UHD New Releases, Reissues and Upgrades

[cinemaniac]

re: Nosferatu banding, were you able to confirm it wasn’t just my display?

I based this on your comment as I haven’t yet watched the film. If you have a time stamp by any chance I can take a look.

It’s about 20mins in when he walks inside the inn. Completely lit by candles and hearth.

[nicolas]

re: Nosferatu banding, were you able to confirm it wasn’t just my display?

I based this on your comment as I haven’t yet watched the film. If you have a time stamp by any chance I can take a look.

It’s about 20mins in when he walks inside the inn. Completely lit by candles and hearth.

I’ve checked and can’t see it on my display. Looks very nice to me particularly as it’s a tricky shot with all the candlelight and the lens vignetting. Later in the shot, Hoult turns sideways as the camera pans when there’s near-total blackness. This did look odd in motion but it actually revealed some faint vertical lines on my TV rather than an issue with the disc. When pausing and moving forward very slowly the effect I saw during that moment wasn’t visible.

[cinemaniac]

Dang.

[rberrios15]

If I missed any recent titles, please add. I browsed these through the BR.com release calendar and briefly checked the forums.

Not quite as recent but also rec these in the red category:

American Hustle (Sony)
Captain Phillips (Sony)

And also Drive (Sony) in the blue category since the consensus seems to be that Second Sight has superior encode.

[Fus1on]

@fus1on

Will be adding all of these. Plus, I'm adding The Penguin (WB), since I just watched the first episode of that UHD and it looks incredible.

- Paddington 1-3 (StudioCanal UK) - first one is a minimal picture upgrade (2K upscale) but good new Atmos mix, second one (2K upscale) is poor in HDR10 and better in DV due to extremely bright grade with the 2018 Atmos mix carried over, no complaints about the third part

If there are "no complaints" about Paddington 3, would you say it's more deserving of going into the Reference tier rather than Solid?

[rberrios15]

@fus1on: Propose adding Contagion (WB) to red category. Surprisingly impressive.

@finch: Ocean's Eleven (WB) also appears to be a red category title. Can't speak to Ocean's Twelve or Thirteen but Eleven is all around excellent to my eyes.

[nicolas]

@fus1on: Propose adding Contagion (WB) to red category. Surprisingly impressive.

@finch: Ocean's Eleven (WB) also appears to be a red category title. Can't speak to Ocean's Twelve or Thirteen but Eleven is all around excellent to my eyes.

You were too early with your Oceans assessment. The first one is indeed quite stunning and deserving of the red category. As usual with BD, they took a bit off the top with the encode so it’s not as sharp as it could be but the master is nice. Part 2 was likely sourced from the 4K DI (yes, this was one of the first films to get that) and is a smaller upgrade with (IIRC) occasional touches of DNR whereas Part 3 was definitely from the DI and has sadly more DNR but in 4K much superior encoding than the BD. I’d say for all three the blue category is fair.

[nicolas]

Caps for Snake Eyes were published and it’s a bad one. The 4K master looks anemic with poor colors, electronic-looking grain and mushy detail. This looks awfully close to a 2K upscale with fake grain similar to what Turbine sometimes does in Germany.

On the other hand, their Reindeer Games upgrade is a revelation. One of the worst BDs now received a major upgrade that actually deserves the red category. Caps are also out and the encode looks like it holds up.

[therewillbeblus]

Those should be switched. 2025 strikes again

[rberrios15]

@fus1on: Propose adding Contagion (WB) to red category. Surprisingly impressive.

@finch: Ocean's Eleven (WB) also appears to be a red category title. Can't speak to Ocean's Twelve or Thirteen but Eleven is all around excellent to my eyes.

You were too early with your Oceans assessment. The first one is indeed quite stunning and deserving of the red category. As usual with BD, they took a bit off the top with the encode so it’s not as sharp as it could be but the master is nice. Part 2 was likely sourced from the 4K DI (yes, this was one of the first films to get that) and is a smaller upgrade with (IIRC) occasional touches of DNR whereas Part 3 was definitely from the DI and has sadly more DNR but in 4K much superior encoding than the BD. I’d say for all three the blue category is fair.

Gotcha. Working my way through the trilogy and let you know what I think but going in expected Eleven would look better than the others.

[nicolas]

@Chris: Just read your review of The Wages of Fear and noticed an error re. SDR. The 4K disc is in regular 8-bit SDR (BT.709) as I believe all Criterion 4Ks are. If they receive SDR masters with a slightly wider P3 color gamut or 10-bit SDR (BT.2020) rather than HDR10 they’re encoding them into HDR10. A recent example is Godzilla vs. Biollante and earlier The Virgin Suicides.

[CSM126]

Those should be switched. 2025 strikes again

No kidding. Snake Eyes is a great film and I’m sad it’s been done wrong by here. Ugh. Looks like someone digitally sharpened a video tape.

[Fus1on]

The Brutalist (Elevation)
The Brutalist (A24)

The A24 version still looks nice, but is absolutely out-classed by the Elevation's vastly superior encoding. Both versions are the 200-minute cut with a 1 minute intermission, by the way, something that the back of A24's release implies otherwise. Unfortunately, I bought that version because I expected it to have the full intermission, but it doesn't.

Caps

[cdnchris]

@Chris: Just read your review of The Wages of Fear and noticed an error re. SDR. The 4K disc is in regular 8-bit SDR (BT.709) as I believe all Criterion 4Ks are. If they receive SDR masters with a slightly wider P3 color gamut or 10-bit SDR (BT.2020) rather than HDR10 they’re encoding them into HDR10. A recent example is Godzilla vs. Biollante and earlier The Virgin Suicides.

Ugh, thanks for pointing that out

[nicolas]

The General’s Daughter (Kino) - caps-a-holic. Total pixel mush in many caps.

[tenia]

Oh wow it's so bad that on my phone, I thought I was looking at the BD's caps but it was the UHD's.

[therewillbeblus]

Caps for Snake Eyes were published and it’s a bad one. The 4K master looks anemic with poor colors, electronic-looking grain and mushy detail. This looks awfully close to a 2K upscale with fake grain similar to what Turbine sometimes does in Germany.

Do you think this is a case where the blu-ray is better, or where it's still worth getting the 4K if you like the film, even with all the faults?

[nicolas]

Caps for Snake Eyes were published and it’s a bad one. The 4K master looks anemic with poor colors, electronic-looking grain and mushy detail. This looks awfully close to a 2K upscale with fake grain similar to what Turbine sometimes does in Germany.

Do you think this is a case where the blu-ray is better, or where it's still worth getting the 4K if you like the film, even with all the faults?

It depends on how sensitive you are to semi-organic grain and the change in colors to a rather dull color scheme.
Take a look at these two caps, preferably on a PC monitor and look at them closely back-and-forth.
Since I have the disc I can confirm that the SDR-converted caps are quite accurate in comparison with the final product in HDR/DV.

https://caps-a-holic.com/c.php?go=1&a=0 ... 64&i=3&l=0
https://caps-a-holic.com/c.php?go=1&a=0 ... 62&i=1&l=0

If you think the colors look rather ugly, contrast is so-so and the skin tones are unusually pale, I'd say avoid the disc.
If you'd like to have a more densely visible grain structure to give you the impression of organic film and don't mind the new colors, the 4K disc should do you well.

I think the old master is quite good, sadly Warner distributed the film in 2013 and they compressed it on a BD-25, which resulted in the filtered appearance.
In my mind, colors are significantly better though and it evokes a more organic viewing experience despite the less optimal encode. I'll use that disc for future viewings.

But that's just my opinion and maybe you feel differently.

[nicolas]

The Little Women 1994 4K saga continues: The first disc was shipped with a faulty 5.1 mix where some of the channels were empty. The second disc has the corrected 5.1 but inferior encoding for the film with ~15 GB less as well as worse bitrate optimization. I don’t think the new encode is particularly horrendous and looks mostly just fine, particularly in more dimly lit interiors, but it’s still an unwanted downgrade that shouldn’t have happened. The usual highlights in exteriors suffer the most compared to the nicely done first disc.

[tenia]

Why even bother reencoding the video ? Just re-author the previous disc with the new track, check the sync, and voilà.
EDIT : saw on the other board the idea that they might have farmed out the change to another authoring house, but still, except if they mistakenly reencoded the movie for Sony for free, it's weird not to simply use what was already done.

[nicolas]

Why even bother reencoding the video ? Just re-author the previous disc with the new track, check the sync, and voilà.

Geoff on BR said that Sony probably farm out their MOD titles to different authoring houses and that may have happened here again. From a technical perspective, there’s no reason for another encode as the feature size on the first disc was “only” 86 GB and the couple of foreign tracks are all low-res DD 5.1 anyway.

[nicolas]

Don’t Torture a Duckling (Arrow) - great new restoration and color grade but excessively brightly mastered in HDR at up to 10.000 nits. Much better in Dolby Vision, which tones down the blown-out highlights, recovers some detail there and enables more consistent, filmic look. The only (minor) downside is some chroma noise in the highlights for the most eagle-eyed pixel peepers like me. Most people won’t be bothered by it and that’s absolutely fine. Grain resolves nicely in HDR10 and DV.

Here’s my more detailed write up:

SpoilerShow

Mastering is by Dragon DI, encoding by Engine House.

What did annoy me though is that they mastered the film at 10.000 nits max in HDR10. It’s not a continuous torch mode grade like Paddington 2 where not even Dolby Vision can fully tone it down, but select highlights are very aggressively bright. I have a good TV that tone-maps reasonably well but I still don’t like it.

In DV, it’s much better and the (surely MEL) allowed for a slight detail recovery as part of the superior tone mapping just like how so many of Sony’s light cannon grades were salvaged that way. However there’s one annoying downside of this torch mode master that the Dolby layer on its own couldn’t fix: chroma noise. It’s not as bad as Desperado (IIRC another torch mode master) where occasionally entire frames were full of it but from what I’ve seen exactly the (highlight) areas hurt by the very bright HDR grade and recovered by the DV layer come with chroma blocking / color noise. It’s unfortunate but this is visible in motion and eagle-eyed viewers won’t like it too much. I haven’t seen this film before and can’t comment on how much of it is seen throughout the runtime. What we gain in DV should still outweigh the downside.

All in all, such a comparatively tricky case makes again quite clear that Engine House remain a notch below Fidelity in Motion for 4K encodes and that Arrow don’t do us any favor by only inviting David in on their biggest projects any more.

[nicolas]

The Brutalist (Elevation)
The Brutalist (A24)

The A24 version still looks nice, but is absolutely out-classed by the Elevation's vastly superior encoding. Both versions are the 200-minute cut with a 1 minute intermission, by the way, something that the back of A24's release implies otherwise. Unfortunately, I bought that version because I expected it to have the full intermission, but it doesn't.

Caps

I’ve got another title for the red category: Dream Scenario (DCM), which is a German import and the film’s only 4K release. It’s a beautiful encode in SDR and from what I’ve seen they didn’t translate on-screen text into German. @therewillbeblus, this is something for you

[therewillbeblus]

I've read through Geoff's reviews, but wondering if anyone here can vouch for Kill Bill being a substantial enough upgrade over the BD to warrant a $50+ purchase? It's one of my favorite films, so I feel obligated to see it in its best form, though not if I'm not gonna notice a difference!

[nicolas]

I've read through Geoff's reviews, but wondering if anyone here can vouch for Kill Bill being a substantial enough upgrade over the BD to warrant a $50+ purchase? It's one of my favorite films, so I feel obligated to see it in its best form, though not if I'm not gonna notice a difference!

I got them after reading the many negative comments and am happy for one key reason: Detail recovery across both films. I’ve rarely seen such ugly, blown-out masters like these two films on the old BDs. Some people speculated that this was intended by Robert Richardson but that’s BS when looking at his other films that got restored and how much detail they captured even for these ancient DIs. The new HDR grades are also more subdued and ultimately film-like, which is what I was looking for and received from the 4Ks. There’s other stuff like select scenes / shots having been further degrained (or rather denoised) but I personally consider this minor against the clear advantages I mentioned. I also love both both films, caved in and bought the two for around $60 in total as that’s going to be it for a long time after Tarantino clearly made the decision to not invest into a rebuild. It’s his call as he got the rights to the films before he licensed them to Lionsgate.