UHD New Releases, Reissues and Upgrades

[nicolas]

Question, nic: how much better is the MoC 4K of High Noon over their BD? Are we talking blue or red category? Sounded like blue to me.

I've added Raging Bull (Imprint) to the OP. Will add a note for the Import section too when I'm on a PC again.

Where should the Doinel 4Ks go? Red with a caveat for Les Mistons?

High Noon in the blue category and Doinel red with the caveat sounds fair to me.

[nicolas]

Timecop (Studiocanal Germany) is better than the Shout 4K. Plaion are SC’s distributor in Germany and one of their representatives revealed in a German forum that SC hired LSP to do the encode. Also just now, a poster on the other forum who got it already mentioned that they got a proper 5.1 mix instead of the Shout upmix.

[Lowry_Sam]

So I viewed 5 Minutes into A Fistful Of Dollars for both Eagle & Arrow UHDs with original English 1.0 and noticed significant difference between the 2. The Eagle opens with a title card stating that its from a 2014 Restoration by Cineteca di Bologna & Ritrovata and Eagle made further adjustments to the color timing. The Arrow looks like a newer restoration with more detail, a broader color palette (with less yellow & more blue) & brighter. There are instances on the Eagle in the opening credits where the red bleeds into the black, whereas in the Arrow red & black outlines are quite distinct with clean finite lines. The English mono on the Arrow is also significantly more robust and cleaner, the Eagle much flatter. The Eagle looks & sounds like watching the film in a rep house theater in the 1970s, The Arrow looks and sounds like watching a more recent film in a modern cineplex theater.

[vanshady]

I think the Antoine Doinel set should be blue tiers instead of red because even though they are significantly better than BD, they all have either botched masters or questionable color gradings. Here's the same nicolas review he commented for reference.

[Finch]

I did see nic's review which is why I asked him already several posts above yours if red with a caveat added for Les Mistons was fair and he agreed. Since Criterion have not yet committed to fixing that disc, I'm going to take the Doinel set out of the OP until we know whether LM gets redone. Please also bear in mind that red covers reference or significant improvements over the last Blu-ray which nic clearly seemed to think the rest of the Doinel set was (and your own post said they were significantly better). My suggestion therefore would be depending on what Criterion does with LM: either it's red across the board or LM is singled out as a disappointment.

[nicolas]

Some news regarding Shout titles:
- Ace Ventura 4K has drab colors compared to Warner’s BD, which was sourced from a 2K IP scan. Interestingly, Shout licensed the film from Sony as they seemingly got the Morgan Creek library. Geoff D mentioned that Arrow have UK rights to both Ace Ventura films and other Morgan Creek titles, so maybe they’ll address this with Sony for their inevitable UK release.

- Jet Li Collection: A BR member suggested that the masters Shout worked with are the same as 88’s but they denied it. This is now confirmed via this comparison with Shout having made subtle adjustments. However the biggest difference is in the subtitles, so even if it turns out that Shout has better masters (88 got a DNR master for The Bodyguard from Beijing), the 88 discs are probably the ones to get. Will update once there are more reports.

@Fus1on:

The Phoenician Scheme (Universal) - caps. The BD was clearly low-pass filtered. Luckily, the 4K looks excellent.

Warfare (Leonine) - caps. A24 is the better one.

[andyli]

I didn’t follow the ruckus on the other forum. Are Shout’s subs on their HK titles now considered pariah?

[nicolas]

I didn’t follow the ruckus on the other forum. Are Shout’s subs on their HK titles now considered pariah?

It seems so, at least when it comes to Tai Chi Master. Discussion went on for a few days now. The poster who did the PQ comparison also looked at the subtitles and they’re quite different from each other. It seems the 88 translations are more literal whereas Shout’s are colloquial.

[Finch]

nic, how much of an advance is MoC's The Old Dark House 4K over their BD? I already sold it off so can't check who is credited with the encode for it, if it was David or Luke Louca. Does the Dolby Vision grade make the 4K look substantially better?

[yoloswegmaster]

I didn’t follow the ruckus on the other forum. Are Shout’s subs on their HK titles now considered pariah?

It seems so, at least when it comes to Tai Chi Master. Discussion went on for a few days now. The poster who did the PQ comparison also looked at the subtitles and they’re quite different from each other. It seems the 88 translations are more literal whereas Shout’s are colloquial.

I was going to ask why they are hiring a white guy from Scotland who isn't fluent in Cantonese to do the subs but I just found out that he does this for free, which explains everything.

[nicolas]

nic, how much of an advance is MoC's The Old Dark House 4K over their BD? I already sold it off so can't check who is credited with the encode for it, if it was David or Luke Louca. Does the Dolby Vision grade make the 4K look substantially better?

Their 4K is my first copy of the film but I’ve checked in the FiM thread on the other forum and he indeed encoded their BD, so it’s probably just a smaller upgrade. Here are some screenshots I found that include the Cohen BD and the poor German 4K with terrible fake HDR. David’s DV grade is way more subtle and doesn’t blow out the highlights. I really loved how the film looks.

[Finch]

Thanks, nic. Appreciate it. Updating OP accordingly.

[nicolas]

I didn’t follow the ruckus on the other forum. Are Shout’s subs on their HK titles now considered pariah?

It seems so, at least when it comes to Tai Chi Master. Discussion went on for a few days now. The poster who did the PQ comparison also looked at the subtitles and they’re quite different from each other. It seems the 88 translations are more literal whereas Shout’s are colloquial.

I was going to ask why they are hiring a white guy from Scotland who isn't fluent in Cantonese to do the subs but I just found out that he does this for free, which explains everything.

Truly unbelievable. If their bar is already that low with bigger titles, I don’t want to know how half-assed the smaller Golden Princess ones will be. We can only hope that Arrow’s got us adequately covered

[Finch]

They may have asked native speakers to cover other titles instead due to the sheer volume of titles needing to be prepped. Mark did say that he runs his translation past a native speaker before it gets submitted. Also, he did the subs for 88's disc of Tai Chi Master which IMO are a lot better than Shout's going by the sample that was compared on BR. Now we don't know yet who did the subs for Shout's version of Tai Chi Master so I'm not going to speculate. But it does make me hope that the subs for City on Fire on disc are better than the streaming version subs which they already admitted were rushed to meet the early deadlines.

[nicolas]

Thanks for the info, Finch. I had no idea and will take my comment about Mark back. Still unfortunate that Shout’s subs aren’t closer to 88’s, whatever the reason may be.

[rrenault]

So what's the status of Criterion's UHD of Raging Bull? Is it basically a blue tier release now compared to the (eye wateringly expensive) Imprint edition? My understanding is the Imprint is a bigger upgrade for audio than for video.

[Yakushima]

Graveyard Shift (Kino) - disappointing.
Murder by Decree (Kino) - Red category, with a caveat of somewhat inconsistent compression quality and typos in subtitles. Still, a huge improvement.
The Cell (Arrow) - some parts looked stellar, and some less so. However it is a big improvement over previous editions, so I would put in Red category.
Choose Me (Criterion) - Red category.

[Finch]

Small correction: Mark did the subs for 88's Fong Sai Yuk collection (I thought it was Tai Chi Master or perhaps he did all three?) but Ruined on BR.com thought those subs were also better than Shout's on disc subs. Ruined liked 88's subs better for all the Jet Li films that Shout covered in their set.

I don't believe we've had confirmation yet who translated any of the Jet Li titles for Shout, whether it's a native speaker or not, and there may have been different translators for each of the films.

[mfunk9786]

Disney should be forced to testify in some kind of tribunal for only encoding the Master and Commander UHD release at a grand total of 60 GB and a bitrate more indicative of a Blu-ray disc (averaging less than 45 Mbps). Sounds like it looks pretty good, but why do this with a film that's nearly 2.5 hours long?

That's okay, I'll keep buying that garbage.

[Fus1on]

Oof, that's a shame to hear. Still though, Disney has done a pretty good job with their recent encodes considering the smaller disc sizes they tend to use, so we could still get a release that at least looks solid. Tombstone still looked great even though it was encoded on a BD-66, and that movie's about 5 minutes shorter than M&C.

[mfunk9786]

Oof, that's a shame to hear. Still though, Disney has done a pretty good job with their recent encodes considering the smaller disc sizes they tend to use, so we could still get a release that at least looks solid. Tombstone still looked great even though it was encoded on a BD-66, and that movie's about 5 minutes shorter than M&C.

Agree and disagree, that and A Complete Unknown are examples of recent Disney releases that are crammed onto dual-layer discs and look perfectly good, but could probably look better with more room to breathe. So while I agree with you and know this is the best we're going to get on this side of the pond, I'd buy an Arrow equivalent in a heartbeat if it comes along down the road since I know it's going to be significantly better. Considering what they're charging for these reissues, it really does feel like highway robbery.

[Fus1on]

Completely agree, although I'm honestly more bothered by the fact that (like KoH) it's probably not a rebuilt scan, and they're apparently excluding a ton of legacy special features in this release when, like you said, they're charging quite a bit for it. Since I don't have this on Blu-ray right now, I'll definitely still pick up the UHD, but yeah, it's a shame that it couldn't have been a better release.

[nicolas]

Master and Commander HDR10 and DV FEL screenshots by samlop / BR.com: https://slow.pics/c/WjLd8gAL

LFE comparison: https://forum.blu-ray.com/showpost.php? ... tcount=468

[Fus1on]

I mean... I've seen worse.

[Finch]

I'm glad I hung on to the BD CE of Master and Commander as Disney dropped all but the most basic extras from the 4K. While I appreciate that they released the film in 4K at all and I will upgrade, I'm going to wait until the price drops 40-50%. Ditto the original Lilo and Stitch.