UHD Titles Worth/Not Worth Upgrading

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tenia
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Re: UHD Titles Worth/Not Worth Upgrading

#51 Post by tenia » Tue Sep 21, 2021 9:00 am

It's reliable to judge the resolution upgrade (details, etc) but pretty much useless for anything color-grading related. Sure, you'll be able to catch big differences, but you can't do subtler more precise analysis since it's downconverted to SDR (and also, I think, from the WCG too).

As for the screencaps vs in-motion, except very specific exceptions (like fake grain such as on the German UHD of American Werewolf in London), you can very much accurately judge things from a (properly taken) screencapture (including for UHD).

I'm myself using a 1080p monitor and it's not a problem : I'm looking at it barely 1 meter away from the screen, you can zoom, select only a part of the screenshot, etc. And the 4k cap will appear at its proper resolution, so it'll be bigger than my screen forcing me to scroll, but at the proper resolution nevertheless. It's not downscaled.

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EddieLarkin
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Re: UHD Titles Worth/Not Worth Upgrading

#52 Post by EddieLarkin » Tue Sep 21, 2021 9:15 am

Viewing 2160p caps on a 1080p screen is fine, it's the fact the caps are converted to SDR first by caps-a-holic that is important to be aware of. So by definition you are not seeing them as they appear on the disc, as they do not exist in SDR on the disc. For this reason you cannot make any real judgements about how the disc truly compares, since you're forcing the HDR grading into a much narrower confine, which obviously isn't happening when you view the disc itself on a proper 4K HDR set up. If ALL you want to compare is the resolution then as tenia says they serve that purpose without issue, but to judge whether a UHD is better than a BD by resolution alone would be very foolish.

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ShellOilJunior
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Re: UHD Titles Worth/Not Worth Upgrading

#53 Post by ShellOilJunior » Tue Sep 21, 2021 9:51 am

Thank you both for the replies.

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mhofmann
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Re: UHD Titles Worth/Not Worth Upgrading

#54 Post by mhofmann » Tue Sep 21, 2021 12:55 pm

ShellOilJunior wrote:
Tue Sep 21, 2021 8:47 am
How reliable are sites like Capsaholic if one is not viewing the images with a 4K monitor? I know the site is very popular among blu-ray.com members but I suspect many of them are viewing the caps on 1080p monitors. I'll look at the site every now and then but treat their offerings as a suggestion of what movies may look like. Also, I find it difficult to judge quality unless I can see it motion.

Thought I'd put that out there. I'd be interesting in reading feedback and I might even learn a few things. Thank you!
What would be the difference, i.e. why would one need a 4K monitor to view the screencaps? You mean for 4K UHD Blu-rays? No problem on a 1080p screen either; in that case a full-size capture just won't fit on the screen. Likewise, on a 4K monitor the 1080 vertical resolution screencap will be quite small and one may need to zoom in to judge the quality.

More important than monitor resolution that you can compensate for during your viewing is color accuracy. If you don't view the screencaps on a color-calibrated monitor, then you won't see what they actually look like on a properly setup output device. Unfortunately I don't think the 4K UHD screencaps are stored with the proper color gamut and dynamic range intact, so that will just be a (tone-mapped) approximation. But my statement holds for Blu-ray screencaps as well. The color accuracy of any monitor, 4K resolution or not, depends on both the hardware as well as the software calibration, e.g. using a colorimeter.

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Re: UHD Titles Worth/Not Worth Upgrading

#55 Post by FrauBlucher » Tue Sep 21, 2021 6:50 pm

Something I thought interesting to post.. Someone made this suggestion to the KL Insider
Just my opinion, but I personally think Witness for the Prosecution would sell pretty well on UHD. Perhaps as a safer measure you could do a limited pressing run of say 1,000 copies (or whatever number you think is safe), perhaps exclusive to the site store? I'd bet something like that would sell out quickly, especially if it included a slipcover. I feel there's just as much, if not more, demand for classics like that on UHD, as there are for titles like Mystery Men. Anyway, I hope you may re-consider getting the rights to it.
His response...
At minimum we would need to sell something around 10,000 units, 4K restorations in HDR/Dolby Vision, authoring and replication is too expensive to do limited edition releases.

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Re: UHD Titles Worth/Not Worth Upgrading

#56 Post by Nw_jahrles » Tue Sep 21, 2021 8:28 pm

FrauBlucher wrote:
Tue Sep 21, 2021 6:50 pm
Something I thought interesting to post.. Someone made this suggestion to the KL Insider
Just my opinion, but I personally think Witness for the Prosecution would sell pretty well on UHD. Perhaps as a safer measure you could do a limited pressing run of say 1,000 copies (or whatever number you think is safe), perhaps exclusive to the site store? I'd bet something like that would sell out quickly, especially if it included a slipcover. I feel there's just as much, if not more, demand for classics like that on UHD, as there are for titles like Mystery Men. Anyway, I hope you may re-consider getting the rights to it.
His response...
At minimum we would need to sell something around 10,000 units, 4K restorations in HDR/Dolby Vision, authoring and replication is too expensive to do limited edition releases.
I think that number is correct. Kino like to keep their prices low and costs down. It wouldn’t be like them to offer a cost-heavy Ltd edition that they sell at a premium. Synapse is putting their run at 6,000 right now for Demons 1 & 2 and selling it for $52.99 at Diabolikdvd.

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Re: UHD Titles Worth/Not Worth Upgrading

#57 Post by FrauBlucher » Tue Sep 21, 2021 8:48 pm

There minimum of 10,000 units seems high to me

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Re: UHD Titles Worth/Not Worth Upgrading

#58 Post by MichaelB » Wed Sep 22, 2021 2:22 am

FrauBlucher wrote:There minimum of 10,000 units seems high to me
Based on what?

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Re: UHD Titles Worth/Not Worth Upgrading

#59 Post by FrauBlucher » Wed Sep 22, 2021 4:40 am

I was talking strictly about being able to move that number of units. Not about the breaking even mark or whatever they need to meet costs. Twilight Time only pressed 3000 blu-ray's. And that took a while for most of them to sellout and that was with blurays having a bigger market than UHD

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tenia
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Re: UHD Titles Worth/Not Worth Upgrading

#60 Post by tenia » Wed Sep 22, 2021 5:26 am

But that was with Twilight Time having prohibitive value-for-money pricing points and being sold only on their web-store and SAE. That's not the case for Kino (on none of these points).

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Re: UHD Titles Worth/Not Worth Upgrading

#61 Post by EddieLarkin » Wed Sep 22, 2021 5:45 am

Yeah Kino sell everything very cheap, and have regular sales. I picked up Hannibal I think for $12 direct from their store, and Mad Max for $15. That's never gonna be the case with say, Blue Underground's UHDs.

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Re: UHD Titles Worth/Not Worth Upgrading

#62 Post by FrauBlucher » Wed Sep 22, 2021 5:52 am

But my point is really whether the market for UHD being big enough to move 10000 units. I’m just skeptical at this point. Probably using TT was a bad example

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Re: UHD Titles Worth/Not Worth Upgrading

#63 Post by MichaelB » Wed Sep 22, 2021 12:01 pm

Since they've already released UHDs, I imagine they've crunched the numbers and worked out that when the very high cost of per-unit manufacturing is factored in they can plausibly break even on 10,000.

Clearly, that is achievable - I believe Second Sight sold more than that in an ostensibly UK-only release of Dawn of the Dead - but it does rather depend on the individual title. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly undoubtedly yes. Witness for the Prosecution, very possibly not.

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Re: UHD Titles Worth/Not Worth Upgrading

#64 Post by bluesforyou » Wed Sep 22, 2021 1:34 pm

tenia wrote:
Tue Sep 21, 2021 9:00 am
It's reliable to judge the resolution upgrade (details, etc) but pretty much useless for anything color-grading related. Sure, you'll be able to catch big differences, but you can't do subtler more precise analysis since it's downconverted to SDR (and also, I think, from the WCG too).

As for the screencaps vs in-motion, except very specific exceptions (like fake grain such as on the German UHD of American Werewolf in London), you can very much accurately judge things from a (properly taken) screencapture (including for UHD).

I'm myself using a 1080p monitor and it's not a problem : I'm looking at it barely 1 meter away from the screen, you can zoom, select only a part of the screenshot, etc. And the 4k cap will appear at its proper resolution, so it'll be bigger than my screen forcing me to scroll, but at the proper resolution nevertheless. It's not downscaled.
I actually don't agree that you can judge the resolution bump properly from screencaps either. A lot of the times for BDs and UHDs sourced from the same master, the resolution difference is not going to be obviously amazing looking at single frames but in motion the difference accumulates for every frame and can deliver a stunning effect.

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andyli
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Re: UHD Titles Worth/Not Worth Upgrading

#65 Post by andyli » Wed Sep 22, 2021 9:08 pm

Yes. And there's another factor. With HDR you get higher edge contrast, which serves as a visual cue for sharpness. So during playback on an actual HDR-capable screen the video will look crisper. This explains for me why the UHD captures on caps-a-holic only show a slight improvement whereas the difference is a lot more pronounced in playback.

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Re: UHD Titles Worth/Not Worth Upgrading

#66 Post by jegharfangetmigenmyg » Thu Sep 23, 2021 4:43 am

I would also add the difference between BD and UHDBD in general image stability. This can of course not be seen in screencaps, but it surely can in motion. I think it comes down to SDBD's just being more compressed than UHD's. But yeah, colour clarity, especially deeper colours, and image stability have had the biggest wow effect on me. Definitely more so than resolution.

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tenia
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Re: UHD Titles Worth/Not Worth Upgrading

#67 Post by tenia » Thu Sep 23, 2021 5:33 am


bluesforyou wrote: I actually don't agree that you can judge the resolution bump properly from screencaps either. A lot of the times for BDs and UHDs sourced from the same master, the resolution difference is not going to be obviously amazing looking at single frames but in motion the difference accumulates for every frame and can deliver a stunning effect.
My experience with 4k remains limited since I'm not equipped myself but I have yet to see screencaps misleading me in this kind of comparisons and/or on this kind of aspects.
I get what you're saying but training one's eyes on watching and assessing restorations' PQ is one thing, and you can actually also train your eye on understanding what to look for on screencaps. Hence how I pretty much never have been misled there (which is just an UHD-updated version of "you have to see it in motion").

One thing though is that since HDR plays with contrast and contrast plays with the perception of sharpness, SRD downconverted caps are likely not to properly convey this (as andily mentioned), but that's related to the downconversion, not the general concept of screencaptures.

I'm not sure what you mean by Image stability though. If you're talking about compression, there are pleny of exemples showing this isn't that linear (ie there are very "stable" BDs and "unstable" UHDs). If you're talking about frame stability (the lack of wobbling) or color stability (the lack of flickering or color fluctuations), that's down to the restoration.

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Re: UHD Titles Worth/Not Worth Upgrading

#68 Post by jegharfangetmigenmyg » Thu Sep 23, 2021 8:46 am

tenia wrote:
Thu Sep 23, 2021 5:33 am
I'm not sure what you mean by Image stability though. If you're talking about compression, there are pleny of exemples showing this isn't that linear (ie there are very "stable" BDs and "unstable" UHDs). If you're talking about frame stability (the lack of wobbling) or color stability (the lack of flickering or color fluctuations), that's down to the restoration.
It wasn't bluesforyou that mentioned image stability, it was me. I know that frame and color stability is down to the restoration. What I meant was that the jump in resolution and especially the jump from AVC to HEVC have, at least to my eyes, led to a less digitally noisy and thus more stable image. Of course this applies more to grain rendering in older movies shot on film than it does the the digitally shot ones where there's usually no grain to render. And yes, of course, there are badly compressed BDs and badly compressed UHDs, but generally I've had a more filmic experience with UHD.

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Re: UHD Titles Worth/Not Worth Upgrading

#69 Post by tenia » Thu Sep 23, 2021 8:53 am

Gotcha, it's clearer to me now what you were specifically referring to.

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Re: UHD Titles Worth/Not Worth Upgrading

#70 Post by andyli » Thu Sep 23, 2021 10:15 pm

What an upgrade! Image #6 showcases what HDR can do for the highlight.

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Re: UHD Titles Worth/Not Worth Upgrading

#71 Post by bluesforyou » Fri Sep 24, 2021 1:27 pm

tenia wrote:
Thu Sep 23, 2021 5:33 am
bluesforyou wrote: I actually don't agree that you can judge the resolution bump properly from screencaps either. A lot of the times for BDs and UHDs sourced from the same master, the resolution difference is not going to be obviously amazing looking at single frames but in motion the difference accumulates for every frame and can deliver a stunning effect.
My experience with 4k remains limited since I'm not equipped myself but I have yet to see screencaps misleading me in this kind of comparisons and/or on this kind of aspects.
I get what you're saying but training one's eyes on watching and assessing restorations' PQ is one thing, and you can actually also train your eye on understanding what to look for on screencaps. Hence how I pretty much never have been misled there (which is just an UHD-updated version of "you have to see it in motion").

One thing though is that since HDR plays with contrast and contrast plays with the perception of sharpness, SRD downconverted caps are likely not to properly convey this (as andily mentioned), but that's related to the downconversion, not the general concept of screencaptures.

I'm not sure what you mean by Image stability though. If you're talking about compression, there are pleny of exemples showing this isn't that linear (ie there are very "stable" BDs and "unstable" UHDs). If you're talking about frame stability (the lack of wobbling) or color stability (the lack of flickering or color fluctuations), that's down to the restoration.
Of course I am not denying that over time one learns how to "read" screencaps and how they actually relate to the playback. I meant it for more people just getting into UHD and looking at screencaps to help them in their purchasing decisions. Without having the reference of a few discs and their screencaps, one can be misled in terms of the perceived resolution. And yes the color and contrast play a big role in this too.

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Re: UHD Titles Worth/Not Worth Upgrading

#72 Post by tenia » Fri Sep 24, 2021 4:11 pm

bluesforyou wrote:
Fri Sep 24, 2021 1:27 pm
Of course I am not denying that over time one learns how to "read" screencaps and how they actually relate to the playback. I meant it for more people just getting into UHD and looking at screencaps to help them in their purchasing decisions. Without having the reference of a few discs and their screencaps, one can be misled in terms of the perceived resolution. And yes the color and contrast play a big role in this too.
As any "indirect" tool, it indeed can be misleading and comes with some kind of a learning curve. But so does, say, judging compression and using bitrates info for this. What I just wanted to say was that it is a reliable tool, but yes, it does require to know how to read it. :wink:

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Re: UHD Titles Worth/Not Worth Upgrading

#73 Post by swo17 » Tue Oct 05, 2021 10:11 am

With the new edition of Halloween now out, I'm curious what the technical experts here consider to be the best option available

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Re: UHD Titles Worth/Not Worth Upgrading

#74 Post by EddieLarkin » Tue Oct 05, 2021 10:21 am

swo17 wrote:
Tue Oct 05, 2021 10:11 am
With the new edition of Halloween now out, I'm curious what the technical experts here consider to be the best option available
This new Scream version should definitely be the best. It's the first scan from the OCN, and even the SDR caps show this plainly. It also carries the original mono, whereas the old Lionsgate 4K only had a mono mixdown of the 7.1 (complete with added effects). It does unfortunately appear to be badly compressed, but since the disc has full enhancement Dolby Vision, the extra layer may fix a lot of the compression issues as we've seen with many other discs (there is no way to screen cap DV, so the caps are only showing the compression of the base HDR10 layer).

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Re: UHD Titles Worth/Not Worth Upgrading

#75 Post by swo17 » Tue Oct 05, 2021 10:46 am

Thanks. Apparently the mono track leaves something to be desired though

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