UHD Titles Worth/Not Worth Upgrading [Archive]

[swo17]

Ha, I missed the year discrepancy but saw the discussion was in March and people were talking about a Le Cercle rouge review so it seemed current

[denti alligator]

From what I gathered, possibly Svet's review of For All Mankind.

What was the issue there?

[tenia]

I can't say for sure, it seems some related posts were deleted, but it seems Geoff criticized Svet's review of the movie.

[captveg]

IIRC before his post was deleted, he mocked Svet for not realizing the voice overs in the films are of the astronauts/mission control members, and that the review states the unidentified voices "belong to us, the overwhelmed human race, witnessing an event of historic proportions."

The review was later updated with an addendum stating there is an English text only subtitle track with the voice over identifiers in addition to the English SDH track. I seem to recall that the BD defaults with the English text only track ON, so I would expect the UHD to as well.

[Finch]

It's disgraceful that Blu-Ray.com continue to allow their reviewers to wield moderating powers and to censor criticism of their writing, especially when there are now numerous instances of said criticism to be justified. And if Geoff's posts were deleted for mocking Svet, why are other posts about "fluidity" and such like still online? This is no longer about running a tight ship, but trying to save blushes for one guy who's brought the site into disrepute. I've said this before, they can give Criterion reviews to someone else who'd additionally do a more thorough job of it as well as not tainting his writing with toxic far-right views. More importantly, banning someone like Geoff D, who indisputably brings a lot of value to the site, deprives everyone else and hence the site and forum of an important voice. I really hope that if the ban is permanent, Geoff decides to post elsewhere, preferably here.

[hearthesilence]

It's kind of weird how a forum on Blu-ray discs has devolved into its own Kremlinesque corner of the web. It's like an Onion concept come to life, but not really funny.

[Finch]

Robocop Director's Cut footage looks appreciably better on the UHD

4k vs 2021 Blu-Ray

As with many Arrow UHDs, Robocop is either a reference title if you own any of the previous BDs except Arrow's own 2021 BD or solid upgrade if you did upgrade to the BD last year.

[tenia]

Yes, unlike the previous BD which had to use what MGM provided, Arrow was able to directly access the unrated elements for the UHD and re-scan them.

[andyli]

Are you sure they are from different scans? The framing looks exactly the same.

[swo17]

Yes, unlike the previous BD which had to use what MGM provided, Arrow was able to directly access the elements for the UHD and re-scan them.

I read this was the case for American Werewolf in London. Is it also true for RoboCop?

[dwk]

For RoboCop, I think, Arrow were only able to rescan the footage cut to avoid an X-rating, not the whole film.

[tenia]

It's my understanding (and what I meant : they were able to rescan the Unrated elements - I've updated my post to make it clearer).

[Finch]

Yes, there was a tweet by James Flower that they were able to do a new scan on the few shots that got taken out for the R rating. I believe it was around the time people were complaining about the 4k following so soon after the Blu-Ray.

[Finch]

Kino's 4k of Eastern Promises added as a reference title: brighter contrast revealing more detail and superior colors.

[Finch]

Geoff reviews Robocop 4k

There aren't many tricksy editorial moments like fades and dissolves, just a lot of clean cuts, and some scenes have a very distinctive 'look' built in anyway like the MediaBreaks which were shot on Betacam component video, plus 'Robo Vision' with the faux scan lines, so those being an optical or video effect is moot because they weren't meant to look like film regardless. Most of the action is done in-camera too e.g. the shots of the OCP building (Dallas City Hall in actuality) with the gorgeous matte painting extensions were done by artist Rocco Gioffre using original negative compositing. Basically they shot a rock-steady plate of the building with the area to be extended masked off and then later exposed the same piece of film to the matte extension painted on masonite, done with no optical compositing and no loss of quality (though some matte shots of the moving elevators needed optical printing to shrink the size of the live-action element). Same goes for much of the ED-209 model stuff, as instead of compositing the stop-motion onto a live-action plate they back-projected the live action behind the miniature and ran it frame by frame as they animated the model in the foreground, adding motion blur for extra dynamism, with a few insert shots of ED-209 done against a miniature set when no humans are seen. (Indeed, the film only has one bluescreen shot.) The grain does spike quite noticeably in the shot of Mr. Kinney throwing his Desert Eagle hand-cannon to the floor, looking quite 'fizzy'.

So what all that means is that the live action is mostly cherry camera negative and this 4K UHD version wrings every last bit of detail out of it. The previous Arrow BD gets most of the way there, circumventing the MGM BD's low pass filter as said, but it lacks the very finest points of delineation, albeit tiny things that you'd have to have your face up to the screen to notice like the minutiae of the OCP boardroom table, but the cumulative effect is of it looking sharper than ever before. The grain helps with this perception too as it's very well behaved on the BD but a bit more raucous on the UHD, it seems to show more RGB noise in particular and makes it feel even more textured and gritty and lived-in, which was the intention behind the photography: to not go for a bold, gaudy "comic book" style because the movie was so OTT to begin with, they felt they needed to ground the absurdity of it in a more realistic visual manner (also why they used handheld cameras so much). The bigger point of difference in the live action scenes is of coursh the unrated footage culled from dailies (quick and dirty positives printed up so filmmakers could review what they'd shot) but as they're only a generation removed from the negative then they hold up very well for sharpness and grain, some of it intercuts almost seamlessly like the Mr Kinney additions - though those shots are so brief you don't really get a chance to compare one to the other - while Murphy's execution is more troublesome because the grain can look significantly noisier, as well as other issues.

It be argued that the amped up colour saturation of this HDR grade runs contrary to the stated intent of grotty urban decay but it stops short of turning the movie into a day-glo romp. The overall colour temperature is very similar to the BD as there isn't an overpowering tint one way or the other, though the SDR leans towards a fractionally yellower cast while the HDR is more neutral, but only slightly. In direct comparison the BD's colour tones do however seem a little enervated, lacking in energy and looking drained, paler, while the UHD jump-starts it with radiant reds that zing off the screen, from the crimson drench of the copious amounts of blood to a vibrant splash of red lipstick on the OCP board member sitting next to Bob Morton in the ED-209 demonstration. Caucasian skin tones also get a far pinkier hue this time around, looking much fuller than before though not going full tanning salon. Robo's cool steely-blue suit also gets an uplift, it's nowhere near as blue as the Robo 2 suit but it looks closer to it now because of the extra saturation, the blue tones showing up more as well as the iridescent accents of purple that play off of the armour.

I had my doubts about what could be achieved in terms of HDR when dealing with an SDR transfer almost 10 years old, and in one respect this grade shows those limitations because it has barely any extra highlight detail over the Arrow BD. There's a hint of it here and there, like slightly more in the huge close-up of headlights at the start of chapter 5 or the city background in the top left behind Robo when he pulls the assault cannon out of the car to blast ED-209 outside OCP headquarters, but there simply isn't some wholesale unveiling of previously unseen highlights. What you can see of the (real) cityscape outside the OCP boardroom's windows is virtually unchanged between Arrow's SDR and HDR iterations, looking a tiny bit more diffuse on the SDR perhaps. It's partly because the previous Arrow BD shows so much highlight information to begin with, easily besting some of the older and far more blown-out transfers, but also partly because the master just doesn't have anything else there whereas a brand new capture of the negative could've dug even deeper into the highlights.

This is my personal definition of what "fake HDR" represents i.e. taking an SDR image and boosting it, but as it stands I'm not complaining as such because I still liked it in HDR. They've given the brightness a bump for both peaks and average luminance, stuff like that same brightly-lit OCP boardroom looks noticeably brighter than the BD viewed at 140 nits peak and smaller speculars like the glints from Robo's armour stand out more now. And as said, it helps that the master already contains a lot of highlight information so it doesn't look unnatural with that brightness appended to it, if they'd pushed it any further than this then I wouldn't be too impressed (and pushing it too hot could've caused issues with tone mapping whereby people might lose highlight information that they could see on the SDR!) but it stays the right side of tastefulness.

A bigger departure from SDR to HDR is in the gamma/black levels of the respective versions. At first glance some might denounce this as "another darker Arrow grade" and if they were looking at selected stills then they'd be right, but this doesn't tell the whole story. First of all, in the brighter interiors and exteriors the HDR grade actually has lower gamma i.e. it lets out MORE shadow detail than the SDR. You can see further into ED-209's maw, spotting the radiator grille, further into the recesses of Robo's dark rubber inner suit and so on. Subtle improvements perhaps but definitely there and it lets the HDR image 'breathe' because the extension into the lowlights helps to offset the lack of expansion into the highlights, it still feels like the range has been opened up. And yet...throughout Murphy's execution the blacks are massively darker on the Director's Cut UHD than they are on the equivalent Arrow BD, to the point of crushing out a lot of shadow information. It starts with the shot of Lewis and Murphy in the squad car calling for backup ("oh man!") and doesn't relent for the entire duration of the steel mill sequence which culminates in Murphy's grisly demise. This isn't a Dolby Vision issue either, it's right there on the HDR10 layer too.

I was at first very puzzled as to why they'd grade this one sequence so much darker than the rest of it and then I realised: they've done it to try and make the unrated footage blend betterer. The footage has been newly transferred from dailies as the booklet states, yes, which is why it holds up so well for detail as said, but the thing about dailies is that they're not often properly timed. They're struck from the negative but given a quick 'one light' timing (that is, a set of timing lights designed to make a palatable positive print for projektion, nothing more) and so that 'look', quite low contrast with restricted range in both highlights and lowlights plus a green tinge, is baked into that piece of film. Indeed, if you check the previous Arrow BD then some unrated shots in the execution scene lose a lot of shadow detail compared to those around it, even if it is from an older transfer of the unrated dailies. Alas, the unrated footage still stands out on UHD even with this latest attempted fudge because it simply doesn't have the same tonal range and colour range of the negative, and combined with the increased colour saturation it makes the grain look noisier too. The clincher is that if you pull up the same steel mill/execution sequence on the theatrical cut UHD (which I notice hasn't received many comments or caps on) then the blacks are lighter, nowhere near as crushy as the DC UHD and look more like they do in the rest of the film. Why the discrepancy between the two UHDs? Because there was no need to try and balance out the unrated footage on the theatrical UHD.

Again, these aren't complaints as such, as the Murphy death sequence will ALWAYS have this uneven look no matter what they try to do with it, it's just a different type of unevenness than previously seen on other transfers of the DC. Ah, it is what it is. The Boddicker skewering looks nicely improved though, not as weird as the MGM 2014 BD with its bizarre red noise in the blood or as soft as that shot looked on the Arrow BD. One other benefit of this 4K UHD package is that on the theatrical UHD Murphy's execution is now presented in the same restored quality throughout, what I mean is that the shots of Murphy's death that were exclusive to the theatrical cut were actually pulled from an older transfer on the Arrow theatrical BD, despite the OG negative - conformed to the theatrical - having been scanned for the 2013 restoration in the first place! I can only think that MGM had focused so much on putting together a DC master for the 4K restoration that no-one bothered to do the theatrical version of Murphy's crucifixion, but that omission has now been rectified.

The compression by Fidelity in Motion is masterful. No matter how busy or gunked-up the frame gets the encoding just eats it up, and the increased RGB noise is never, ever allowed to turn into the sort of dreadful chroma compression that other encoders seem to emit on the HDR10 layer, especially when dealing with a Dolby Vision Full Enhancement Layer (FEL) which adds 12-bit extension data. But as Fidelity do not generally use FEL and prefer to utilise a 10-bit base layer with just the payload of DV metadata delivered in a DV Minimum Enhancement Layer (MEL) then you get the best of both: a quality encode that all can enjoy, plus the dynamic metadata if your equipment is DV compatible. When Murphy's being shot to death there's all that powder in the air (they put talc in the squibs to suggest the breakdown of his body armour) and the Arrow BD softens quite a bit despite that also being a Fidelity encode, it doesn't get all blocky but AVC compression in 1080p can only resolve so much, but properly handled in HEVC and at 2160p rez there's more temporal information there. Superb, just superb.

I must admit that this 4K HDR version of RoboCop took a little bit of getting used to, firstly for that more saturated appearance and then for the quite drastic darkening of the unrated Murphy execution. But the overall impression is that Arrow have delivered a verr naice upgrade over what is already a stunning BD, further refining the detail and bringing out more grain, with an HDR pass that is about as tasteful a reworking of an older SDR transfer as you're likely to get. And it's all wrapped up in a faultless encode from the crew at Fidelity.

[vsski]

Thanks for posting Finch, this makes me stick with my Arrow BD and save my money.

[Finch]

For All Mankind becomes the fourth Criterion reference UHD (following Menace II Society, The Red Shoes and The Piano).

[Finch]

Turbine in Germany gave Possessor Uncut a new HDR grade and Dolby Vision which as per this review yields even better results than the already very strong Well Go USA UHD. I've updated the import column and OP accordingly.

[Finch]

The Proposition (BFI): for owners of all previous Blu-Rays, this will be a reference disc, anyone buying the new, separate BFI Blu-Ray now and deciding to get the UHD later will still find the 4k an appreciable upgrade.

Please note that the Blu-Ray included with the UHD does NOT come with a 1080p copy of the film, only with more extras. The 1080p disc of the 2022 restoration itself is sold separately as a 2-disc edition.

[Finch]

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is a reference disc except, again, for those who may decide to go with the also excellent new Arrow Blu-Ray first and upgrade later (you know the drill by now).

Geoff's review of the UHD

Point of interest that this disc was encoded by someone other than Fidelity In Motion but Geoff is very happy with their work.

[Finch]

Studio Canal's UK edition of The Elephant Man is a bit of tricky one to assess since Geoff's review from two years ago points out some grain management though any possible degradation of the film negative is not a fault of the UHD transfer. At the same time, the UHD is heads and shoulders above any of the Blu-Rays, with the exception of Studio Canal's simultaneously released 2020 BD.

Since I've allowed other discs in the top tier despite minor flaws, I'll add Elephant Man as a reference disc with a caveat about the grain management, and also as a solid upgrade for anyone deciding to upgrade from the 2020 Studio Canal Blu-Ray. I won't be including the 2020 Criterion BD in the second tier comparison since Fidelity in Motion's compression is appreciably superior to the Criterion.

[black&huge]

why is the Sony UK release of Blade Runner 2049 prefeable/better than the US release?

[Finch]

I'll amend the OP (thanks for asking): the Sony UHD (it handled the film globally so this applies to all of the Sony UHDs of BR 2049) is marginally sharper and better encoded, and the film is on a BD100 compared to Warner's BD66.

[denti alligator]

In the Heat of the Night, anyone?

[Finch]

I haven't seen any useful feedback yet but I believe it's one of Kino's SDR only UHDs. I don't expect it to be a reference disc.

Speaking of reference discs, I am adding last year's upgrade of Scott Pilgrim vs the world for the spectacular Dolby Atmos track (Independence Day is the other title that got bumped just for the audio).