UHD New Releases, Reissues and Upgrades

[Lowry_Sam]

Any US source for the Angel's Egg UHD?

It's in theaters now so it might be a while for a release.

[Jean-Luc Garbo]

Any US source for the Angel's Egg UHD?

It's in theaters now so it might be a while for a release.

HBO Max will have it on streaming after the theatrical window.

[swo17]

Or is Michael asking where to purchase the Umbrella UHD?

[Michael Kerpan]

swo17 -- Yes, I was wondering if anyone domestic can supply this -- or would one have to import it?

[andyli]

Its standard edition is still orderable on Amazon. The independent boutique shops used to take pre-order for the limited edition but it's now sold out everywhere.

[swo17]

Uh oh, I don't even see it on Umbrella's site anymore. Is this another Dogma situation, where they aren't allowed to sell it to U.S. customers so they won't even let them access a listing? (Umbrella doesn't delete items from their store just because they sell out)

[Finch]

Yeah I just checked Orbit for the standard which is what I preordered and even that one doesn't generate any results. Nuts.

[Jean-Luc Garbo]

swo17 -- Yes, I was wondering if anyone domestic can supply this -- or would one have to import it?

Gkids hasn't said anything about their physical release but they sounded certain it would happen.

[andyli]

Disappointing: Sense and Sensibility (Sony) - caps. The 2021 Columbia Classics disc isn’t perfect either and looks filtered but the new standalone MOD release is just awful. Makes me wonder if they’re hiring the guy who does Kino’s discs.

This is unbelievable! I thought the new stand-alone edition, which added Dolby Vision, was sure bets. Get your act together, Sony!

[tenia]

Their MOD releases really are hit-or-miss and clearly handled by a B-team or something.

[andyli]

How do you tell if it's a MOD again?

[nicolas]

How do you tell if it's a MOD again?

If it’s available at MovieZyng and the 4K discs come with thicker slip covers and cover inserts than wide releases. Reason is that they’re manufactured elsewhere, including the discs.

[eerik]

How do you tell if it's a MOD again?

Sony MOD releases are produced through Allied Vaughn and listed on MovieZyng.com: https://www.moviezyng.com/all.aspx?Attribs=17365

[andyli]

Ahh. Thanks for the responses. I recognize the website as the one that gives the Warner Archive sales.

[nicolas]

Tucker: The Man and His Dream (Pathé) - 4K SDR release of the beautiful 2018 master. Excellent encode and contains a 2.0 track. Forced French subs only. Would be a red category title but the Lionsgate BD doesn’t look bad in caps and is sourced from the same master. (Added to the international list).

Early impressions of Eagle’s Once Upon a Time in America 4K are positive. Same master as on the Fox BD with gentle HDR10 and the encode of the long cut holds up with bitrates in the 40 MBs range. I’ll have mine tomorrow and see if there’s more to say. Same for Second Sight’s Possession.

Turbine in Germany released Rob Cohen’s Daylight this week. They did their own restoration and consulted with Cohen for over a year to get the look right. Kino has a different master with a brighter grade that looks more like the previous home video transfer but Cohen apparently didn’t approve that. Turbine also created a new Atmos mix and bonus features. I imagine that this will be quite an upgrade to the Kino, their mediocre encoding and mastering choices. I like this film and will get their edition at some point next week.

Turbine have also announced yesterday that they’ve got Dante’s Peak upcoming in January.

[Finch]

Geoff gives a thumbs up to the Sunset Boulevard 4K
.

[nicolas]

My impressions of the Second Sight Possession 4K:

-> Second Sight licensed the film from TF1 and used the Le Chat Qui Fume master from 2020
-> It was graded with HDR/DV visibly on the basis of the SDR master.
-> The LCQF master’s visual characteristics (especially the blown-out highlights) are still intact.
-> The FiM encode is likely the best it can look BUT there’s some pixelation in the highlights and it looks like it’s embedded in the master instead of traditional blocking.
-> DTS-HD 1.0 audio sounds excellent with clear voices and sounds.

Apart from the untidy highlights as a result of the mastering, the master is not as 100% film-like as the best recent 4K masters from Criterion in particular. A new master would have honestly been most appropriate to benefit of a native HDR grade in order to achieve the "blown-out" highlights that are seemingly intended but without this coming at the expense of seamless grain roll-off.

[nicolas]

Once Upon a Time in America (Eagle): I have to be the bearer of bad news and contradict the previous reports that called this excellent disc without any tampering of the master.

Some definitely messed with it as there’s grain management going on that resulted in magnetic, squishy grain movement. Both cuts (4K discs) are affected and it doesn’t look like an encoding issue to me as the bitrates don’t drop down to single digits á la Paramount or Studiocanal. During opticals, the lowest I’ve noted on the Extended 4K was around 30 MB/s vs. ~5 MB/s more for the theatrical cut.

Darker scenes are mostly (but not always) better but when it gets brighter, particularly in exteriors or scenes like the Jennifer Connelly dance scene at minute 38, I can’t unsee the digital tinkering as it does some damage texturally.

I compared it with the Eagle and Warner Fox BD of the extended cut and they all look fine without grain management like that. Eagle’s BD is an older one if anyone’s curious and credited to another authoring house than 64Biz, which did the 4K.

Other than that, except for some encoding-related chroma noise that peeks through in the DV layer, Eagle did everything right. They corrected the framing to 1.85, kept the original English titles, the English restoration note, subtitles, HDR/DV is gentle and respectful of the source black levels are better than on the WB/Fox BD. Without that grain management, this would’ve been the all-timer release we all longed for.

[andyli]

Once Upon a Time in America (Eagle): I have to be the bearer of bad news and contradict the previous reports that called this excellent disc without any tampering of the master.

Some definitely messed with it as there’s grain management going on that resulted in magnetic, squishy grain movement. Both cuts (4K discs) are affected and it doesn’t look like an encoding issue to me as the bitrates don’t drop down to single digits á la Paramount or Studiocanal. During opticals, the lowest I’ve noted on the Extended 4K was around 30 MB/s vs. ~5 MB/s more for the theatrical cut.

Darker scenes are mostly (but not always) better but when it gets brighter, particularly in exteriors or scenes like the Jennifer Connelly dance scene at minute 38, I can’t unsee the digital tinkering as it does some damage texturally.

I compared it with the Eagle and Warner Fox BD of the extended cut and they all look fine without grain management like that. Eagle’s BD is an older one if anyone’s curious and credited to another authoring house than 64Biz, which did the 4K.

Other than that, except for some encoding-related chroma noise that peeks through in the DV layer, Eagle did everything right. They corrected the framing to 1.85, kept the original English titles, the English restoration note, subtitles, HDR/DV is gentle and respectful of the source black levels are better than on the WB/Fox BD. Without that grain management, this would’ve been the all-timer release we all longed for.

To be honest, I can live with that. I can even live with the Warner blu-ray from 2014 if it has the 229 min. cut. Such is the world we live in. No other editions on the horizon any time soon.

[Finch]

Angel's Egg is available again at Orbit.

EDIT 12/14: And sold out again but you can request a notification when more stock is in.

[Stefan Andersson]

Once Upon a Time in America (Eagle): I have to be the bearer of bad news and contradict the previous reports that called this excellent disc without any tampering of the master.

Some definitely messed with it as there’s grain management going on that resulted in magnetic, squishy grain movement. Both cuts (4K discs) are affected and it doesn’t look like an encoding issue to me as the bitrates don’t drop down to single digits á la Paramount or Studiocanal. During opticals, the lowest I’ve noted on the Extended 4K was around 30 MB/s vs. ~5 MB/s more for the theatrical cut.

Darker scenes are mostly (but not always) better but when it gets brighter, particularly in exteriors or scenes like the Jennifer Connelly dance scene at minute 38, I can’t unsee the digital tinkering as it does some damage texturally.

I compared it with the Eagle and Warner Fox BD of the extended cut and they all look fine without grain management like that. Eagle’s BD is an older one if anyone’s curious and credited to another authoring house than 64Biz, which did the 4K.

Other than that, except for some encoding-related chroma noise that peeks through in the DV layer, Eagle did everything right. They corrected the framing to 1.85, kept the original English titles, the English restoration note, subtitles, HDR/DV is gentle and respectful of the source black levels are better than on the WB/Fox BD. Without that grain management, this would’ve been the all-timer release we all longed for.

From Oreste de Fornari's book Sergio Leone: The Great Italian Dream Of Legendary America, which was originally published in Italian as Tutti i film di Sergio Leone:

"Tonino Delli Colli: Sergio and I understood each other very well; there was no need for a lot of instructions. We shared a point of departure, an aesthetic principle: /.../ In Once Upon a Time in America we differentiated between three periods. For 1923, a sepia print that recalls the photos of that period. For 1930 we tried to keep the image as neutral as possible, a kind of metallic black-and-white, cold approach to the gangster films of that epoch. For 1968 no special effect. We used a little Rn, a special bath patented by Technicolor Italiana, which made the blacks more velvety, added brilliance to everything and reinforced the contrasts."

See post 65 here:
https://www.hometheaterforum.com/commun ... 934/page-4

Does any of the DVD, Blu or UHD editions look like what Tonino Delli Colli describes above?
Might there be Italian 35mm prints and home video masters that look like the above, whereas non-Italian prints and masters look different?
Was Rn (I assume it is = silver retention) used for the whole film or just for 1968?

[nicolas]

From Oreste de Fornari's book Sergio Leone: The Great Italian Dream Of Legendary America, which was originally published in Italian as Tutti i film di Sergio Leone:

"Tonino Delli Colli: Sergio and I understood each other very well; there was no need for a lot of instructions. We shared a point of departure, an aesthetic principle: /.../ In Once Upon a Time in America we differentiated between three periods. For 1923, a sepia print that recalls the photos of that period. For 1930 we tried to keep the image as neutral as possible, a kind of metallic black-and-white, cold approach to the gangster films of that epoch. For 1968 no special effect. We used a little Rn, a special bath patented by Technicolor Italiana, which made the blacks more velvety, added brilliance to everything and reinforced the contrasts."

See post 65 here:
https://www.hometheaterforum.com/commun ... 934/page-4

Does any of the DVD, Blu or UHD editions look like what Tonino Delli Colli describes above?
Might there be Italian 35mm prints and home video masters that look like the above, whereas non-Italian prints and masters look different?
Was Rn (I assume it is = silver retention) used for the whole film or just for 1968?

I only have the Warner/Fox BD and this new Eagle 4K set which includes their old BD. All discs are based on the Ritrovata master that can be seen on caps here: https://caps-a-holic.com/c.php?d1=13397 ... =4&l=0&a=0.

Basically it’s all a yellow-ist affair and leans sepia throughout the film. I haven’t watched the 4K in full yet but HDR tones down the more excessive hues from the SDR grade. I can live with how it looks now but considering it’s Ritrovata accuracy is always doubtful and due to their blanket approaches with tints and gamma levels, nuances are often lost.

The old master (first Warner BD) looks too neutralized and has typical shortcomings of 2000s home video masters. In the end, I imagine a mixture between the two grades would’ve been more appropriate to translate what the DP was after, particularly for the 1968 scenes.

[Stefan Andersson]

From Oreste de Fornari's book Sergio Leone: The Great Italian Dream Of Legendary America, which was originally published in Italian as Tutti i film di Sergio Leone:

"Tonino Delli Colli: Sergio and I understood each other very well; there was no need for a lot of instructions. We shared a point of departure, an aesthetic principle: /.../ In Once Upon a Time in America we differentiated between three periods. For 1923, a sepia print that recalls the photos of that period. For 1930 we tried to keep the image as neutral as possible, a kind of metallic black-and-white, cold approach to the gangster films of that epoch. For 1968 no special effect. We used a little Rn, a special bath patented by Technicolor Italiana, which made the blacks more velvety, added brilliance to everything and reinforced the contrasts."

See post 65 here:
https://www.hometheaterforum.com/commun ... 934/page-4

Does any of the DVD, Blu or UHD editions look like what Tonino Delli Colli describes above?
Might there be Italian 35mm prints and home video masters that look like the above, whereas non-Italian prints and masters look different?
Was Rn (I assume it is = silver retention) used for the whole film or just for 1968?

I only have the Warner/Fox BD and this new Eagle 4K set which includes their old BD. All discs are based on the Ritrovata master that can be seen on caps here: https://caps-a-holic.com/c.php?d1=13397 ... =4&l=0&a=0.

Basically it’s all a yellow-ist affair and leans sepia throughout the film. I haven’t watched the 4K in full yet but HDR tones down the more excessive hues from the SDR grade. I can live with how it looks now but considering it’s Ritrovata accuracy is always doubtful and due to their blanket approaches with tints and gamma levels, nuances are often lost.

The old master (first Warner BD) looks too neutralized and has typical shortcomings of 2000s home video masters. In the end, I imagine a mixture between the two grades would’ve been more appropriate to translate what the DP was after, particularly for the 1968 scenes.

Hi, thanks for swift reply and interesting information!

[Finch]

Le Quai des Brumes (Studio Canal)

I can confirm the French 4K has English menus and subs for the film and the extras on the disc. All the more puzzling that Studio Canal only released the BD in the UK.

[nicolas]

Possession (Second Sight) - caps are up now. Here is also an extensive comparison of the various BD releases for anyone curious.