Paramount Catalog Titles on Blu

[Matt]

It doesn’t look any better than the Imprint edition and no mono track? No thanks.

[andyli]

They're based on the same 4K restoration. I wouldn't expect any other outcome.

[Ribs]

Vanilla Sky will get a Presents edition with a new master in November. In addition, a new listing of Reds has also appeared, though not at the Presents pricepoint, so it could just be a new release (truly even if its a new encode of the ancient master it will probably be a substantial improvement, though I have some hope that maybe both this and Heaven Can Wait have just been mislisted and could be getting Presents releases)

[Stefan Andersson]

Press release for Ragtime/Paramount Presents edition:
https://www.hometheaterforum.com/commun ... st-5031259

Includes a newly discovered director´s cut workprint. Also deleted and extended scenes and a separately listed deleted scene, which I guess is the Emma Goldman/Evelyn Nesbit/Younger Brother scene already featured on the earlier DVD.

[domino harvey]

Wonder if it will still be censored like on the DVD?

[beamish14]

Press release for Ragtime/Paramount Presents edition:
https://www.hometheaterforum.com/commun ... st-5031259

Includes a newly discovered director´s cut workprint. Also deleted and extended scenes and a separately listed deleted scene, which I guess is the Emma Goldman/Evelyn Nesbit/Younger Brother scene already featured on the earlier DVD.

I'm VERY curious about the condition of that workprint. I'm going to assume it's a faded 35mm print (god help us if it was printed on Fuji stock in 1981), but I'm interested to see how Forman intended to use the figures who were completely excised from his film, like Harry Houdini and Emma Goldman.

[Stefan Andersson]

I'm VERY curious about the condition of that workprint. I'm going to assume it's a faded 35mm print (god help us if it was printed on Fuji stock in 1981), but I'm interested to see how Forman intended to use the figures who were completely excised from his film, like Harry Houdini and Emma Goldman.

POSSIBLE SPOILER




Perhaps the workprint will look like this b/w deleted scene (from the earlier dvd) where Evelyn Nesbit meets Emma Goldman and Younger Brother:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m6UaVK11bso

More info here, including link to a pdf file of the screenplay, which includes scenes not in the release version:
https://cinephiliabeyond.org/milos-formans-ragtime/

END POSSIBLE SPOILER

[hearthesilence]

The Presents line will be releasing A Place in the Sun, Bugsy Malone, and Nashville in August.

The new Nashville BD may be taken from a newer 4K restoration, but it looks like ass. Horrible, horrible DNR, stick with MoC or Criterion, which are probably from the same master.

[senseabove]

The new Nashville BD may be taken from a newer 4K restoration, but it looks like ass. Horrible, horrible DNR, stick with MoC or Criterion, which are probably from the same master.

Yeeeeeeesh...

[Rayon Vert]

Another crime.

[hearthesilence]

Makes me wonder if 1) the other former Criterion/MoC titles look just as bad and 2) whether anyone streaming these titles will be subjected to the same shitty master.

[Nw_jahrles]

You have to wonder how many users are going to be irritated over at HTF since Robert Harris really pumped up this release as a “night and day” upgrade.

[hearthesilence]

I'm sure it was, the Criterion restoration was an old 2K restoration whereas the newer 4K restoration was used for a DCP that's already been screened for over five years now. Plenty of people have seen it by now, but I'm sure they fucked it up for the BD.

[beamish14]

Anyone have any guesses about future Paramount Presents titles? I've been wondering about The Day of the Locust and Bringing Out the Dead.

[EddieLarkin]

I too do not see much evidence of DNR in the Nashville caps. If the new version looks a touch softer, this may be due to some built in sharpening on the old transfer. The grain on that one seems to have a harsher sharpened look to it. As for that particular shot highlighted by senseabove, the detail that is lost there is not the result of DNR, but by a fudging of the dynamic range. It's probably the case that the remaster was done in HDR/PQ, and then obviously converted to SDR/gamma for this Blu-ray release. There have been many instances of this happening on new Blu-rays that are sourced from HDR remasters, where the new highlight information is being lost in the conversion to SDR. Sadly it seems Paramount wish to milk us for a lot of these new masters by releasing them first only on Blu-ray, and then perhaps later on UHD (or possibly not at all, saving the 4K/HDR for streaming).

[Moshrom]

The new restoration is also much more stable in motion and no longer flickers like mad.

[andyli]

I've sampled the disc a while back and remembered it looked gorgeous in motion. No idea where people saw DNR and why they so quickly formed a negative opinion based on screengrabs.

[Rayon Vert]

In terms of those screengabs, something like this also makes the Paramount look problematically blurry (?). I get that the Criterion might have been sharpened, but just looking at the detail in the hair, for example, isn't reassuring.

[senseabove]

Several of the caps look great—most of the indoor, averagely-lit scenes are an improvement, like the cap of Tomlin at the table with her kids—but just as many of them have something very funky going on, as RV and EddieLarkin noted: Karen Black's blurry hair, the loss of detail in the grass here that doesn't seem solely attributable to the Criterion being overly sharpened, just about everything in that junkyard cap, the disappearing head in the bar.

I've been planning on showing Nashville to a friend soon in an attempt to recuperate Altman, after an evening's discussion of why he hated 3 Women and I think it's a masterpiece, so I may spring for the iTunes HDR on the assumption that the blurriness is less noticeable in motion and the colors are better handled in HDR.

[dwk]

Harold and Maude Blu-ray is coming out on December 7th as part of the Paramount Presents line:
New 4K transfer
Commentary with Larry Karaszewski and Cameron Crowe
Yusuf/Cat Stevens on Harold and Maude
Theatrical Trailer #1
Theatrical Trailer #2

 

[ryannichols7]

that commentary isn't listed as new...was it on a previous Paramount DVD?

[PfR73]

It is new. It hasn't been on any previous release and is listed as new on the Blu-ray.com news article.

[senseabove]

I watched the 4k DV iTunes download of Nashville last night. The blurriness does pop up occasionally, and, frankly, reminded me of watching a slightly warped print, as it sometimes blurred in only a portion of the visual field (not relegated to specific objects at a certain depth, like a bad focus pull), sometimes covering the whole image for a frame or two. Geraldine Chaplin's head still dissolves and reconstitutes in the darkness of the bar when she approaches Tom (though coming out of full black was a pretty frequent issue, with some portions of the screen rapidly fluctuating in and out of legibly "on" and OLED-black "off"—I'd say that probably wasn't aided by streaming compression, but the whole file is only 5.4GB!); in the junkyard, the white car detail is still blown out, if not quite so thoroughly erased, and the rusted car in front is still a maraschino cherry red. Detail does look great in motion, though, outside of those extremes, and the colors absolutely pop. Which feels wrong to say about an Altman film from the 70s, but as a counterpoint, I did just pull down the big, lavish 2014 career survey Altman's daughter co-wrote to skim through the Nashville chapter written by co-author Giulia D'Agnolo Vallan, and there's a brief, unsourced reference to "its reds, whites, and blues [being] deliberately heightened through an extra saturation process..." I've never heard that mentioned before, and it's been far too long since I've seen a print to recall how vivid those colors were, but it at least gives some support for the color timing of this release. I'd be curious if anyone knows of other sources that mention that...

[dwk]

Heaven Can Wait and Reds (40th Anniversary Edition) Blu-rays are coming out on November 30th.

[Altair]

Having Reds back on blu - hopefully a new scan - is tremendous news.