UHD New Releases, Reissues and Upgrades

[Finch]

Re Performance: on BR, Spaceman Doug asked if the Here's to Old England line from the Memo from Turner sequence was properly restored and Powell Pressburger said it still sounded spliced in from an inferior source.

[nicolas]

Re Performance: on BR, Spaceman Doug asked if the Here's to Old England line from the Memo from Turner sequence was properly restored and Powell Pressburger said it still sounded spliced in from an inferior source.

I just read the discussion again and Powell Pressburger claimed that they used the 35mm sound negative for their restoration but that’s not true according to the restoration notes. Criterion simply mentioned a 35mm magnetic track. Spaceman Doug claimed they’d seen / heard a clip of a broadcast recording where it sounded better but can’t find it any more. Chris’ comments about the sound being great elsewhere gives me confidence that Criterion did proper remastering work and the “spliced in” thing couldn’t be dealt with better.

[nicolas]

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (Arrow) - caps by asacmurr. Comparison between the Arrow, VS and Turbine releases with Arrow (Engine House) being the best encoding-wise.

[tenia]

Quite a fascinating 3-way comparison to understand the different quality levels of encodes on the market.

[cdnchris]

Sorry, I completely forgot about the issues with Memo from Turner; just remembered it was the North American track. I also don't have the Warner Blu-ray anymore, so can't do a direct comparison anymore.

[_shadow_]

I don't think there's much difference between the Criterion and the UK BD - the dialogue on the Criterion seems a little better integrated but that could just be due to the difference in levels as the UK is higher. I did a really rough comparison of the Criterion, UK and the "unrestored" laserdisc audio that has all the musical instrumentation present and the dialogue playing with the same fidelity as the music. It seems like the mania for having a deep-bass remix of "Memo From Turner" is just never going to allow a presentation with all the music and dialogue, even if it's seemingly "lower fidelty" because it's not maximizing subwoofer usage.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Iky1tk ... share_link

[MichaelB]

Chris’ comments about the sound being great elsewhere gives me confidence that Criterion did proper remastering work and the “spliced in” thing couldn’t be dealt with better.

I've been in situations where I've had to splice in audio from a different source, most recently when reinstating a line in the British theatrical version of Confessions of a Window Cleaner that had been redubbed for the US market. I think I did as good a job as anyone could have done, but if you're specifically listening out for it you will of course notice, because for all iZotope RX10's astonishing ability to do things like match timbre and EQ between audio from different sources it ultimately can't make an inferior source sound identical to a high-quality one. At least not without degrading the high-quality one to make it match the inferior one, which would obviously be insane.

[nicolas]

Chris’ comments about the sound being great elsewhere gives me confidence that Criterion did proper remastering work and the “spliced in” thing couldn’t be dealt with better.

I've been in situations where I've had to splice in audio from a different source, most recently when reinstating a line in the British theatrical version of Confessions of a Window Cleaner that had been redubbed for the US market. I think I did as good a job as anyone could have done, but if you're specifically listening out for it you will of course notice, because for all iZotope RX10's astonishing ability to do things like match timbre and EQ between audio from different sources it ultimately can't make an inferior source sound identical to a high-quality one. At least not without degrading the high-quality one to make it match the inferior one, which would obviously be insane.

Thanks for your info. I can well imagine that what you described is what happened with Performance too. With Criterion in particular I don’t take great audio for granted, so if the infrequent “spliced-in” feeling happens in an otherwise higher quality source I’d be totally fine with it.

[Drucker]

I'm still not clear on this point: what in "Memo From Turner" is spliced in? How does it differ than the version on the Singles Collection box set?

[_shadow_]

With no insight behind the scenes, it's hard to know what's going on with the audio, but listening to the references available, it seems like there was a substitution in the "Memo from Turner" sequence of a different version of the song starting from the first DVD release.

Compared to the laserdisc audio, which had the US dub version of the film, there is musical instrumentation missing - I don't have the exact vocab, but some kind of electric guitar riffing that is clearly audible on the laserdisc and not audible at all on the DVD and subsequent disc versions. You can still hear the difference in the bits of the song present in the trailer and supplemental featurette, though neither contain the exact "Here's to old England" section.

The DVD and BD/UHD tracks sound like the version of the song that's on the soundtrack album, which also doesn't have the riffing. So it almost seems like that version was dropped in - and that possibly also caused the "old England" line to be dropped through negligence since it's not part of the album version. And the subsequent BDs and UHDs seem to have tried to fix that by grafting that line from some other source on top of the alternate version of the song. The difference in fidelity between the song, which now has deep bass and wide dynamic range, and the dialogue, which does not have that, makes the fix stand out more than it should.

It would be great to hear from someone who worked on the disc what materials were used and what was done to them...

[nicolas]

Deep Blue Sea (Arrow) - caps by cinemaniac. Gorgeous upgrade

[kekid]

Has "A Man for All Seasons" been issued in 4K outside the box?
I see some postings on ebay as "other".
Does anyone know if they are of comparable quality to what is in the box?

[tenia]

It hasn't, but some people break up the boxset to sell the titles separately.
I even bought solely the books and the extra discs on eBay.

[therewillbeblus]

Any word on the quality of the Megalopolis UHDs imports? No U.S. editions on the horizon it seems, even blu-ray

[Finch]

Not so far. I can only discern that all European releases to date are SDR only, no HDR or DV.

[Finch]

King of New York and Basic Instinct are coming from Lionsgate Limited soon but the Arrow 4K of the Ferrera is excellent already and the Lionsgate disc of the Verhoeven is probably just a port of the Studio Canal.

[domino harvey]

Any word on the quality of the Megalopolis UHDs imports? No U.S. editions on the horizon it seems, even blu-ray

I wouldn’t be surprised if they tried to recoup a bit by going to one of the boutique labels

[nicolas]

King of New York and Basic Instinct are coming from Lionsgate Limited soon but the Arrow 4K of the Ferrera is excellent already and the Lionsgate disc of the Verhoeven is probably just a port of the Studio Canal.

Surprisingly it won’t be! It’s going to be a new encode with the original 2.0 surround mix from the LaserDisc which Cliff from LG made sure to be included. They also included the LD extras in their set. The master will be the same but both discs are new.

[nicolas]

Any word on the quality of the Megalopolis UHDs imports? No U.S. editions on the horizon it seems, even blu-ray

I’d be surprised if a US edition didn’t end up at Lionsgate Limited with bonus features. I know Coppola has recorded a commentary and it should be on the Eagle release. I only wonder about what happened with Mike Figgis’ announced BTS documentary. Would make sense to include all that in a special edition to make it more tempting for people who didn’t like the movie but are interested in the production stages.

[nicolas]

Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice (Kino) - my review. Great upgrade in picture and sound, solid encode

[kekid]

Has anyone compared the picture quality of the newly released Criterion 4K of The Wages of Fear with the BFI 4K?

[nicolas]

Has anyone compared the picture quality of the newly released Criterion 4K of The Wages of Fear with the BFI 4K?

Yes! fkid on the other forum posted screenshots today. They do both look excellent. Unless there’s any upcoming info re. sound quality I think you can go with both versions. Note that the Criterion presents the master as originally graded in SDR whereas FiM added HDR / Dolby Vision for the BFI.

https://slow.pics/c/DGOvarQZ?canvas-mode=fit-width

[nicolas]

Thief (Criterion) - caps. Would’ve been a red category disc if the former 4K restoration wasn’t as good. Colors are more different and nuanced than anticipated even in the SDR-converted caps and the usual gain in highlight detail is also apparent. Encode looks excellent except for the brightest areas as usual.

[nicolas]

Has anyone compared the picture quality of the newly released Criterion 4K of The Wages of Fear with the BFI 4K?

Yes! fkid on the other forum posted screenshots today. They do both look excellent. Unless there’s any upcoming info re. sound quality I think you can go with both versions. Note that the Criterion presents the master as originally graded in SDR whereas FiM added HDR / Dolby Vision for the BFI.

https://slow.pics/c/DGOvarQZ?canvas-mode=fit-width

There’s indeed another update on this and it seems the winner is Criterion’s release. Their audio mix is has more detail than BFI’s and same applies to the subtitles, covering both English and French spoken words and are presented in regular and SDH according to fkid.

[Finch]

Gotta give Criterion credit where its due. I'll keep the BFI in the red tier still but Criterion additionally gets a mention in the superior import column when I get back on a PC.