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Often DVDs and BDs have deleted scenes on them - but looking at them usually the quality is poor compared to the rest of the film. I understand that scenes are often cut before they hit post-production, so the colour/grading will be off, for example, and maybe they'll decide not to reshoot a scene so the acting and direction might be slightly-off too.

...but almost always other aspects are poor too, such as the film jumping around, the "resolution" being blurry (as though they used a cheaper or inappropriate film-stock), and plenty of dust/speckles and other visual artefacts that just shouldn't be there.

By way of example, see this deleted scene from Trainspotting:

- compared to the opening scene - which still looks great today:

I can understand it's possible for post-production to fix the "jumping" issue (which would have been a lot of work in pre-computerized workflows) but how does the lower apparent film-grain size happen and the other aspects that aren't fully explained by post-production magic?

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    That's a good question. I'm thinking they don't want to give the goods away for free, so if at a later date they try to sell the new complete edition with 5 extra minutes, they can only then present them in full glory. If that's the case it'd be in their interest to lower the resolution and quality of the cutscenes. It might also be just test shoots, done on handcams, that were cut before actual shooting them.
    – CyberClaw
    Nov 16, 2016 at 10:14
  • Sometimes they are rough cuts of scenes.
    – user25738
    Nov 16, 2016 at 14:04

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Many deleted scenes are cut rather quickly from the movie's timeline. In this case, it's likely they used dailies and then the scene was never edited/tuned up because there was no need for it. If you see a deleted scene with a timecode on it, this is definitely from a daily. Many times after the film has been completed, the only source of these dailies are DVD copies given to the crew. Film dailies get expensive, so many are recorded onto DVD which reduces the image quality.

However, there are also plenty of movies in existence where a scene was removed later in the process. In these cases, the complete scene was filmed, processed, edited and re-sync'd, but for whatever reason was decided to be left out of the film. Those outtakes look as professional as the rest of the film.

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    It might be worth adding a link describing dailies for people who aren't familiar with the term.
    – user1118321
    Nov 16, 2016 at 17:41
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    Right, the newer version may have been scanned from the original film at a much higher resolution, while the "new" scenes are being upsampled from a "standard def" DVD, The HD version may have also had post processing for color, sharpness, and contrast.
    – Yorik
    Nov 16, 2016 at 20:09
  • @Yorik You can't really "sharpen" a DVD into HD/4K quality though (even with so-called "AI upscalers" the results are very lacking).
    – Dai
    Dec 6, 2021 at 13:55

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