UHD New Releases, Reissues and Upgrades

[Finch]

Just to confirm, Yakushima, we've never taken Atanasov's reviews into account for the rankings in this thread. Ditto RAH over at HTF or Gary Tooze's Beaver reviews. No need to link to either of them going forward.

[Yakushima]

Just to confirm, Yakushima, we've never taken Atanasov's reviews into account for the rankings in this thread. Ditto RAH over at HTF or Gary Tooze's Beaver reviews. No need to link to either of them going forward.

Glad to hear, Finch, thanks!

[nicolas]

I’ve gotten a couple of UHD releases today and, amazingly, they’re all great releases that deserve a spot in the red tier.

1. An Inspector Calls (SC). Likely a FiM encode and the 4K restoration was definitely done from the OCN. Dolby Vision is on the disc and it looks as good as the Ealing titles. Since this is a new restoration and clearly better than the one they used for their first BD (I’m judging from caps), I think it definitely warrants the red tier.

2. To Kill With Intrigue (88). I’m fairly new to the HK martial-arts titles and only really got into them once labels started releasing them in 4K but this should be an undisputed highlight of a restoration and grade. I know many of the classics were Ritrovat’d and / or DNR’d in the past but this is as close to perfect as I imagine the material looks. Encode is not FiM but excellent with incredibly minor and barely noticeable chroma noise here and there. Still a red tier disc and 88 did great work. (I was surprised to see this ending up in a sale close to the release date, hopefully this sells well and they’re bringing more of their Chan titles to 4K).

3. The Exorcist 3 (Arrow). I’m also new to this title but can’t imagine it having looked as good as it does now. Arrow have gotten access to Shout’s restoration and it looks spectacular. If the Legion cut was indicative of the old master, the TC UHD is an appreciable difference and the newly restored 2.0 sounds genuinely spectacular and outclasses both the old 2.0 and 5.1 tracks in my opinion. If the booklet is correct, encoding is by Engine House but there are no issues from what I can tell right now.

[danbez]

I have seen a lot of negative feedback regarding Stardust on BLu-ray.com and other places, so I was surprised to see it in the red list. Is it because the Blu-ray was so bad that even a disappointing 4k would still be a great upgrade to have?

[Finch]

I don't remember anymore whose sources I used at the time, sorry. I can revise it downwards if someone else here has the disc and confirms what you've read.

[Fus1on]

Nicolas listed Stardust as being solid on the Encodes thread.

[andyli]

Screenshot comparison for To Catch a Thief. The image mostly looks coarse, nothing like a scan from large format elements. Compression is shit. In some cases (such as comparison 2/29) the UHD is visibly inferior to the old Blu-ray. What happened?

[andyli]

And Kino's Brick seems to be a solid upgrade even from their own 4K-sourced blu-ray. May not be perfect compression-wise, but I doubt I'll notice any issue in real-time playback.

[tenia]

Screenshot comparison for To Catch a Thief. The image mostly looks coarse, nothing like a scan from large format elements. Compression is shit. In some cases (such as comparison 2/29) the UHD is visibly inferior to the old Blu-ray. What happened?

Wow, this comparison list is all over the place. There are some that looks good, others seem to have rubbish compression, and others (like 10 and 12) make it looks like the UHD recycles the 2012 BD master (I suppose the BD is the 2012 because of the AR). You can't seriously be so close to a 15 years old HD master performed from an intermediary source when using a recent 6k scan / 4k resto from a VistaVision OCN. You just can't.

[nicolas]

Nicolas listed Stardust as being solid on the Encodes thread.

I don’t have Stardust and referred to cinemaniac’s screenshots and his follow-up posts on the other forum where he described the UHDs (small) improvements over the BD despite the usual Paramount compression issues.

[MichaelB]

Side Note: Yes, you are correct when you say that he doesn't know what he's talking about. His "Dr." title doesn't come from a doctorate in video production, film, etc., as you would reasonably expect, it's literally from bassoon playing. He literally has no idea what he's talking about and yet he uses his doctoral status as a way of sounding smarter.

During the notorious Dekalog débâcle of 2016, his keenness to maintain that Criterion got it right while Arrow got it wrong caused him to make factual errors so elementary and embarrassing that his reputation never recovered.

You could always tell when he was out of his depth, because he'd seriously ramp up the height from which he was loftily talking down to you - but in this particular instance he did that to me while in the very next paragraph revealing beyond any possible doubt that he fundamentally didn't understand the technical basis of what he'd been arguing, and this was so unarguably the case that there was no coming back from it. He's barely posted in the blu-ray.com forums since.

Equally telling is this comment from his review of Second Run's Black Peter:

My one and only criticism pertains to the presence of large damage marks that repeatedly pop up in the upper right corner of the screen. I did not find them distracting at all, but there are five or six, possibly even a few more of these marks, and I am not exactly sure why they were not eliminated. There are digital tools that could have easily and permanently removed them.

Now, I completely accept that he was legitimately unaware that the Czech National Film Archive's restoration policy is to present films exactly as they were shown at their premieres, and so what he's complaining about is a feature, not a bug – but how on earth does a loudly and patronisingly self-declared film expert not recognise projectionist's reel-change markers for what they so clearly were?

And I've just looked up his review of Indicator's Age of Consent, which still claims that:

The Film Foundation's restoration provides better balanced visuals, with the wider panoramic shots in particular having more pleasing delineation.

I personally oversaw the seamless branching of this title, so know for certain that the only unique video material in the studio version is right at the start and end and that this footage doesn't feature any "wider panoramic shots". With those, he was literally watching the same video encode both times.

(If he wasn't so invariably unpleasant to deal with - he'll never, ever admit to being wrong, so getting him even to correct an unarguable error of fact is like pulling teeth - I'd have privately PMed him to sympathetically suggest that maybe his brain had been fooled by the fact that the studio cut had an inferior quality soundtrack into thinking erroneously that its visuals were similarly divergent. But they weren't, and that's a matter of demonstrable technical fact, not opinion.)

[dwk]

I seem to recall he also did not know what anamorphic lens flare was in The Royal Tenenbaums

[Finch]

A Nightmare on Elm Street 1984 is getting positive to mixed reactions: on the plus side, the aspect ratio is correct, it has the OG audio and the HDR grade is solid. On the other hand, compression is not as good as it could have been and at least one viewer noticed chroma noise as a result. Brief discussion here and screenshots here.

[Fus1on]

Contemporary UHDs List Update:

A few months ago, in the original thread, Nicolas disagreed with me on my placements of EEAAO, First Man, Last Night in Soho, The Boy and the Heron, Whiplash, and Us in the contemporary list. I originally placed them in the solid tier, but he thought they belonged in reference tier. I've since rewatched all of them, and here are my changes:

The Boy and the Heron (Shout Factory) (Moved from Solid Tier to Reference Tier)
Everything Everywhere All at Once (Lionsgate/A24) (Moved from Solid Tier to Reference Tier)
Last Night in Soho (Universal) (Moved from Solid Tier to Reference Tier)
Us (Universal) (Moved from Solid Tier to Reference Tier)
Whiplash (Sony) (Moved from Solid Tier to Reference Tier)

The only one I haven't moved is First Man which, on rewatch, just reaffirmed my initial position that it looks way too inconsistent to belong in reference tier. I will move it if there's enough support for it in this thread, but for now, I'm keeping it as is.

[Fus1on]

And here's another addition to the Contemporary List:

Arcane (Shout Factory) (Added to Reference Tier)

[nicolas]

The only one I haven't moved is First Man which, on rewatch, just reaffirmed my initial position that it looks way too inconsistent to belong in reference tier. I will move it if there's enough support for it in this thread, but for now, I'm keeping it as is.

Inconsistent in the encode or master? I’ve rewatched the film last year and nothing struck me as egregious when it comes to the encode. Colors are great, as are the IMAX scenes and the sound is gigantic. I really don’t see an issue with the master but feel free to disagree and leave the film in the solid tier, I respect your opinion.

[Fus1on]

I'm referring to the difference in film stocks that were used (16mm, 35mm, and 65mm/IMAX). It's inconsistent in that, depending on which stock is used, it ranged from looking decent to fantastic. Also the fact that the transfer is an upscale and not a native scan leads me to believe that it probably could have been better than it is.

[Fus1on]

Again though, if there's enough of an uproar around my placement of First Man, I'll move it.

[rberrios15]

I'm referring to the difference in film stocks that were used (16mm, 35mm, and 65mm/IMAX). It's inconsistent in that, depending on which stock is used, it ranged from looking decent to fantastic. Also the fact that the transfer is an upscale and not a native scan leads me to believe that it probably could have been better than it is.

I actually rewatched First Man last week and would agree fully.

[rberrios15]

Having recently rewatched these as well, would also propose the following for the contemporary list:

BlacKkKlansman (Universal) in Reference Tier
Mission: Impossible 7 (Paramount) in Reference Tier
A Quiet Place (Paramount) in Solid Tier
Black Panther (Disney) in Solid Tier

Welcome others thoughts of course.

[Fus1on]

Definitely can confirm that Dead Reckoning P1 is reference quality. I was unsure whether to put it on the list because the other 6 films are on Finch's list. Will place the rest of these.

[rrenault]

I don’t think these have actually been added to the list:

Last Year at Marienbad (Kino) - blue tier(fine encode, although KL’s Blu Ray was already quite strong)

Army of Shadows (Studio Canal) - blue tier (fine encode, but some color grading question marks)

[rrenault]

I’m also curious to know if there’s any word on how Carlotta’s Truffaut 5 Heroines set has turned out, considering it’s a collaboration with Mk2 like the botched Doinel set.

[tenia]

I think it's just a bit too early for the Truffaut, I think people are barely receiving their test discs or sets.

Army of Shadows (Studio Canal) - blue tier (fine encode, but some color grading question marks)

Not just the grading, but the new restoration also intrusively uses digital filtering, leading to frozen or eliminated grain. It's too often not natural looking, especially since several shots also show sharpening.

[nicolas]

Definitely can confirm that Dead Reckoning P1 is reference quality. I was unsure whether to put it on the list because the other 6 films are on Finch's list. Will place the rest of these.

Dead Reckoning is one I wouldn’t put into reference as Paramount encoded the film for a BD-66 (while putting it on a BD-100 disc) and compressed it more than they should’ve, which is a factor here and there as the highlights don’t always resolve smoothly. I acknowledge that the filmmakers didn’t make it easy on the encoder though as they put on a heavy film grain-like texture to obfuscate the digital nature of the film. In my opinion, they did this very poorly and the added “grain” looks noisy and swarmy throughout, similar to May December. Also resolution-wise, due to the heavy digital “grain”, Dead Reckoning looks worse than M:I Fallout, which was largely shot on film. Again, feel free to disagree but I thought I’d point this out just in case.

M:I 1-5 are all format upgrades and perfect for Finch’s list whereas you can take over with the two newest installments.