It's a term usually used with older mainstream movies. Prior to DVD, when movies were first transferred from film to video, the video was mastered in analog. It was a high quality analog, but analog nonetheless (BTW, even laserdisc was an analog format).
What they are trying to advertise is that rather than just transferring the existing analog copy to DVD, they went back to the film and started the video transfer all over again.
A record has three stages: recording, mixing, mastering.
"Digitally re-mastered" was coined when CD of older recording were being released, and what it means is that step three, mastering, was redone digitally, rather than simply creating a sub-master from the original analog master.
It might have some meaning in the context of a film shot on analog tape or film. (Might). It is virtually meaningless in the context of digital aquisition. We ran out (again) of "Marie and Jack", so I took the opportunity to make a few changes to the disc, and some very minor technical fixes to the film itself.
Strictly speaking the disc was "digitally remastered" because we remastered it digitally. Could have slapped a gold foid sticker on it. Maybe I should have. But I didn't.
Hollywood loves to release multiple versions of every DVD. Never giving you the version you want (Lucas, Disney, etc). Bend over, here comes the Director's Cut.
It just means the master for the disc was digital. For DVD it has to be digital. It means nothing about the A/V quality of the disc. I could take a 20 year old falling apart barely watchable VHS tape, digitally remaster it and then call the DVD digitally remastered regardless of the fact that the film is damn near unwatchable to to the source material.
[Link]
Ordell Deactivated User
1042 Posts 6/05
Posted - Jan 6 2006 : 3:07PM
It rarely means anything any more. Warner made a big deal about the Police Academy DVD being digitally remastered and it looked like shit.
Song of the South may be re-released this year for it's 60th anniversary. It has never been remastered-what would they have to do to such an old film to get it up to par?