comparing a frame with adjacent frames allows detail information to be reconstructed since a given small detail may be split between more film grains from one frame to another.

Modern, photochemical restoration follows roughly the same path:

1. Extensive research is done to determine what version of the film can be restored from the existing material. Often, great pains are taken to search out alternate material in film archives around the World.
2. A comprehensive restoration plan is mapped that allows preservationists to designate elements as "key" elements upon which to base the polarity map for the ensuing photochemical work. Since many alternative elements are actually salvaged from release prints and duplication masters (foreign and domestic), care must be taken to plot the course at which negative, master positive and release print elements arrive back at a common polarity (i.e., negative or positive) for assembly and subsequent printing.
3. Test prints are struck from existing elements to evaluate contrast, resolution, color (if color) and sound quality (if audio element exists).
4. Elements are duplicated using the shortest possible duplication path to minimize analog duplication artifacts, such as the build-up of contrast, grain and loss of resolution.
5. All sources are assembled into a single master restoration element; most often a duplicate negative.
6. From this master restoration element, duplication masters, such as composite fine grain masters, are generated to be used to generate additional printing negatives from which actual release prints can be struck for festival screenings and DVD mastering.

[gmoney]

4. well, sometimes they learn how to actually make things sound better

Like when CDs first were launched, companies just used the vinyl "master recordings" to make the CDs, but CD technology had somewhat different sonic qualities, so the music maybe didn't have pops and scratches, but didn't sound as good.

So a lot of it is spending more time in adjusting the audio so that it sounds closer to the original recordings, or in some cases, what the artist intended the original recordings to sound like, but wasn't able to at the time. Sometimes that takes place when a new source is found, or just when they want to release a deluxe edition to get us to buy "Dark Side" for the 10th time.

Sometimes they just make it louder.

With video, they improve the technology of transferring the images to the new media (DVD or Blu-Ray) for a sharper image, improved sound, etc.