UHD Titles Worth/Not Worth Upgrading [Archive]

[nicolas]

Criterion’s Trainspotting UHD is another encoding disaster like Blood Simple - same anomalies:

Edit: Please disregard this post - I failed to notice that Svet uploaded 31 Blu-ray caps before posting 6 UHD caps at the bottom of his review and confused these with actual UHD caps. Sorry about that - hopefully we’re in for a good encode after all.

[dwk]

I cant speak to the actual quality of the encode for this title, but you should take Svet's UHD caps with a massive grain of salt.

[nicolas]

I cant speak to the actual quality of the encode for this title, but you should take Svet's UHD caps with a massive grain of salt.

Sorry for the confusion - see my edited post. I agree that we should take his UHD caps with a grain of salt due to them not being properly tone-mapped, so any sort of color judgment is impossible but despite the conversion to 1080p and JPEG I think we’ll get a good first look at the encode. I’ve taken his Days of Heaven UHD caps and noticed the very good encode, compared to Walkabout where the disaster is as obvious on these converted caps as on mine on the other forum. Hopefully we’ll be getting good Trainspotting caps soon! Again, sorry for all the confusion.

[nicolas]

I’ve now received my 4K set of The Apu Trilogy. It’s honestly a little worrying that a phenomenal trilogy as the Apu trilogy receives that little coverage for its 4K debut.
I sincerely hope that this set sells well for Criterion and entices them to bring more of the releases to 4K what made them the label that it is right now - the Apu trilogy and Satyajit Ray are a big part of that. Bergman, Kurosawa, Fellini, Tarkovsky etc. would fall under the same category.

What about the Apu set? It’s gorgeous and a stronger upgrade than anticipated, although expectations should obviously be kept in check due to the state of the original elements of the films. These UHDs are nonetheless the best-case scenario as they appear to present the 4K masters in a quality that’s very close to ideal.

The encodes, credited to NexSpec (BDs are still the old ones and therefore Pixelogic) are very good. This company did a great job on Moonage Daydream (also SDR like the Apu Trilogy) and it’s the same here. All three discs are BD-100s, a definite surprise.

Most beneficial from the upgrade is the overall definition in the segments that were sourced from the OCNs. HDR / DV is not needed here. The grayscale is optimal.

The best-looking UHDs in the set are Aparjito followed by Pather Panchali. Apur Sansar is not as all-around beautiful but almost - very minor highlight issues are palpable here and there and the brightest skies are not as detailed as they should be.

I’d also rank the original BDs exactly the same and consider Apur Sansar the worst-looking one. That BD has heavy macroblocking throughout and therefore represents the most significant upgrade from BD to 4K. I’d already recommend the UHD set for the third film alone.

If you’re the audience for these films, please support this set. The UHD format needs many more releases like this.

[cdnchris]

It’s honestly a little worrying that a phenomenal trilogy as the Apu trilogy receives that little coverage for its 4K debut.

I just wanted to point out that Criterion now sends out everything for the month all at once, at least for finished copies (I'm not sure on check discs and that). It looks like they just shipped this month's, so more reviews will be popping up.

[nicolas]

It’s honestly a little worrying that a phenomenal trilogy as the Apu trilogy receives that little coverage for its 4K debut.

I just wanted to point out that Criterion now sends out everything for the month all at once, at least for finished copies (I'm not sure on check discs and that). It looks like they just shipped this month's, so more reviews will be popping up.

This is a good point and likely the defining factor for the unusual quietness regarding Criterion releases. Maybe they’re trying to save some shipping costs by doing it like that. But I’m not sure if that’s a good thing - early reviews & packaging photos were always welcome.

[Finch]

Did NexSpec encode Blood Simple? If they did, I don't understand why they seem to do good work on several titles but then botch others. The only explanation I can think of is they have different team members working on different titles and it becomes a luck of the draw which title is handled by a more competent staff member.

[Matt]

Re: timing of sending out review copies:

Maybe Criterion has accepted that many (most) buyers wait until 50% off sales to buy and feel there’s little need to solicit advance reviews. Or they’re sick of people like us criticizing their encoding and want to sucker as many people as they can into buying releases before they find out. (It’s a joke, Criterion! Please don’t put a mousetrap in my next package!)

[M Sanderson]

Criterion’s Trainspotting UHD is another encoding disaster like Blood Simple - same anomalies:

Edit: Please disregard this post - I failed to notice that Svet uploaded 31 Blu-ray caps before posting 6 UHD caps at the bottom of his review and confused these with actual UHD caps. Sorry about that - hopefully we’re in for a good encode after all.

hearing that people are unhappy with the colour scheme being altered

[nicolas]

Did NexSpec encode Blood Simple? If they did, I don't understand why they seem to do good work on several titles but then botch others. The only explanation I can think of is they have different team members working on different titles and it becomes a luck of the draw which title is handled by a more competent staff member.

Yes, Blood Simple is NexSpec as well (confirmed on the other forum). In that vein, Kyle15 told me there that NexSpec is indeed a part of Pixelogic / Radius60 and not much more than a new name. It’s apparently no new authoring house after all. This makes their missteps and good work even more perplexing. I already speculated whether the good efforts are bound to the masters which had director approval, although that doesn’t make sense as directors rarely approve anything beyond the creation of the original (4K) master. SDR titles fared better so far.

[Finch]

I don't have a problem with the screenshots posted so far of the Criterion.

Edit: talking about the colors of the new Trainspotting transfer.

[nicolas]

I don't have a problem with the screenshots posted so far of the Criterion.

Take a look at the cap of the character standing next to a window here (ignore that it’s not tone-mapped): https://forum.blu-ray.com/showpost.php? ... stcount=70

Look at how beautifully the grain resolves on the character’s face. The window frame also looks immaculate. Compare that with how the grain looks in the window. Grain isn’t even any more, only these weird splotches with odd horizontal and vertical lines in some of them. Then, the area where sunlight hits the window and no grain whatsoever is left. This particular blocking pattern is also present on Walkabout and looks the same here - there is no grain movement in the affected areas even when the camera moves.

Edit: Just noticed an even stronger example of this in the cap underneath the one I described - the fire and smoke.

[Finch]

Sorry I should have been clearer. I was talking about the colors on the new Trainspotting disc. I was meaning to respond to msanderson's post about people complaining about the colors but my reply followed on yours regarding Blood Simple and I didn't realize immediately that my post could be taken to refer to the Blood Simple disc. Sorry for the confusion caused!

[dwk]

Sorry for the confusion - see my edited post. I agree that we should take his UHD caps with a grain of salt due to them not being properly tone-mapped, so any sort of color judgment is impossible but despite the conversion to 1080p and JPEG I think we’ll get a good first look at the encode. I’ve taken his Days of Heaven UHD caps and noticed the very good encode, compared to Walkabout where the disaster is as obvious on these converted caps as on mine on the other forum. Hopefully we’ll be getting good Trainspotting caps soon! Again, sorry for all the confusion.

Svet has had some instances of caps showing issues that are not on the diac. (I remember that the consensus about his Lost Higheay caps was that they had artifacts that were not present on the actual encode.) I dont know, maybe he has gotten better at capping UHDs. I can't say I bother looking at his reviews.

[nicolas]

Received my Mean Streets UHD LE from Second Sight / Lime Wood today. I couldn’t wait for their edition and bought the Criteiron during the last sale and was quite impressed with their version. Their UHD definitely has one of their best encodes and the audio didn’t feel as filtered as some of their other tracks.

Second Sight delivered a beautiful LE as always and used a BD-100 for the UHD as well. Sound is 1.0 PCM and English SDH are available. As previously revealed, David M / FiM did the encoding and it shows.

Although Criterion / NexSpec did good work for a change, it‘s obvious that David squeezed more bits out of the master, which is great for highlights and some of the colors (particularly the newly graded cyan tones) that have always been problematic for many authoring houses notwithstanding the disc format. The differences are visible if you know where to look at, otherwise not so much. All in all this is a comparatively small upgrade if you consider the Criterion the base edition. As someone definitely looking for the very best versions of films, I‘m very happy with what I got and appreciate the extra 10% I‘m not getting from Criterion‘s authoring house.
For normal viewers, if you have the Criterion or are more comfortable choosing that version, you‘re not missing out on much. Same applies to the SS vice versa if you decide solely on the basis of the image.

For what it‘s worth - colors appear to be the same on both CC and SS editions.

The same applies to the audio. I have a feeling that Second Sight ported over Criterion‘s audio as-is. The bitrates are nearly constantly at 1.1 Mbps, which is the Criterion standard. I can’t comment on whether SS could have done anything to improve Criterion‘s track - I wish I knew. I only hope that no opportunity to deliver the best-possible audio experience was wasted here.

Nevertheless all in all a wonderful edition! Thank you Second Sight and FiM for the great work as always!

[MichaelB]

Svet has had some instances of caps showing issues that are not on the diac. (I remember that the consensus about his Lost Higheay caps was that they had artifacts that were not present on the actual encode.) I dont know, maybe he has gotten better at capping UHDs. I can't say I bother looking at his reviews.

He seems convinced that more than one of Indicator's Jean Rollin discs leans turquoise, which isn't something that anyone else seems to be able to duplicate.

As for Lost Highway, has anyone reviewed the Criterion UHD who has also seen it in 35mm, ideally on its original release when prints were still in pristine condition? Because I'm very keen to know if this release finally comes close to replicating what I remember all too vividly (an image so dark during parts of the early scenes that it was almost impossible to see anything, aside from a very very faint and properly terrifying perception that something was there), as previous VHS, DVD and BD releases have comprehensively failed to get anywhere near it. No fault of the labels concerned, of course; home video technology simply wasn't up to it.

[nicolas]

Svet posted his review of The Roaring Twenties over a month before the release. I assume this a check disc they sent out earlier than the final copies, so we may see more early CC reviews after all. (The 1080p caps he posted show a spectacular transfer).

[tenia]

In that vein, Kyle15 told me there that NexSpec is indeed a part of Pixelogic / Radius60 and not much more than a new name. It’s apparently no new authoring house after all.

Interesting. I thought NexSpec was a new venture with part of the old staff, and not simply a sub-branch within the facility. Looks like a Team A / Team B thing, which makes me wonder how they attribute a given title to one or the other team.

This makes their missteps and good work even more perplexing. I already speculated whether the good efforts are bound to the masters which had director approval, although that doesn’t make sense as directors rarely approve anything beyond the creation of the original (4K) master. SDR titles fared better so far.

I'd then suppose it might be a combination of the challenge offered by the digital master (just like their BD encodes are suffering most when having to deal with very fine 4K/OCN-based restorations) and who precisely (ie not the facility but the individual authorer) performed the encode.

Re: timing of sending out review copies:
Maybe Criterion has accepted that many (most) buyers wait until 50% off sales to buy and feel there’s little need to solicit advance reviews.

I think it's mostly a matter of practicity and cost efficiencies. Most of the labels I deal with and that have multiple-titles-per-month are shipping them altogether, being check discs (like Indicator) or finished products (like Carlotta). In the case of Indicator, and it could explain why it's done this way, it seems they're shipped directly from/by the pressing warehouse.

[andyli]

I sampled the first 30 minutes of Come Drink with Me today. I think the underlying 4k scan is good, massively exceeding the existing HD master. But it appears that the transfer has some built in DNR and gives the film a slightly smooth look that I also find on some of Arrow's Shawscope restorations. I doubt it's Spectrum's doing given how well they treated Millennium Mambo. Anyway, I wasn't bothered very much by it to be honest. What a film! Can't wait to experience the whole thing in its newest digital form.

[tenia]

I watched it yesterday after giving it a quick spin a couple of weeks ago and yeah, looks like a new 4k OCN-based restoration slashed with DNR. It's really disappointing. Not a fan of the grading either, that seemed quite inconsistent to me (but I don't know the movie much so maybe it has always been the case).

[AxeYou]

[...] Mean Streets UHD [...]

The same applies to the audio. I have a feeling that Second Sight ported over Criterion‘s audio as-is. The bitrates are nearly constantly at 1.1 Mbps, which is the Criterion standard.

Both releases are LPCM Mono (48kHz, 24-bit). LPCM/WAV bitrate is always constant, and is solely determined by sample rate and bit depth—It's uncompressed with fixed-length audio samples after all. As such, we can't tell whether the mastering is the same between Criterion and SS based only on bitrate.

Blah-ray / Moshrom has compared various releases including the CC UHD, but not the SS. CC sounds quite decent: https://blah-ray.blogspot.com/2023/11/m ... -1973.html

(oh and the anonymous comments below that post are calling us out here )

The biggest issue that I have with that site (as well as on Criterionforum) is the amount of people on their who think that they are tech experts just because they repeat buzzwords like "encode" and "filtering" but don't even know what those words even mean. Also irritating is how they blindly worship and have a circlejerk over David M./FiM and act like everything they do is perfect, even though I have seen plenty of encodes done by them that contain macroblocking, poor grain structure, chroma noise, etc...

Completely agree, especially re. FiM - one of the reasons their encodes appear more detailed is simply because they slap on AI sharpening.

[nicolas]

[...] Mean Streets UHD [...]

The same applies to the audio. I have a feeling that Second Sight ported over Criterion‘s audio as-is. The bitrates are nearly constantly at 1.1 Mbps, which is the Criterion standard.

Both releases are LPCM Mono (48kHz, 24-bit). LPCM/WAV bitrate is always constant, and is solely determined by sample rate and bit depth—It's uncompressed with fixed-length audio samples after all. As such, we can't tell whether the mastering is the same between Criterion and SS based only on bitrate.

Blah-ray / Moshrom has compared various releases including the CC UHD, but not the SS. CC sounds quite decent: https://blah-ray.blogspot.com/2023/11/m ... -1973.html

(oh and the anonymous comments below that post are calling us out here )

The biggest issue that I have with that site (as well as on Criterionforum) is the amount of people on their who think that they are tech experts just because they repeat buzzwords like "encode" and "filtering" but don't even know what those words even mean. Also irritating is how they blindly worship and have a circlejerk over David M./FiM and act like everything they do is perfect, even though I have seen plenty of encodes done by them that contain macroblocking, poor grain structure, chroma noise, etc...

Completely agree, especially re. FiM - one of the reasons their encodes appear more detailed is simply because they slap on AI sharpening.

Thank you for that helpful note. I had no idea about the constant bitrate in PCM tracks. I guess I should correct my post on the other forum as well. I switched back and forth between the CC and SS discs and honestly couldn’t hear a difference. They likely shared the audio as well.

[tenia]

FiM, AI sharpening since 2015, ie before AI sharpening even existed. Yeah, right.

Ironic though to rant about the supposed abuse of tech words only to mismatch a sharpened texture with a more transparent encode.

And of course, no single example mentioned.

[therewillbeblus]

Another addition to the reference category: The Wicker Man 4K / DV. Phenomenal release all around. Exceptional encode, restoration, color grade, sound mix and literally everything we want to see. If only more people would work on our favorites that way…

Great to hear. Now if they would just release a version that's reasonably-priced..

I’m sure a standard edition with The Final Cut appears down the line in the UK at least. If that’s the only cut you’re interested in, the extra swag of the Collector’s Edition probably isn’t worth it.

It looks like a standard edition has been issued with all three cuts on UHD

[nicolas]

Great to hear. Now if they would just release a version that's reasonably-priced..

I’m sure a standard edition with The Final Cut appears down the line in the UK at least. If that’s the only cut you’re interested in, the extra swag of the Collector’s Edition probably isn’t worth it.

It looks like a standard edition has been issued with all three cuts on UHD

You’re right and it comes at a great price for all the content. Rarewaves currently charge a crazy 123€ for the limited edition, so that one may be at the end of its availability although Amazon still has it in stock for around 70€.