UHD Titles Worth/Not Worth Upgrading [Archive]

[Finch]

Aliens seems to be the least affected but I personally would pick the old Blu ray over the 4k.

[therewillbeblus]

Aliens seems to be the least affected but I personally would pick the old Blu ray over the 4k.

Ha, literally just offloaded my blu assuming this would best it. Oh well

[ford]

What I don’t get: why was Cameron so comparatively respectful about the Titanic UHD but deploys all this AI crap on Aliens and True Lies?

[nicolas]

What I don’t get: why was Cameron so comparatively respectful about the Titanic UHD but deploys all this AI crap on Aliens and True Lies?

I think it’s due to the slower and less grainy film stock. He’s all about getting rid of the grain and Titanic never had too much to begin with. He’s always been himself in that way. I haven’t seen the entire thing yet but the shots with more processing are interiors which were surely shot with faster (grainier) stock to compensate for the lack of light. The submarine shots in particular.

[tenia]

Re: Aliens - I hope the disappointments aren’t bad enough to prefer the blu? Or is it another Jurassic Park sitch where it’s not ideal but still better

I think that might be the one case where you'd want to wait for the UHD to have the full picture regarding the high frequencies retention. But past this, the remaster look plasticky and processed and not filmic at all through its 4k streaming file and I don't recall the BD looking like this.

[Finch]

existenz screenshots here and here

Aliens screenshots here, here, and the most egregious example here

EDIT: even more screenshots here

EDIT 2: Kino's Monster Squad 4k is getting good marks so far. I've not seen any complaints about downmixes yet.

[Blip Martindale]

To be fair, James Cameron is no Alain Resnais

For one thing, it's easier to spell

[tenia]

That egregious Aliens example looks like it's from a video game. What a trainwreck, and what a sad shame for all the "pro" reviewers seemingly happy to endorse or even defend this crap.

[EddieLarkin]

Those caps reveal Aliens isn't even from a new scan, that's just the old 2K scan done for the BD, after being degrained and AI uprezzed (and not even done well, check out Weaver's face and Biehn's eye in the third link). What a total fucking scam.

Word is True Lies suffers the same, Titanic as well but to a lesser extent because its old BD source was 4K to begin with, and The Abyss the least of all, as it does seem they did go back to physical elements for that one, since they had nothing ready to work with.

Which is the one silver lining here, as it was only The Abyss that truly needed to come out of this well.

Titanic and Aliens already have great BDs which will clearly remain the standard for good, and True Lies has the decent Spanish bootleg which is still available. Along with the great T1 disc and the serviceable old T2 Blu-ray (ideally the DNR free 2015 Lionsgate one), you can get the rest of Cameron's filmography in decent old editions. No one should be giving money to this new shit with the exception of The Abyss.

[tenia]

Word is True Lies suffers the same

Oh no, True Lies is plain garbage, it clearly is, by quite some margin, the worst looking of the bunch.

Titanic as well but to a lesser extent because its old BD source was 4K to begin with, and The Abyss the least of all,

Even The Abyss obviously look filtered through its 4k streaming. All 3 are now looking un-filmic and un-natural (plus True Lies being a FUBAR nightmare). Titanic might look better, but probably only because the overall look of the film makes it less obviously intrusive but also very likely because the artificial processing has been applied with a lower intensity. In any case, all 4 movies now look like "what if" versions from a parallel universe : what if those movies weren't shot decades ago on 35mm film but 4 years ago on Red Monstro ?

[Finch]

Monster Squad (Kino)

No complaints about the audio reported (this far).

Two users mentioned a color space issue in the last two minutes of Face Off where the actors' face turn red but it's only been reproduced on some, not all players. Same with brightness flickering during Dolby Vision playback.

Also: The Warriors (Arrow) (FIM encode on the 4k)

FIM also encoded Arrow's Chucky franchise 4ks and Studio Canal's Peeping Tom 4k. Not seen any word yet on the audio which was bungled on Shout's discs of CP2 & 3.

[onedimension]

Those caps reveal Aliens isn't even from a new scan, that's just the old 2K scan done for the BD, after being degrained and AI uprezzed (and not even done well, check out Weaver's face and Biehn's eye in the third link). What a total fucking scam.

Word is True Lies suffers the same, Titanic as well but to a lesser extent because its old BD source was 4K to begin with, and The Abyss the least of all, as it does seem they did go back to physical elements for that one, since they had nothing ready to work with.

Which is the one silver lining here, as it was only The Abyss that truly needed to come out of this well.

Titanic and Aliens already have great BDs which will clearly remain the standard for good, and True Lies has the decent Spanish bootleg which is still available. Along with the great T1 disc and the serviceable old T2 Blu-ray (ideally the DNR free 2015 Lionsgate one), you can get the rest of Cameron's filmography in decent old editions. No one should be giving money to this new shit with the exception of The Abyss.

Weren't these releases all postponed for years because Cameron wanted to have time to do them justice?

[TechnicolorAcid]

Well I mean he did do justice for himself but not for the fans of these films.

[tenia]

VDM would have probably done better than those, with new scans (which those aren't) and without the whole artificial shenanigans, for a fraction of what it probably cost and in a tenth of the time it took (grading for Abyss started in march 2019).

What a waste. Some people should just be blacklisted from restoration labs.

[nicolas]

Received my copy of Face/Off today, totally banged up on the outside with a broken and bent case, torn slip and a scratched UHD inside. But more importantly, it plays back flawlessly in DV on my system (Panasonic UB824 and LG G2 OELD). It’s very annoying that so many people have these continuing playback issues with KL releases.

Picture quality makes it immediately apparent that KL did the restoration and not Paramount as there are no traces of filtering, DNR, smearing or their anemic colors. The long wait for the UHD gave that away to a degree but having it confirmed is nonetheless reassuring.

The encode in DV is standard and part of what I assume will be the KL norm for as long they contract their newly UHD-equipped and cheaper authoring house. Skies, highlights and small to mid-size bright areas don’t resolve as good as they should with some macroblocking and / or clipping. On first glance, it doesn’t seem as bad as in Stalag 17 or Walkabout, so they may have tweaked their settings slightly more as this is a higher-profile release. Compared to previous releases, it’s obviously a night-and-day difference in a positive sense. Grain in normal moments is also very fine and beautifully crisp without a trace of persistent low-pass filtering. This seems to be one of their better recent encodes in the vein of Ronin instead of the mentioned Stalag 17 and is ultimately a solid upgrade.

BTW, thanks tenia and therewillbeblus for the kind words about my contributions to this thread in the awards thread.

[tenia]

You're welcome. I'm quick to rant when deserved, so it's only far to also try and praise when deserved (which it is).

(And this list and all the gathering feeding it and the people doing it deserve it as a whole, it's an excellent trustworthy tool to see what the consensus about a release is)

[nicolas]

Shout knocked it out of the park with JFK! I had high expectations considering their fantastic recent output but certainly did not see such a remarkable edition coming.

The UHD has a flawless encode from what I saw. 205 minutes of Robert Richardson’s expressive cinematography (difficult to encode) in 4K DV. Very beautiful, fine grain throughout. Even in the highlights that weren’t blown out by the cinematography and yes, even around the blown-out areas. I expected what is often seen here - a slightly extended image area around these highlights is often blocky with the highlight itself then clipped. This would have been more than understandable in this case due to the runtime but it’s literally not there. What’s supposed to be blown-out is blown-out and nothing else. It’s razor-sharp work. I’ll use this as a standard going forward in case there are doubts on whether such precise encoding is even possible on the format when someone that isn’t David M does the encoding. Wholeheartedly yes to that. It just takes good work.

The theatrical cut on BD also looks really good but the length and general lower bitrates are palpable. It’s obviously not as precise and pretty as an UHD but definitely a very good encode within the format’s limits. OCN footage looks great but IP- or other second-generation material isn’t perfect. I’m also one of those that wished for this cut on UHD or ideally both but to be honest, after seeing such a gorgeous UHD I couldn’t possibly prefer that BD even if the cut may be superior.

If you’re even remotely a fan of the film or epics like this, the set is a must-buy. As always, I hope that Shout keeps up this quality going forward.

[Maltic]

You're welcome. I'm quick to rant when deserved, so it's only far to also try and praise when deserved (which it is).

(And this list and all the gathering feeding it and the people doing it deserve it as a whole, it's an excellent trustworthy tool to see what the consensus about a release is)

This thread is reason in itself to get UHD

[C.C. 95]

Some 4K updates:

Clue and Point Break by Shout are two excellent discs. The former’s clearly limited by the 70s stock and lighting (the actual resolution never reaches 4K) but the encode and colors are fantastic.

Clue was shot in 1985 on Eastman 400T 5294 film stock.

American Graffiti appears to have had a lot of DNR applied, unusually so, for a Universal disc. Nobody who's watched the new release, is happy with the disc and opinions vary on how much better than the old, in itself underwhelming Blu-Ray it is.

Unfortunate but not surprising. I forgot where, but when the original Blu-ray came out, there was a guy who does a lot of work with transferring films to digital (grading, creating DCP's, etc.) who defended the DNR because he mentioned how Super 16 looks way too grainy for a general audience and how it "needs" to be reduced. It left me with the impression that there was no chance the film would ever be released on Blu-ray without grain reduction, not unless a boutique somehow got access to a straight "unrestored" transfer and it's impossible to see how that would happen.

American Grafitti was shot on 2-perf 35mm Techniscope, not Super 16.

[hearthesilence]

American Grafitti was shot on 2-perf 35mm Techniscope, not Super 16.

Correct, my mistake - I double-checked, and the critique from that guy still holds (and he even mentioned the format): "This movie (American Graffiti) was shot on 2-perf Techniscope, so it needed a lot of help; it had grain the size of canned hams. Looks fine now." To be clear, I don't know if I'd agree as I've never seen the film beyond the DVD and the Blu-ray.

[MichaelB]

Techniscope has fuelled some great Blu-ray releases - Arrow's Zombie Flesh Eaters and Day of Anger spring to mind off the top of my head - but you're unavoidably going to be dealing with half the picture resolution of anamorphic 4-perf 35mm, so the higher the resolution the more pronounced the grain. Especially if you don't have access to the original camera negative - Arrow's Nightmare City is a good illustration of the problem there, because the OCN had undergone irreversible chemical damage but the interneg was two generations removed, and so had a noticeably softer picture: in the end, because both sources were compromised, they opted to include both.

[nicolas]

The Man from Nowhere and The Wailing in 4K by Well Go USA are both upscaled from their 2K DI’s. These are no regular 2K DI’s on UHD like we see from major studios as Well Go likely used AI here.

This sounds concerning and it’s not flawless but it’s far from a James Cameron disaster and both films look significantly better in 4K than on the old BD’s, which Well Go thankfully included. Both BD’s struggle with compression - Man from Nowhere is squeezed on a BD-25 with significant compression issues throughout the film and The Wailing is palpably low-pass filtered to compensate for the film’s length but even the filtering couldn’t help hiding all the compression issues.

The UHD’s (both BD-66’s) are better suited for both films although The Wailing generally runs at lower bitrates on the 4K than the BD. If you look closely, there is still macroblocking on the UHD but the upscale compensates for it as the digital grain is mostly eradicated. To be honest though, I think it looks quite good and much better than the BD. Textures are clean, maybe a touch too clean, but rarely in a way that it appears all too artificial. The biggest plus likely is the inherent resolution and solid definition of the less compressed master Well Go received when they prepared their BD. The AI then didn’t need to do much work. The Wailing now often looks like an ultra-clean 2023 digital film shot on a Red camera. Darker shots and interiors struggle with the grain / noise upscaling slightly more.

The Man from Nowehere is a bit more difficult. The film is a few years older from 2010 and was apparently shot on 35mm film and finished in 2K according to IMDB. Well Go once again performed an upscale from what they already had (I assume so). That film now also has a cleaner texture (not as sharp as The Wailing) but film grain is not evident. When comparing this with the old BD, despite it being impacted by horrendous compression, it looks like the filmmakers applied quite heavy DNR to the film in the original master. The BD represented that look in addition to more compression. It’s a terrible disc and the UHD is much better. Textures are less sharp than The Wailing, colors lean quite saturated from but from your regular viewing distance it’s definitely the best version currently available.

Both of these discs can be had for under $15 and will soon get replacement discs with Dolby Atmos included. For that amount worth it IMO especially if you never owned them before.

[Finch]

Adding those to the OP. Where did you hear/read about the replacements? Did WellGoUSA make an official statement?

[nicolas]

Adding those to the OP. Where did you hear/read about the replacements? Did WellGoUSA make an official statement?

I read it on the other forum. Someone contacted Well Go and they replied that Atmos tracks were indeed planned and not just erroneously put on the back covers of both films. They’re now apparently authoring the discs again. I haven’t heard anything since. I’ll contact them soon and hope that they ship internationally.

Also, Shout’s The Man in the Iron Mask UHD is a reference upgrade in both video and sound.

[rrenault]

Should Rio Bravo perhaps be downgraded to a solid upgrade? There were murmurings on Blu-ray.com about it having some issues.