Hacker News Reader

HNHacker News

Top New Best Ask Show Jobs

Comment by reaperducer | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

reaperducer·

Special effects, costumes and sets are all much more believable when you're viewing them on a little grainy screen

Can confirm. I recently watched Ghostbusters on Blu-ray. Wow. The special effects are really obvious.

View on HN

> The special effects are really obvious.

I've never understood this complaint. Almost all special effects are obvious, because they depict things that aren't real. I don't remember watching Ghostbusters in the theater and wondering if those were really ghosts.

Some people just cannot (or refuse to) recognise all the noise you can see around old/cheap/low quality effects. I often watched those silly Japanese horror varieties where they would show you a grainy video of some dark place, and then maybe a grainy shot of someone crawling out of something. But you know it's two separate things spliced together because the grains are of a different size, or when one area is gray-scale while another is simply decolourised to match. My friends could never tell the difference.

It's easier to suspend your disbelief when you can't see the little squares around the TIE Fighter as it attacks the Millennium Falcon.

Older 'practical' special effects still hold up better than much more recent early CGI though. Even if you can tell that something is a physical model, IMO it still looks 100x better than a poorly rendered and animated low-poly 3d effect.

Even modern CG is garbage and suffers from the uncanny valley effect.

I don't enjoy Marvel films but even if I did they're unwatchable because of the awful CG.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com