by Anonymous81 » Tue Jul 03, 2018 11:21 pm
This is a fantastic and explanatory video. Gotta love Adam. Although I will very slightly (and respectfully lol) split hairs and disagree dialectically and semantically with him in saying it's "not even really a remaster." In my nomenclature, coming from the audio world, a remaster means taking original premaster source material, without changing them at all, and taking them through higher resolution audio converters, digitizing them if you're working with older media (which is a bit like porting I suppose lol,) maybe alter the mix slightly (change the arrangement via pan, maybe duplicate some tracks if need be, basically just making things clearer and sweeter, bring things up in the mix or down etc. etc.) possibly use new compression if you can get away with it without destroying dynamic range, etc. You might add new effects, like new reverb since effects technology tends to improve (which to me is akin to them adding new post processing effects to the game,) and all of this is done sparingly and carefully so as not to change the original audio at all, but just make things as good as they can be using newer technology.
Imo, this is precisely what they've done with Shenmue here. So, for ME, that's a remaster. Anything beyond would be a remake, and anything less would just be a straight port. I know not everyone agrees with that nomenclature, and I totally respect that. But for me, these are absolutely remasters. And not only that, but true remasters, rather than the quasi-remakes which keep getting called remasters (looks at Spyro lol.) Ironically though, it's the audio in this release which hasn't been remastered lol.
But ALL of that having been said, great video from Adam I will share around online to try and inform people with questions about these things!
Last edited by
Anonymous81 on Wed Jul 04, 2018 12:10 am, edited 1 time in total.