Toy Story was less than modern HD, yet you can pay extra to stream it in 4K from Apple! Not sure how that works!
https://www.quora.com/How-much-faster-would-it-be-to-render-...
Are you just guessing?
Whether it happened or not doesn't change that even if the original theatrical version was 1536×922, re-rendering for higher resolutions is trivial.
When old content that doesn't have a high resolution film or digital master copy is remastered to HD, it's done using super resolution tools that do their best to infer extra detail based on the existing data.
Once upon a time it was completely normal to have manual processes in your final build process. Something like a word processor in the 1990s would have one of the team sat at a machine building the "gold" binaries by hand, maybe following a checklist, likely hand written. OK, so we need to drag all the files except these two into this folder, then run this program...
Today, hopefully most of you today would see that's awful and you'd forbid it on a project you led and insist on CI instead.
Toy Story in particular had to be re-rendered to produce the 3D re-release over a decade later, and Pixar did that. They chose not to later re-render to 4K because in their opinion it isn't worth the effort compared to just upscaling it.
It is in no way a "download the archive and type make again" sort of situation. It's a huge effort.
It's not obvious whether any of the comments here that "they didn't feel it was worth it" are actually informed, or that's synthesis (guessing).
> “We had to have some very, very smart people at Pixar go back in and write some software and figure out a way to make it so that those files would render on our current computers,” he said.
>It took four months to resurrect the old data and get it in working order. Then, adding 3-D to each of the films took six months per film.
https://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/04/movies/04murp.html
Sounds like getting the render to work was about as much effort as converting to 3D.
Everything is trivial when someone else has to do it.
Everyone on HN who says something is "trivial" is someone who has never tried it.
Re-rendering source material for a different resolution is trivial.
Doing a 4k scan of a film that only ever was scanned for a DVD release is trivial, provided you still have the masters.
Doing the same thing with a film which was made 1995 as a digital animation is anything but trivial. This is not your "I just have to select a higher resolution and render everything"-thing.
- certain visual results might be bound to software versions that are so old grabbing a copy of them and making them run would be a challenge in itself
- there might be manual processes which need to be redone in order to get the final result — IF they have been documented
- there might be file formats in use which are no longer readable, or might be read differently
Scaning a film and retouching it is trivial, redoing a digital animation that was top notch in 1995 is not.
Some of the model shots also had to be entirely redone via 3D effects, such as the Crystalline Entity in S05E04. Paramount spent millions on this project, which were never recouped as the discs were released just as streaming took off.
(As a TNG fan, it was totally worth it.)
Technically you upscale whenever you full-screen the video player on your computer (unless the video is already at your monitor's native resolution), but upscaling algorithms that don't have to be fast enough to run in real time can do very impressive things to the video if the encoder knows what they're doing (and it can do really bad things if they don't).
Also, "4K" is generally a shorthand for the UHD format, which also brings in HDR. Lots of movies that weren't shot in 4K or were shot on a film stock that you just can't extract 4K worth of information out of can still massively benefit from the wide gamut offered by HDR. 24-bit color isn't enough to accurately represent a lot of content. Of course this means you have to have a monitor that can do HDR, and not just that, do it properly. A lot of cheaper 4K monitors claim to support HDR, but the display can only output SDR: in this case "supporting" HDR just means the firmware can understand HDR signals and tonemap HDR to SDR so you don't have to have your player software do the tonemapping.