1104 Citizen Kane

[hearthesilence]

Indeed. Dolby Vision would not by its nature cause detail to blow out (if anything, the opposite would happen), so if that really is happening then someone involved in the grading made the decision to do it. But I don't know of a single example where detail that is visible on a Blu-ray has been whited out on a UHD EXCEPT in cases where the HDR grade is so bright that certain displays end up fudging the tone mapping. Now the whole point of Dolby Vision is to ensure precisely that doesn't happen regardless of display, but I can't help notice that RAH indicates he watched this on a projector, which of course cannot accept a Dolby Vision signal, and will instead default to HDR10. And projectors as we know are notoriously bad at tonemapping HDR10 and are the exact sort of device that would white out high level nit information that is otherwise visible on a Blu-ray.

Of course this relies on the assumption that Harris didn't bother checking this scene on a different, Dolby Vision capable display, which seems hard to believe, but nothing else makes much sense.

Someone should tell this to RAH - maybe via PM so that there's less chance of pushback, but just to suggest he try this differently. Otherwise he's going to make the same mistake over and over again...

[EddieLarkin]

Well he's now confirmed he is not comparing this to the Blu-ray, so who knows if this particular detail being blown out has anything at all to do with the UHD. It may very well be blown out on both formats and thus instead be a result of the grading.

[tenia]

Not for the first time does Harris seem confused on what Dolby Vision is and what it actually does.

Harris always seemed to me to have a particularly difficult time assessing things more on the digital aspect of a restoration. He stumbled more than once on not picking up digital issues and definitely has issues understanding and assessing the HDR elements of a UHD release.

He most certainly is very competent on having restorations done, but his home video reviews on the other hand...

[The Elegant Dandy Fop]

Are there any stills of the new Blu-ray version anywhere? It seems like this particular scene was the scene people discussed when criticizing the old Warner Bros. DVD of this. It’s the reason I held onto my Criterion laserdisc of it for so long because it looked better than the DVD. Seeing how good it looked on the old Warner Blu-ray (already a 4K remaster), it seems odd to screw it up again. It makes me wonder if he has wrong settings on his display?

[yoloswegmaster]

Are there any stills of the new Blu-ray version anywhere? It seems like this particular scene was the scene people discussed when criticizing the old Warner Bros. DVD of this. It’s the reason I held onto my Criterion laserdisc of it for so long because it looked better than the DVD. Seeing how good it looked on the old Warner Blu-ray (already a 4K remaster), it seems odd to screw it up again. It makes me wonder if he has wrong settings on his display?

I don't know if anyone else besides RAH has received review copies but the page on the Criterion site has stills from the new restoration.

Chris, can you confirm if review copies for recent Criterion releases have been sent later than usual? Sites like BR.com will have their reviews up weeks (and in some cases a month) before the release date but lately it seems as if the review copies are being sent just before the release.

[cdnchris]

Yes, they've been sent out later than usual, and I assume it's the same for other places, too.

[FrauBlucher]

RAH probably got a look before everyone else because of his connection to the WB crew. He usually never reviews Criterions before the others

[EddieLarkin]

It seems to me RAH is imagining a problem where one doesn't exist.

I suspect the papers appear very bright at that moment on the UHD and it's led to RAH assuming they are "blown out". Fair enough, but then to blame HDR and Dolby Vision, when in fact they would make highlight detail more visible, comes across as quite suspect. Almost as if he was scouring the UHD for anything he could use to demonstrate why "HDR bad for old films".

[andyli]

I couldn't figure out why after this many years RAH is still against HDR on older films. Shouldn't the veteran preservationist be the first to admit that film stock *is* the original HDR format? Or does he mean to say all the higher dynamic range captured by the OCN isn't supposed to be preserved because traditionally film post-processing involved multiple printing steps and the higher dynamic range would have been lost in the film prints. This is the only valid reason I can think of. But then again he seems to be alright preserving spatial resolution that would have been lost in film prints with 4K scanning, so why stop there with color information?

[nitin]

I think RAH believes HDR to be 'adding' things that were not there, and so a fundamentally incorrect starting point.

[yoloswegmaster]

Someone on the BR forum was able to take a screenshot of the restoration notes from the unboxing video:



I can't seem to recall if the previous 4K restoration was primarily from the same fine-grain master or if they had used multiple sources.

[Finch]

Beaver (no UHD caps at present, just BD)

[yoloswegmaster]

Beaver (no UHD caps at present, just BD)

It's strange that the brightness and contrast levels for the Bluray changes after the first 30 minutes, while the 4K doesn't look anything like the new Blu at all.

[Tuppence]

If those caps are accurate (and Gary mentions the issue in his text of his review, so has presumably seen it in motion), this looks like a worst-case-scenario HDR > SDR conversion error for most of the film on the Blu-ray (though the UHD is apparently fine). The contrast in the image just collapses, and no highlights get above a dull grey - you can see it scrolling through Gary's thumbnails at the bottom of the review. I can't believe Criterion would screw up their own holy grail so fundamentally, and I'll wait for more reports, but it's not looking good.

[FrauBlucher]

Maybe Chris could verify this

[hearthesilence]

For anyone who needs a regular BD, I wonder if WB's overseas release of this will be fine? (I'll probably be good with the UHD is that isn't messed up.)

[Altair]

Will this new BD be even that superior to the existing Warner BD that has been out for years? DVDBeaver's caps suggest the differences will be minor at best (ignoring for the moment the incorrect HDR to SDR conversion).

[dwk]

If those caps are accurate (and Gary mentions the issue in his text of his review, so has presumably seen it in motion), this looks like a worst-case-scenario HDR > SDR conversion error for most of the film on the Blu-ray (though the UHD is apparently fine). The contrast in the image just collapses, and no highlights get above a dull grey - you can see it scrolling through Gary's thumbnails at the bottom of the review. I can't believe Criterion would screw up their own holy grail so fundamentally, and I'll wait for more reports, but it's not looking good.

It looks to be a mistake, so I assume that they will be fixing it.

Does anyone know if the Beaver is going off a check disc or does he have the finished product? As I recall some early screencaps/reviews of Severin's Blood for Dracula Blu-ray were taken from an incorrect check disc and the actual, released Blu-ray is fine.

[yoloswegmaster]

I'm assuming that they receive the finished product since they have the runtimes for every single extra listed. Wouldn't they just give the 4K and the first blu-ray disc if they were only giving check discs?

[dwk]

For a review, I would assume they would get check discs for every disc in the set, but I may be wrong.

[DevanAGScott]

If those caps are accurate (and Gary mentions the issue in his text of his review, so has presumably seen it in motion), this looks like a worst-case-scenario HDR > SDR conversion error for most of the film on the Blu-ray (though the UHD is apparently fine). The contrast in the image just collapses, and no highlights get above a dull grey - you can see it scrolling through Gary's thumbnails at the bottom of the review. I can't believe Criterion would screw up their own holy grail so fundamentally, and I'll wait for more reports, but it's not looking good.

I mostly lurk here, but I'd just like to throw in my .02c and say that I think this is almost certainly the case. I actually tossed some screenshots into Resolve and applied some HDR-SDR conversions, and the results are exactly what one might expect: https://twitter.com/SadHillDevan/status ... 8865650688

[tenia]

For a review, I would assume they would get check discs for every disc in the set, but I may be wrong.

BD check discs sent to reviewers are supposed to be 1:1 identical in terms of data to the retail discs that'll be on the market. The only difference thus is the lack of final disc artwork, but everything else is supposed to be the same, otherwise, what the hell are we even reviewing ?

It used, I think, to be different with DVD (and might still be) because those are now mostly only used to watch the movie in order to review the movie only - nothing on the PQ/AQ nor a detailed description of the extras.

The only other difference that can happen is... if something is caught after check discs were pressed, like it happened on Arrow's Requiescant whose check discs had subtitles sync issues which were corrected for the retail copies (but required a recall of the early copies sent to retailers and a replacement for early copies sent from Arrow webstore).

That's why sometimes, Svet doesn't detail the Criterion tech details from Criterion's booklet, like for Mulholland Dr : because he only received a check disc.

[filmyfan]

Just put my order in from UK- just before seeing the Beaver review..

ho hum

[MichaelB]

BD check discs sent to reviewers are supposed to be 1:1 identical in terms of data to the retail discs that'll be on the market. The only difference thus is the lack of final disc artwork, but everything else is supposed to be the same, otherwise, what the hell are we even reviewing ?

They aren't always; I reviewed Second Run's Hungarian box set for Sight & Sound off electronically-sent copies of the feature encodes, hence my only listing the extras rather than reviewing them (I still haven't seen them). Although S&S doesn't go into overmuch technical detail, so that's acceptable in the way that it wouldn't have been for something like DVD Beaver.

There have also been actual check discs that had problems that were subsequently fixed, although this is pretty rare as there's a hefty cost involved by this stage. Although one exception was when the BFI's Winstanley went out as a Region B check disc while the final version was region-free - I think that was down to a straightforward communication error somewhere along the line, and it was easily fixed.

[yoloswegmaster]

Someone on Reddit who got an early copy confirms that the Blu-ray does change its look after the first 30 minutes, while the 4K is unaffected and looks great. Seems as if something did go wrong with the HDR to SDR conversion.