Скачать или смотреть The Wire Prequels – Remastered in 4K

Originally aired as webisodes on HBO.com in 2007, these three prequel vignettes offer the only canonical flashbacks to several characters on HBO's "The Wire". They are some of the earliest period piece attempts by the show's braintrust, before they would eventually work on projects like Show Me a Hero or The Deuce. Prior to now, fans of the show have only ever been able to view the prequels online in 360p (and one bizarrely resized 480p clip). They're hard to look at, especially compared to the updated remaster.

With the re-release of The Wire following HBO's HD remaster in 2014, consumers who purchased the complete edition of the show finally had access to a higher bit-rate, 16:9 version of the prequels. To my knowledge, this version has never been shared online, and retains color/contrast closer to the 4:3 releases.

While the 16:9 version displays far fewer bitrate issues than its original online release, there are still shots that suffer from compression artifacts and minor aliasing. I split all the individual shots into Topaz, and used several Artemis AI models to repair the footage before upscaling to 4K.
Using Davinci Resolve, I then recolored the prequels shot-by-shot to match the look and feel of the HD Remasters. The compression on the 16:9 version also resulted in a loss of the film texture very visible in the Remasters, so I finished by overlaying a scan of Kodak Vision 200T 5274 film grain – matching the film used by the show.

My hope is that these changes look subtle enough to remain indistinguishable from the main episodes, although this remaster does expose some production details the original crew never anticipated being seen; like the fact that Young Omar's scar is drawn on with marker. I've done my best to keep it from looking too glaring.

These prequels are now preserved here for any ardent fans of the The Wire to enjoy. To enjoy these videos on your TV, I recommend streaming the version available on my Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/664425069/b5a5d4106e