UHD New Releases, Reissues and Upgrades

[Finch]

Network (Criterion)

[nicolas]

Let‘s Spend the Night Together (Kino) - excellent master in SDR and therefore a good encode but poor audio. The 2.0 is fine but unremarkable, the 5.1 is presumably an upmix with a botched, strongly raised LFE channel which makes the entire track unlistenable on well-tuned equipment. Audio graphs and BD caps here.

[Finch]

Nice review for the Ben Hur 4K

I'd like to hold off a little longer on a rating for both this and All The Presidents Men but feedback is pretty positive for both, and Warner even included the proper logo in black and white for ATPM.

[nicolas]

The Man Who Wasn’t There (Criterion) - Chris‘ review. It’s so good to see how well Criterion’s doing at the moment.

[Finch]

All The Presidents Men (Warner)

(Hold on to your 2 disc BD set though if you care about the Redford commentary)

The Visitor (Arrow)

[nicolas]

Finch, do you have more info on The Visitor? The caps shared by the BR.com reviewer don’t look too good to me. I hope they didn’t grade the entire film to look as pinkish / magenta as these caps suggest.

[Finch]

I went by the Slant Magazine review.

[Finch]

The Stunt Man (Transmission)

Nicholas briefly reviewed it on the other site:

What about the remaster? A+ as far as I’m concerned. Not sure if this was communicated but Radiance commissioned the master! They hired "Heavenly Movie Corp." for the restoration and their technical producer Stephen C. Horne did the SDR and HDR grades. I can’t remember for certain if this is Radiance’s first 4K UHD restoration and / or grading by Horne but if this is any indication for future Radiance restorations, I’m even more excited now as the color grade looks very beautifully filmic with rich, but never exaggerated colors and a HDR enhancement that’s gentle and supportive to grain and colors rather than aggressively punchy and digital (looking at VS here). People who appreciate grades that appear organic and faithful to original prints will be very happy with the results here.

Image scan, restoration and clean-up look immaculate, images are stable and grain is very fine and detailed. The Fidelity in Motion encode resolves everything perfectly.

Radiance also restored the original mono whereas the 5.1 was supplied by Severin. I didn’t check the 5.1 as the mono sounded just right to me with a nice dynamic range and a clear sound without it sounding muffled, filtered, bright or distorted.

I’ll try my best to put up screencaps of the BD at the very least but this is an easy recommendation for everyone even remotely interested in the film or intending to buy a copy.

[JSC]

This is a bit of an odd release. Sony has decided to bring out Martin Ritt's The Front on UHD in May



https://www.blu-ray.com/news/?id=37922

[nicolas]

I went by the Slant Magazine review.

Thanks, I didn't see that one. Wish they made some screenshots.

[nicolas]

Krakatit (Deaf Crocodile) - my impressions
Nightcrawler (Shout) - caps
Knock Off (MVD) - caps. MVD advertised that they scanned the OCN but caps show that this is not the case. The grade is a lot better though. People reported that the SDH subtitles contain plenty of errors and are maybe AI-generated.

[mfunk9786]

Nightcrawler (Shout) - caps

From what I read about this one, Elswit lensed daytime scenes in 35mm, but much of the night shooting used Arri Alexa cameras, which output at little bit better than 2K resolution in ARRIRAW. So of course, a 2K DI was then created in post, and that's what was used to author this disc. It's a crying shame, as usual, that 35mm footage has been compromised in the process of finishing a film from this era, but it put a ceiling on how good this disc could look.

No excuses for the ridiculous looking steelbook, though.

[nicolas]

Well said. The best possible scenario would’ve been to create a hybrid negative with the 35mm scenes and the digital footage filmed out but something traditional like this was already long outdated even in 2014. The only nice, but ultimately minor improvements in 4K are in the expanded dynamic range, slightly tighter visuals when going from 1080p HD to the native 2K and ideally a lack of processing when encoding the DI in a 4K container. I imagine the film looks quite good in motion, better than the Universal BD which seems to have undergone some filtering but still limited in the highlights and darker areas. That cover makes this Steelbook an even harder sell (I dislike Steels in general) but I’ll pick up a copy when it goes on sale.

[Matt]

Someone posted on the other forum: "The DI in 2K was printed back onto 35mm film negative, both as protection and to make copies that were still distributed in 35mm. That film negative was scanned in 4K for the UHD master." I suppose that would lead to a more uniform look for the film.

[nicolas]

The poster’s verbiage suggests that the entire 2K DI was filmed out, which still locks the film in 2K resolution. They could’ve worked from the DI directly as is more common. Intermediate stock normally shouldn’t distort the DI and only protect its virtues as finished by the filmmakers. An exception is when they deliberately work with something like Kodak’s Analogue Intermediate process where DIs are printed to film and copied multiple times to achieve a noticeable, uniform grain overlay. Once they’re satisfied, that element is then scanned and becomes the final DI afterwards.

[Zot!]

Someone posted on the other forum: "The DI in 2K was printed back onto 35mm film negative, both as protection and to make copies that were still distributed in 35mm. That film negative was scanned in 4K for the UHD master." I suppose that would lead to a more uniform look for the film.

I guess this is not so different than the discussion we've been having concerning using the interpositive rather than the negative for a film based workflow to 4K (Boogie Nights). This is an interesting new twist, but if nothing else, I guess you're getting an experience very authentic to how this originally screened. Interesting they didn't go back to the DI, but perhaps that final pass also imparted some additional film-look to the portions shot on digital they felt was necessary. Either way, 2K is 2K, so there would be limited improvements squeezing 4K blood from a 2K stone.

[tenia]

I'd say there is a difference between choosing to remaster from the IP when you could have used the OCN, and this case where scanning the OCN of Nightcrawler in 4k means the following :
Shooting a mix of 35mm and 2k --> doing a 2k DI --> printing it --> scanning this print in 4k.

It's closer to choosing whether or not to redo the whole post-prod in 4k à la Astérix Mission Cléopatre or Le pacte des loups, or re-using whatever already existing elements which is definitively locked in whatever it was done.
Here, it's basically using something 2k for something 4k, but the main question, I guess, is what is better between using the 2K DI directly, or using its film-out though scanned in 4K. On the one hand, it means scanning it in 4K (yay), but on the other hand, it means working from an additional step from the OG elements.

[Zot!]

the main question, I guess, is what is better between using the 2K DI directly, or using its film-out though scanned in 4K. On the one hand, it means scanning it in 4K (yay), but on the other hand, it means working from an additional step from the OG elements.

Pure speculation, but that additional 35mm film-out might have imparted a desired filmic look to the purely lo-res digital elements that helped blend the capture methods better.

Much more aggressive and primitive obviously, but Breaking the Waves was shot 35mm -> Transferred to digital SD tape -> printed to 35mm interpositive. So that final 35mm pass was considered part of the "look". Worth noting that for the recent restoration they went back to the OCN, and recreated parts 2 and 3 digitally, but with some intent to honor the original results, but take advantage of the 35mm resolution.

[nicolas]

Pure speculation, but that additional 35mm film-out might have imparted a desired filmic look to the purely lo-res digital elements that helped blend the capture methods better.

If you look at the caps I shared, you’ll see that this isn’t the case as noise and grain is finer instead of more noticeable or different. There’s no mentioning by Shout that the director or DP was involved in this remaster, which is something they would’ve advertised. If the filmmakers wanted to have a filmic texture in the digital scenes from the get-go, they could’ve added a grain overlay in post. This is common practice these days to varying results but it can definitely be done convincingly without having to touch celluloid.

[eerik]

Fincher's Fight Club announced for May.

I really hope Gone Girl will follow soon. A "special edition" with extra features was promised back in 2015 when the barebones discs came out, but nothing happened. Still waiting.

[tenia]

the main question, I guess, is what is better between using the 2K DI directly, or using its film-out though scanned in 4K. On the one hand, it means scanning it in 4K (yay), but on the other hand, it means working from an additional step from the OG elements.

Pure speculation, but that additional 35mm film-out might have imparted a desired filmic look to the purely lo-res digital elements that helped blend the capture methods better.

That's something I thought about, yes, and it can very well be true. But I spoke solely from a technical perspective, and that's technically an additional intermediate step.

This being written, if it is indeed part of the "look", then yeah, there is a rationale to go there instead of just the DI. But maybe it was filmed-out just because that was some standard practices for this production, and that was it.

[nicolas]

Dogtooth (Visions Home Video) - my impressions

People reported that the US MVD 4K of Double Impact has errors with skipped frames throughout the film. The master should be identical with the one Capelight and 88 released but both of these are confirmed to be unaffected by this. Regarding the encoding, 88 (VDMS) used a BD-66 with the film having ~63 GB and Capelight a BD-100 with ~82 GB for the feature. No info yet whether there’s a noticeable difference.

[nicolas]

Kino (via Frank Tarzi) just answered a question about their 4K encoding on the newest livestream. It took their host 20 streams and likely a decline in viewer engagement to finally take note of this. I gave up after a few times, so hats off to Jefferson for sticking with them for so long and having asked today.

The question was about the encoding issues we’re noticing with their discs, particularly macroblocking, whether this concerns them and if they consider switching to a company like FiM.

To the surprise of no one, Tarzi’s answer is a clear no. He’s sorry about this but they don’t see any issues. He claims the issues we’re seeing are due to different types of players. They’ve been testing on three or four different players and didn’t see any issues. (For the record, this is BS).

He also said that they’re not going to switch to a company that charges three or four times more than they pay now. Putting out 4K discs is expensive and they’re not adding the costs again that they managed to subtract. With a laughter he said "No, that’s something we’ll never do”.

The ironic twist here is that even the smallest of labels like Deaf Crocodile, Arbelos, Carlotta etc. etc. are able to afford Fidelity for EVERY SINGLE release and there are other very good authoring houses as well. "The best label in the world" just doesn’t care in the slightest and if it wasn’t clear already, Tarzi just put the nail in the coffin.

[tenia]

Carlotta have mostly moved from Fidelity in Motion to LSP Medien for their UHD encodes, though.

Kino's answer is pure BS in the worst way, "we can't see it so there's no issue and if there were, it'd be too expensive to solve them anyway so we'll continue to do this mediocre job 'cause we're too cheap to do a good one". Don't get me started on the "it's player related", which might have been a good enough diversion... in 2007.

What they need is a proper backlash, but it'll never happen.

[kekid]

Is there a difference between the 4K releases of "The Great Silence" by Film Movement and Vinegar Syndrome, or are they the same? (I am only asking about the standard edition). Thanks.