UHD Titles Worth/Not Worth Upgrading [Archive]

[Finch]

Forgot Once Upon A Time In Hollywood, added now. The one QT I want is Jackie Brown though.

[swo17]

You're right, she is a QT!

[Finch]

Touche.

Speaking of QT, Inglourious Basterds added to OP. A very good 2k upscale.

[Finch]

A retail listing has appeared for a steelbook UHD of Starship Troopers from Sony with Dolby Vision added. No street date.

[ryannichols7]

two I have but I figured others may be curious about, since there isn't a ton of hand-drawn animation on here, and we have Akira listed...

The Peanuts Holiday Collection (looked good to my eyes!)
Ghost in the Shell (1995)

the latter I've never seen but at like $9 a pop on black Friday I figured why not. I'll probably give it a go tonight.

since Disney obviously seems to have absolutely zero interest in putting their classic titles on UHD, the best we can hope for is Shout/GKids with the Satoshi Kon titles or (of course) anything Ghibli. but I don't think there have been any murmurs on these

[Finch]

Tenebrae (Arrow) (encoded by FiM/David MacKenzie)

EDIT: post amended to remove reference to the second Arrow BD from 2015; this new release is the first based on the 4k restoration so it is a reference title even if you own the previous BD from six years ago (never mind the terrible first BD).

[dwk]

Wasn't the Arrow BD of Tenebrae pretty bad? I recall it was an older transfer full of scratch removal errors. I think this release is the first home video release of the 4K restoration.

[Finch]

I meant the more recent 2015 (?) BD but that is not based on a 4k restoration (I misremembered so thanks for putting the record straight), so I'll amend the above post. The new Arrow 4k UHD is a reference disc regardless of which of the two earlier BDs you own.

[tenia]

There originally was a BD sourced from a dated Italian master riddled with scanner. Then a Steelbook reissue with a new remaster, sourced from France, better but riddled with digital issues that required to be fixed (Synapse fixed many of those, I don't remember if Arrow did).
It definitely wasn't a 4k restoration.

[moreorless]

The previous Arrow was decent enough I spose but just watching a bit of the new one tis definitely miles better, a more significant upgrade than the previous Arrow Argento UHD's although honestly all of those have been pretty great as well.

[hearthesilence]

NYMag just posted this, and while it's not addressing UHD per se, I do wonder if it reflects attitudes that will shape the market for the format.

EDIT: Here's an excerpt for those who hit a paywall:

Unlike movie studios, major streaming services typically demand the CGI for their original shows and films be delivered at 4K, but that’s not always an improvement. “It takes four times as long to render,” says Angela Barson, co-founder of the VFX studio BlueBolt. “You might be able to increase your budget by 15 or 20 percent, but that doesn’t remotely cover all the additional time.” Corners are cut, and a half-assed 4K effect can look worse than a decent 2K one. Barson posits that one of the best things about 4K TVs — HDR, which expands the contrast between lights and darks — might also be the reason CGI is now more noticeable. “It can throw up more issues,” she says. “You have to make sure the CGI matches its surroundings completely throughout the full color gamut. It’s an art form, and not everybody can do it. It requires experts, and there are not enough of them in the world.”

Erik Winquist, a visual-effects supervisor at Weta FX whose credits include Avatar and the latest Doctor Strange, is a 4K skeptic. “One of the Marvel films I just finished very recently was at 2K. The film I’m prepping right now is going to be in 2K. And these are big tentpole films, not low-budget indies or anything,” he says. “With the distance that typical audiences sit from their TVs, the benefit of 4K is debatable. I’ve sat through dailies where we’re zooming in 16 times on somebody’s cheek and analyzing whether the pore detail is everything it can be. Part of me wonders, Is anybody even seeing that?” At home, Winquist watches movies with an HD projector.

I explain my own 4K CGI problem to Robert Eggers, who directed this year’s Viking revenge saga The Northman. “I totally know what you mean,” he says. Eggers has a reputation for period-realistic production design and largely avoided digital effects in his first two features. (When location scouts were unable to source a suitable 1800s lighthouse for The Lighthouse, he had one built.) For a $90 million movie like The Northman, though, Eggers often had no choice. “There was a lot more CGI than I would have liked,” he says. “In 4K, there are certain things that I think look super-jarring, and it makes me want to close my eyes.”

The Northman was shot on 35-mm. film, but its CGI was rendered at 2K. “Much to my shock and horror, it’s easier for an indie movie” — that is, one without much CGI — “to be finished in 4K than a big movie,” says Eggers. He’s mostly happy with how The Northman turned out for home viewers. “The 4K version has a better, more specific, dialed-in color grade than the theatrical version,” he says. “The digital versions of movies that are screened in most theaters don’t have true blacks.”

[Finch]

I've just received my Tenebrae UHD from Arrow and the booklet lists Synapse as collaborators. Both discs are authored by Fidelity in Motion, so the Synapse is a reference disc as well.

[The Elegant Dandy Fop]

I actually had a similar experience to the author of the NYMag article a week ago. I popped in the 4K of Inglourious Basterds, a film sourced from 2K which I've seen numerous times on 35mm and Blu-ray, and never noticed until this viewing that the cows in the opening scene are clearly CGI and look quite poorly done. I sort of wish the lesson of this article would be less that CGI looks bad in 4K and more practical effects looks great in 4K. I miss practical effects! Not enough matte paintings, squibs, and Karo syrup in movies anymore!

[hearthesilence]

Same here. Even on 35mm or Blu-ray, I was never thrilled about CGI, the movement looks to fluid for lack of a better word. (In a lot of ways, Terminator 2 really was the ideal film for CGI and not just a pioneer for it.) All the opticals and matte stuff on everything from Citizen Kane and Hitchcock to a lot of the first Star Wars films just looks more aesthetically pleasing to me.

[tenia]

NYMag just posted this, and while it's not addressing UHD per se, I do wonder if it reflects attitudes that will shape the market for the format.

There are multiple (quite different) things tackled in the article. First, there is the underlying "digital 4k" vs "4k as 35mm digitalisation" difference. Then, there's the question of the VFX rez impact (seeing how Marvel/Disney's are still done at 2K and look more and more awful for each new movie, the 4K rendering time doesn't seem to really be the reason). Then, there's the question of how it's rendered on disc and watched at home (for instance, the color grading of Fury Road on UHD has been debated since its release because of how it exacerbates some obvious CGI). And then, there's simply that newer technologies make older ones often look more limited. When someone says "With a 2K projector throwing a bunch of photons across a theater, what you could get away with in CGI was fairly forgivable", that's exactly the same argument than "With a projection print being a copy of a copy of a copy, you can get away with special effects that will need to be cleaned up when making a restoration straight for the OCN".

However, when Winquist talks about how Marvel VFX are still 2K... he doesn't say that's an industrial choice to ensure X movies per year with Y 2K CGI shots rather than having to bottleneck the whole planning because of how fast you can render CGI in 4K. And after all, since pretty much nobody knows what it means or how the difference materialise in the general audience, it's an easy choice : more stuff at 2K rather than less stuff at 4K. They're still doing 4K DCPs anyway, and UHDs too (and it sells) (a lot).

[ryannichols7]

naturally one would just need to see the last 15 minutes of 2001 of course to see how well the practical effects have held up in comparison. total night and day stuff

[bad future]

Sad irony that the films that seem to benefit the most from UHD/HDR -- shot-on-film, usually catalog titles -- are probably not the ones that will keep 4k players in production if modern, mainstream films decide the format isn't worth continuing to invest in. I do think films finished in 2k can still benefit from it, though (if nothing else, to get closer to the quality of DCP's that play in the theater, without as many issues introduced by compression) so maybe studios and/or manufacturers can figure out how to maximize that benefit, or at least sell it to enough people through marketing.

[Quote Perf Unquote]

I guess we need to have two approaches, or camps, when talking about 4K skepticism.

As the article linked above, and the subsequent posters here, state, modern films with CGI and convoluted workflows present inherent anomalies when the end result is seen on 4K disc and display.

The other discussion is how worth it is 4K harvest and display of older, all analog films, which actually seem to benefit more from the process.

I have no interest in 99% of modern films, so if their practitioners are skeptical of the format, so be it.

But I can't deal with anyone skeptical of the second approach, example the folks who always pipe up dubiously when older 35mm or 16MM films are announced for UHD. We can see some of that just now with CC's upcoming release of "Night of the Living Dead". The more resolution and color gamut, the better, for these older (and better, of course) films.

[Finch]

Turbine's UHD of Henry has been graded in more vibrant colors than any other disc. Some people might prefer that but it's not faithful to the theatrical presentation. The Arrow remains the version to get.

[EddieLarkin]

Graded implies they've done something deliberately. Instead this is just another colour gamut error, similar to Shout's problems with They Live and Prince of Darkness, except in the opposite direction this time. The perils of having two different colour spaces available on UHD, I guess.

In short, Henry was graded in P3 but Turbine have forced their disc to stretch the colour primaries to BT2020, which is a wider gamut than P3. This results in red becoming oversatured, and blue/green and white becoming teal.

Shout did the opposite, taking films that had been graded in BT2020 but forcing them into P3 on their discs, clipping the colour primaries and thus making everything less saturated than it should be.

[vsski]

Eddie - you obviously have a great deal of technical knowledge about all of this and also a good way of explaining what is going on to a layman. Why is it that people who one would expect to be knowledgeable constantly make mistakes that sound like they could easily be avoided.

Are they simply clueless and pretend to know when they don’t, are there other players like studios or license holders that meddle in the decision making process? Are there financial decisions because “getting it right” costs too much (seems unlikely given your description)?

I’m just puzzled how so many of the recent releases are riddled with errors that seem easily avoidable.

[tenia]

1. Even some professionnals aren't that technically minded/savvy.
2. Intermediates means you might think you got something that was prepped up a certain way but actually wasn't.

[EddieLarkin]

These sorts of errors happen at the encoding stage, which is typically done by a third party, not the label itself. I don't know much about the intricacies of disc authoring but I would guess this particular error happens simply because someone leaves a box checked that they shouldn't. Seemingly it's one thing to author a disc, quite another to author a completely error free one. And I'd be very surprised if there are many QC people who would be technically informed enough to look out for errors like this.

[tenia]

And I'd be very surprised if there are many QC people who would be technically informed enough to look out for errors like this.

That's part of what I meant with my 2nd point : in the case of having a new restoration that ends graded in a slightly more specific way (reds more saturated and with a bit more of teal), I can't think of how someone could be sure it's a mistake and not just how the new restoration was willingly graded (and I'm not sure how this could be checked just on its own).

[EddieLarkin]

That's part of what I meant with my 2nd point : in the case of having a new restoration that ends graded in a slightly more specific way (reds more saturated and with a bit more of teal), I can't think of how someone could be sure it's a mistake and not just how the new restoration was willingly graded (and I'm not sure how this could be checked just on its own).

I don't see why it can't be a standard part of UHD QC that the primaries are checked (with the function on certain Panny players), and then the disc authorer can confirm if they match the colour space the master itself is in. And, if the master has been made available on home video already, it should absolutely be a requirement for the QC person to source or be provided with those discs. That would have made it very easy for both Shout and Turbine to avoid this particular issue.