Studio Canal / Kinowelt / Optimum

[tenia]

Yes, there are part of the aspects of the new Total Recall that definitely are inherited, and I think that overall, the new restoration is otherwise great, but the encode of the UHD looks quite appalling in any case.

[GoodOldNeon]

I watched the UHD of Le cercle rouge tonight, and I thought it looked very yellow. Afterwards I popped in the BD and based on the first scene in the train the colours look much better: clean whites and no yellow bias as mentioned earlier by david hare.

The UHD encode is also very poor, with several instances of noticeable macroblocking in darker scenes.

[hearthesilence]

When they master UHD discs, whether it's with or without HDR or DV, ideally shouldn't every playback method have at least a similar look and tonality within the given technical framework (or constrictions)?

[tenia]

It should but in this case, whoever is encoding Canal's UHDs who isn't David M is crapping the HDR layer and the DV layer is coming to the rescue, so any common sense is basically gone down the drain.
But given to any competent authoring house, sure enough, the HDR layer would be properly encoded in the 1st place and people not equipped with Dolby Vision screens wouldn't have such a gap in blockiness.

[GoodOldNeon]

Only question here is did you watch the UHD with DV or does your player and monitor only enable HDR?

Unfortunately my player or TV, can't remember which, doesn't support DV.

[EddieLarkin]

Whilst the DV layer on StudioCanal discs will fix a lot of the bad compression seen in HDR10, there shouldn't be any colour difference between the two, so if the film is yellow in HDR10 it's going to be the same in DV.

But, all three modes on a TV (SDR, HDR10, DV) will have their own colour temperature and white balance settings, so just because a UHD has a change in colour vs the same 4K sourced BD, or between HDR10 and DV, doesn't mean that difference actually exists. It could all be down to not having the 3 viewing modes lined up properly (i.e., calibrated).

[Drucker]

Ladykillers looks fantastic. Honestly when I started reading this forum a disc released by SC was bound to have errors and be terrible. Encode issues aside their restorations seem great nowadays, so hats off.

[mhofmann]

Ladykillers looks fantastic. Honestly when I started reading this forum a disc released by SC was bound to have errors and be terrible. Encode issues aside their restorations seem great nowadays, so hats off.

AFAIK that is a David M encode, while some of the other mentioned releases are not.

[MichaelB]

Yes, I'm not aware of any David M encodes with any issues (aside from a single fade-out flub in The Elephant Man that's down to the restorers and is easy enough to tune out).

This list probably isn't complete, but I believe he was responsible for Angel Heart, Don't Look Now, The Elephant Man, Flash Gordon and The Ladykillers.

[EddieLarkin]

Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure and The Fifth Element too (the latter being much better than the Sony equivalent).

[tenia]

He indeed has encoded all those above, while he hasn't encoded the 4 John Carpenter movies, the 3 Rambo movies, Total Recall, Le cercle rouge, Les trois jours du Condor, Serpico or Cliffhanger, all with their share of issues.

[Drucker]

Understood, but I'd also point out that They Live, Deer Hunter, and according to David Hare, Le Cercle Rouge also look great on blu-ray.

[therewillbeblus]

I watched my SC copy of Le Cercle Rouge last weekend and can confirm it looks great, though the color debates between this and Criterion are fair and probably doomed to be unresolved

[tenia]

In the present cases, the UHDs are concerned, not the BDs (though I've read that amongst those 4 Carpenter, They Live has the best encode).

[L.A.]

The Masque of the Red Death Jan. 25th.

Also some information about the restoration at The Digital Fix.

[L.A.]

The Masque of the Red Death Jan. 25th.

Mondo Digital.

[Stefan Andersson]

Blu releases for March 5, 2021:

Mayerling
Les valseuses
Notre histoire
Shalako
Ouvre les yeux
Il divo
Le poids de l'eau
Alice et Martin
Carlos
Les carabiniers
Docteur Petiot
Moderato Cantabile
Fatale
Chaplin
Charade
Meurtre (Hitchcock)

Source: https://www.dvdclassik.com/forum/viewto ... start=4170

[L.A.]

Link (Richard Franklin, 1986) was released last week. The Digital Fix reviews the disc.

[swo17]

Presumably this corrects what was wrong with the Kino?

[L.A.]

Presumably this corrects what was wrong with the Kino?

Oh, was there something bad about it?

[swo17]

I hadn't bothered to look it up when I wrote that, but the issue was that a mono audio track had been used in place of the advertised stereo track. This review says the SC has a Dolby Digital 2.0 track so that would seem to suggest that it's the one to get

[EddieLarkin]

The Kino uses 2.0 as well, indeed mono audio tracks tend to appear as 2.0 more commonly than they do 1.0. They only way to tell is to listen to them and/or run them through Dolby if you have surround speakers.

[John Hodson]

That's interesting and not the only instance of a Canal encoded UHD disc where the DV layer is good but vanilla HDR not so much. I wonder what's going on? Thank you David; this will now go down on the to buy list.

[EddieLarkin]

That's interesting and not the only instance of a Canal encoded UHD disc where the DV layer is good but vanilla HDR not so much. I wonder what's going on?

It's simply poor encoding practices. Something to do with them starting with the DV encode and auto deriving the HDR10 encode directly from it, rather than treating them as two separate works that need equal attention. Not surprising whenever David M handles a disc for them the HDR10 and DV encodes are both perfect. Indeed all else equal there is little difference between the two formats, certainly nothing that should be causing crushed blacks and wonky colours on HDR10. This will be more to do with how projectors handle HDR (poorly, which is why no projector so far can output in the Dolby Vision format).

[L.A.]

Link (Richard Franklin, 1986)

Beaver.