Best-looking 4k transfer

Discussion in 'Visual Arts' started by The Hermit, Feb 10, 2016.

Thread Status:
Not open for further replies.
  1. Vidiot

    Vidiot Now in 4K HDR!

    Location:
    Hollywood, USA
    It's up to Fox to release it. All the studios are sitting on tons of 4K work that's been done over the past 10 years or so. All they have to do is want to release it.
     
  2. Michael

    Michael I LOVE WIDE S-T-E-R-E-O!

    Marc, was the latest release of Once Upon A Time In America Bluray 4K? and how is it?
     
  3. Vidiot

    Vidiot Now in 4K HDR!

    Location:
    Hollywood, USA
    Have not seen it and don't know. I can tell you many (but not all) of the digital restorations done in the last 6-7 years were 4K, particularly films that had great historical importance, made a lot of money, won a lot of awards, or some combination of the three.
     
    budwhite and Michael like this.
  4. Carl Swanson

    Carl Swanson Senior Member

    Well, maybe I'm all askew, but wouldn't (shouldn't?) that decision be made before investing in the upgrade?
     
    audiomixer likes this.
  5. Michael

    Michael I LOVE WIDE S-T-E-R-E-O!

    thanks...
     
  6. budwhite

    budwhite Climb the mountains and get their good tidings.

    Location:
    Götaland, Sverige
    What do you mean by that?
     
  7. Vidiot

    Vidiot Now in 4K HDR!

    Location:
    Hollywood, USA
    Most film scanners out there actually scan at 4K, but you can flip a switch and either get 2K files or 4K files from the scanned result. There is evidence that if you scan at a higher resolution and downres, the end result is better than if you just scanned the lower resolution in the first place.

    Many features that shoot on a 4K camera (or 3.5K or 3.2K or whatever) routinely downrez to 2K simply because all the VFX are done at this resolution. There are exceptions, and it's fair to say these standards are in a state of flux.
     
    budwhite likes this.
  8. SpudOz

    SpudOz Forum Resident

    I think that this link might have been posted on another thread here somewhere but it's relevant to this thread: When 4k Is Not 4k ». So most of the initial release of titles in UHD blu-ray will be titles that were either not filmed in 4K or were post-produced in 2k and then up-rezzed.

    I saw Lawrence of Arabia here a couple of years ago as a 4K digitally projected presentation. Absolutely stunning. As is already listed above in titles mentioned, the content that is going to benefit the most from the transition to 4k in the short to medium term are older titles entirely produced on 35mm or 65mm film.

    Unfortunately though when the new formats are released to market, catalogue titles are generally given short shrift in favour of modern Hollywood blockbuster drivel. Catalogue titles get released to market down the road as the format becomes established. So I wouldn't be holding your breath for UHD blu-rays of older catalogue titles. I don't think it matters how much "better" UHD blu-rays are compared to the conventional HD release, this format faces a bigger uphill battle than SACD and DVD-A did back at the turn of the century. If the mass market struggles to see the benefit of blu-ray over DVD then UHDblu-ray has no hope. And as Vidiot has pointed out, increasing resolution doesn't make a great difference when compared to other technical aspects of the mastering process.
     
    Vidiot likes this.
  9. mongo

    mongo Senior Member

    Just saw The Revenant today at The Cinerama.
    Best movie presentation I've ever seen.
    Unreal.
     
  10. Vidiot

    Vidiot Now in 4K HDR!

    Location:
    Hollywood, USA
    No. They understand that a part of the overhead for any studio, network, or distributor is to archive their assets to the best format possible to prepare for a re-release in the future. How they make the judgement on whether a film deserves a 4K transfer or not is a good question.

    That isn't necessarily true. I have seen tons and tons (literally hundreds) of 35mm films that look sad and dilapidated nowadays, because they just fell apart over a long period of time due to neglect, storage problems, chemical reactions, and other problems. I'm on a project now involved with restoring a dozen or so 1970s films, and those are all 35mm and have some issues. In some cases, they're being redone from the original negatives, and I can tell you going from 4K would buy you nothing.

    I would agree, though, with 65mm films -- almost all of which were very high-budget productions -- those would probably survive and look very good, since A-list shows like that tend to get more attention from the studios and will be relatively well-kept over time. There are exceptions; Steve Hoffman has talked about how there are still missing elements from Around the World in 80 Days, as just one example, and that was a huge film for its time.
     
  11. White_Noise

    White_Noise Forum Resident

    Location:
    Templeton, MA
    The Criterion transfer of The Thin Red Line by and far sets the high bar for 4k transfers. All I can say is I'm completely floored, and I've seen this film at least 3 or 4 times before. It looks nearly as good as the UHD 4k Planet Earth 2 BR.

    Has anyone else watched this on a 10 bit panel? Is there actually anything better looking at 1080p? Because I'd like to see it.
     
  12. Al Kuenster

    Al Kuenster Senior Member

    Location:
    Las Vegas, NV - US
    For standard BR I agree it's quite stunning, so is The New World from Criterion.
     
    White_Noise likes this.
  13. driverdrummer

    driverdrummer Forum Resident

    Location:
    Irmo, SC
    My Fair Lady
     
  14. Vidiot

    Vidiot Now in 4K HDR!

    Location:
    Hollywood, USA
    That's a really stunning film, shot in spherical Super Panavision 70, and it's pin-sharp. I don't know for sure, but as one of the crown jewel's in WB's library, I would bet it's been restored in 4K.
     
  15. It was restored in 4k by Robert Harris in 2015.
     
  16. Vidiot

    Vidiot Now in 4K HDR!

    Location:
    Hollywood, USA
    Actually done by Warner MPI in Burbank, I believe with staff colorist Patrick Miller, but Harris did the research to hunt down the best surviving film elements. All the restoration was done in the digital domain. I'm not sure if they did the scans in 6K (which would technically be correct for a 65mm 2.20 frame) or just down-rezzed on the fly to 4K; there are pros and cons either way.

    I usually don't think there's anything even remotely close to 4K in a piece of film made before 1980, but Super Panavision 70 (spherical 65mm) is hard to argue with. That's a big mofo frame by any measure.
     
  17. alexpop

    alexpop Power pop + other bad habits....

    What choice of screen are you viewing these 4K titles ?
     
  18. EddieVanHalen

    EddieVanHalen Forum Resident

    Don't you think that movies shot on 65/70 mm like 2001 A Space Oddysey has more definition than 4K? I think, but I'm not a pro like you, it does.
     
  19. Vidiot

    Vidiot Now in 4K HDR!

    Location:
    Hollywood, USA
    Not in terms of MTF and line pairs, not a print struck off the original negative, and certainly not a normal OCN -> IP -> IP -> IN -> theatrical print chain (four generations down from the OCN). But I would say there's at least 4K in the OCN (original camera negative). The three older movies I usually pick as killing my argument of "there's nothing 4K prior to 1980" are Lawrence of Arabia, My Fair Lady, and 2001. I'm not convinced any older anamorphic title could resolve 4K, but everything changed once the Kodak Vision stocks came out in the early 1990s.

    At the same time, I'm not the guy who says, "sharpness is the most important thing in terms of picture quality." The reality is that color fidelity, black level detail, highlight detail, skintone accuracy, gamma range, and many other factors are actually more important. There are $995 digital cameras that technically can do 4K, but they still look like crap compared to film (or a high-end $40,000-$50,000 digital camera). I am a big believer in spherical prime lenses as providing the best possible detail; anamorphic lenses lose quite a bit of sharpness, particularly in the older days. A lot of that is different today, since both lenses and film stocks (and digital cameras) got much sharper, by an order of magnitude.

    BTW, the recent 70mm release of Dunkirk has 120 70mm prints struck right off the original negative, and they went to extraordinary lengths to make sure it was as sharp and grain-free as possible. So that's a case where there's a lot they can do to avoid unnecessary optical generations and use modern technology to go a lot further than they could 40 or 50 years ago.
     
  20. EddieVanHalen

    EddieVanHalen Forum Resident

    Do you think that many pre-1980 movies could benefit from UHD more because of HDR/Dolby Vision than resolution?
     
  21. Vidiot

    Vidiot Now in 4K HDR!

    Location:
    Hollywood, USA
    At the moment, I'm looking at an LG OLED55C7, which I had calibrated to Rec709 and BT1886 specs with a Klein K-10A probe and Calman alignment software. I actually have not had it calibrated for 400-nit HDR, because we're waiting a month for the screen to break in.

    Well, most film negative (particularly recent film) can reproduce more than the 10-12 stops you can see on a traditional video monitor. They can go beyond a 16-stop range with Dolby Vision, so -- in theory -- the highlights won't be as "clipped" as they would be in normal HD color and gamma space. You might think of this like an audio dynamic range that's been somewhat-compressed to play on the radio, then all the compression is removed for a remastered audiophile release.

    I think HDR is something you can see more readily than 4K, but most studios and distributors are kind of doing them both at the same time. Each is independent of the other -- you can have just a regular HD image that's HDR -- but generally only the 4K master is being done in HDR. They compress the dynamic range for the HD version.

    Now, whether you could see this on pre-1980 films... that's a tough call. I think there would not be a lot of older films that would hold up for both 4K and HDR. That doesn't take away anything from how brilliant they are as movies and how fantastic they looked as originally photographed. Any classic film is great almost regardless of the presentation. I always say, "Citizen Kane is still a great movie even if you just watch it on an iPhone."
     
    Last edited: Jul 30, 2017
    alexpop likes this.
  22. mongo

    mongo Senior Member

    I has, from 8k scans.
     
  23. mongo

    mongo Senior Member

    Not doubting you at all, never read that an OLED panel required break-in.
    I've seen a Calman calibrated C7. Impressive to say the least.
     
  24. Vidiot

    Vidiot Now in 4K HDR!

    Location:
    Hollywood, USA
    Yeah, my guy uses Calman and spent almost 2 hours tweaking the crap out of the C7. The difference between the factory settings and the calibrated settings are night and day.

    We're adding the LUT box this week with a 32x32 LUT inside a Blackmagic Teranex Mini, which was the cheapest ($600) LUT box I could afford. It'll do the job. We'll see if we can push it for HDR or not.
     
  25. SamS

    SamS Forum Legend

    Location:
    Texas
    You have something to strip off HDCP before you send HMDI into the Teranex Mini?
     
Thread Status:
Not open for further replies.

Share This Page

molar-endocrine