UHD Titles Worth/Not Worth Upgrading

[nicolas]

Taxi Driver 4K steelbook coming in June. This may include the fixed version that does not repeat a shot of Andy the gun dealer when he showcases his guns to Travis.

Is the Columbia Classics 4K disc problematic or the old BD? This is the first time I’m reading about this.

[Finch]

The 4K and apparently the BD based on the most recent restoration.

[therewillbeblus]

This is fantastic news - I thought I missed the boat for good

[nicolas]

The 4K and apparently the BD based on the most recent restoration.

Thanks! Sony is aware of the issue according to their customer service but they gave conflicting info about how the fixed disc will actually be distributed: https://forum.blu-ray.com/showpost.php? ... tcount=850

[nicolas]

I updated the non-English friendly UHD post viewtopic.php?p=811790#p811790 with three new Le chat qui fume releases and, as promised, made a master list for UHDs with English audio but no English subs below:

Gandahar (France) - solid compression and restoration but botched Dolby Vision with washed-out colors (HDR10 and SDR not affected by this)
Préparez vos mouchoirs / Get Out Your Handkerchiefs (France) - generally well-encoded, grade with strong yellow tint (Cohen BD caps https://www.blu-ray.com/movies/Get-Out- ... creenshots), botched Dolby Vision with washed-out colors (HDR10 and SDR not affected by this)
Night of the Seagulls (France) - old master, bad gamma, blown-out highlights, weak detail (source: https://forum.blu-ray.com/showpost.php? ... stcount=38)

[nicolas]

Master List for non-US/UK international 4K UHD releases of films with original English audio but NO English subtitles. Additional contributions are always welcome and appreciated.

Red category:
Apocalypse Now Theatrical Cut (Italy) - better compression than Lionsgate and Studiocanal releases, exceptional 5.1 audio close to the OG mix
Apocalypse Now Final Cut (Italy) - better encode that restores subtly filtered high-frequency detail on the LG and SC
Killers of the Flower Moon (Italy) - very strong 5.1 audio, intertitles are translated into Italian but English subtitles are available for these sections and the Osage dialogue
La La Land (Italy) - better compression and errors in the LG master are fixed, audio 5.1 only
The Legend of 1900 (Germany)
The Little Drummer Girl (Korea, miniseries)
The Neon Demon (Germany)
Opera (Germany)
Persepolis (France / Germany)
Rider on the Rain (Germany)
The Straight Story (France / Germany)
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (France) - some shots are better compared to the Second Sight (https://caps-a-holic.com/c.php?d1=18250 ... =4&l=0&a=1)

Blue category:
Bridget Jones' Diary (France) - forced, but not hardcoded French subs
Lock Up (Italy) - better compression than SC/LG
Rambo: Last Blood (Germany) - extended cut
Total Recall (Italy) - significantly better compression than SC/LG, dynamic 5.1 but no OG 2.0 track

Disappointing category:
Bloodsport (Germany / UK) - bad compression, moderate DNR in select shots, 1.78 AR instead of 1.85
Cliffhanger (Italy) - green-ish SC master that restores some blown-out highlights compared to the Sony master, bad HDR10 compression (https://caps-a-holic.com/c.php?d1=18181&d2=16833&c=6322)
Letter from an Unknown Woman (France) - strong compression but elevated gamma levels and forced French subtitles (red category release if both can be fixed by the 4K player / TV)
Love Actually (France) - as bad as the US Universal with occasional DNR and bad encoding, US has Atmos

[therewillbeblus]

Is there a version of Germany's The Neon Demon that's become available again for non-outrageous prices, or did you just grab a copy before it went OOP?

[nicolas]

Is there a version of Germany's The Neon Demon that's become available again for non-outrageous prices, or did you just grab a copy before it went OOP?

I had no idea that it went OOP just like Suspiria, very annoying. I bought the UHD shortly after its release date in 2016. This was one of my first UHDs

[therewillbeblus]

Wow, nice! I believe it's one of the most expensive UHDs being scalped, and has been for a while.

Any notes on Shout!'s The Lost City of Z? Trying to decide if it's worth the pricy upgrade..

[nicolas]

Wow, nice! I believe it's one of the most expensive UHDs being scalped, and has been for a while.

Any notes on Shout!'s The Lost City of Z? Trying to decide if it's worth the pricy upgrade..

I’ve never had the film on BD before getting the UHD but on its own I think it looks superb. For whatever reason, Shout only got to access a 2K file even though a 4K DI exists according to IMDB but honestly, had I not known this, I wouldn’t have guessed this when playing the UHD.

Re. The Neon Demon. Absolutely crazy to me how an early format German SDR UHD fetches such high prices. I paid 13€ (!!) at the time.

[therewillbeblus]

It’s in HDR on Amazon in the states at least..

[Finch]

Warner UK are going to release North by Northwest in a 4K tat edition later this year.

[denti alligator]

Excellent news!

And I’ll happily take an ROT business card as swag.

[Finch]

I Am Cuba (Criterion) Chris's review

[vanshady]

In short, the new Fear and Desire edition is a disaster of an UHD

nicolas, with 4k of Fear and Desire butchered, which version of BD do you recommend?

[nicolas]

In short, the new Fear and Desire edition is a disaster of an UHD

nicolas, with 4k of Fear and Desire butchered, which version of BD do you recommend?

There’s no optimal solution if you’re looking at any of the Kino options as all of them (2012 disc included) have their own more or less severe issues. I heard that Eureka put out a BD some years ago but it’s sadly OOP and fetches high prices on eBay. I’d say choose the KL 4K-restored BD for now as there’s no info yet whether international labels licensed their restorations for local releases.

[Orlac]

In short, the new Fear and Desire edition is a disaster of an UHD

nicolas, with 4k of Fear and Desire butchered, which version of BD do you recommend?

There’s no optimal solution if you’re looking at any of the Kino options as all of them (2012 disc included) have their own more or less severe issues. I heard that Eureka put out a BD some years ago but it’s sadly OOP and fetches high prices on eBay. I’d say choose the KL 4K-restored BD for now as there’s no info yet whether international labels licensed their restorations for local releases.

What's up with the 2012 releases?

[nicolas]

nicolas, with 4k of Fear and Desire butchered, which version of BD do you recommend?

There’s no optimal solution if you’re looking at any of the Kino options as all of them (2012 disc included) have their own more or less severe issues. I heard that Eureka put out a BD some years ago but it’s sadly OOP and fetches high prices on eBay. I’d say choose the KL 4K-restored BD for now as there’s no info yet whether international labels licensed their restorations for local releases.

What's up with the 2012 releases?

The transfers of the two films are ancient and particularly The Seafarers looks rough. I‘ve also included this 2012 release in my cap comparison if you want to see how it compares to the new UHD / BD. The Seafarers: https://slow.pics/c/AQhszlGn
Fear and Desire: https://slow.pics/c/T45h4TJc

Select "Canvas: screen width" and "Fit into canvas" in the menu on the bottom of Slowpoke Pics in order to see the comparison as intended á la Caps-a-holic.

[nicolas]

My thoughts on Criterion’s Werckmeister Harmonies 4K UHD.

On first glance, the film looks absolutely gorgeous in 4K with a, dare I say, flawless encode in 4K. It’s such a pristine, beautiful image and with gorgeous detail. Yes, it’s SDR but, as always, I’ll prefer a very good SDR encode to a disappointing HDR/DV one by the boutiques that aren’t renowned for their encoding. Criterion is on a great streak when it comes to black and white films and Werckmeister is probably my favorite as of yet. Definitely a red category release.

The BD… not so much. It’s a typical Criterion encode on BD. Pixel mush in brighter moments, better when it’s dark and overall quite a bit filtered. The difference to the 4K is bigger than it should be. Their decision of offering a 4K version definitely paid off here. We also have a FiM encode of the film to compare the CC against, which is available on Blu-ray in the Béla Tarr set released by Carlotta. Unsurprisingly, his BD encode is significantly better than Criterion’s and closest to the 4K version in terms of definition. When compared against David’s, the UHD is only a modest upgrade.

Criterion also added Tarr’s first feature Family Nest to their BD as a bonus and it’s probably best not to even peek into the thing once. The quality is comparable to Kino’s Fear and Desire 4K & BD, which is all you need to know if you’ve seen my posts about that abominable edition. Bitrates are almost exclusively in the single digits. It’s hard to discern anything that’s shown in these frames beyond rudimentary shapes due to some of the biggest macro-ultra-mega-blocking. We’ve all seen such low-res bonus features or documentary clips many many times but Family Nest was newly restored in 2K by the same facility (National Film Institute of Hungary) that gave us this amazing Werckmeister 4K master. NexSpec / Criterion simply encoded the film to death as if compressing it at 480p for YouTube. Luckily, a FiM encode of the film is also available in the Carlotta set I mentioned earlier.
Without Family Nest, I would’ve been perfectly happy with Criterion’s new edition. As usual nowadays sadly without much in terms of bonus features but still, we’ve got a very good UHD encode. However, seeing them slapping Family Nest, a 108-minute feature together with a 148-minute feature and do that bad of an encoding job is an insult to us collectors and the film itself by essentially ruining the first (and maybe last) English-subtitled "HD" version of an acclaimed feature in the bonus section without any care at all. This whole edition absolutely is one big step in the right direction as they wouldn’t have given Werckmeister, a "specialty" title, a UHD had they not seen a notable sales prospect and at the same time two steps back when it comes to the curation of a major part of this release.

A great review for further reading shared on the other forum: https://cinapse.co/2024/04/criterion-re ... 00-4k-uhd/

[tenia]

I also think it's cheapening out to think it's OK to do instead of giving the extras, or at least Family Nest, a dedicated BD.

[rrenault]

I’m guessing Carlotta’s FiM encode still holds its own next to Criterion’s 4K SDR disc(and I’d presume the same for the Apu Trilogy, which I don’t physically own in any format), but the former isn’t English-friendly, so I guess the latter may as well be a red title.

I bought Carlotta’s Tarr set a few months ago so am a tad reluctant to splurge on Criterion’s UHD on day one since I’m sure Carlotta’s presentation is still stellar.

On a side note, it’s interesting Carlotta went 4K on Farewell, My Concubine but not on Werckmeister Harmonies.

[nicolas]

Finally, Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia. As I said before, this is my most anticipated release of the year (so far) and everything looked promising from the master to KL finally getting a SDR master after countless disappointing HDR encodes.

And the final result is indeed largely great. This is Kino’s best encode in a long time and particularly since they stopped caring about decent presentations but it’s still with unfortunate shortcomings I thought we’d be spared of similar to NexSpec / Criterion doing very well in SDR. Them and KL’s authoring house employ similar methods when it comes to encoding SDR content, which is keeping a constantly high bitrate across the entire film without doing much (or any) manual fine-tuning labor. Their credo is: Keep the bitrate high and hope that everything looks fine.

In the case of Nostalghia, the majority does look fine because of a key reason: There aren’t too many bright highlights. The black and white scenes are muted, therefore the encode holds up. The monochrome segments just as well. The scenes with a little more color though have severely clipped highlights whenever the camera has a sky in focus.
The steam bath sequence (around minute 35) is a good example. For the first moments, the steam obscures the overcast sky which gives the frame texture and detail. As such, the encode is good but as soon as we advance in the scene and the sky reveals itself a bit more, the filmic texture falls apart and it instantly gets blocky. In Tarkovsky’s eternally beautiful dolly shots, this is immediately palpable and unfortunately distracting. Kino is still Kino in SDR too but not as bad as HDR due to the smaller dynamic range. I’m 100% sure the encode would’ve turned into a disaster in HDR.

What about the master? Beautiful but slightly imperfect. I’m not sure if the imperfections I saw are the same small qualms Lanci himself has in that the digital realm can’t fully match his desired look. The vast majority of the master looks great without any blanket tints as suspected in both black and white and monochrome. The bleach bypass look is rendered beautifully and feels convincingly taken over into the digital realm but I can’t help noticing a hunch of a greenish blue ever so slightly intruding in whites during the color scenes in the film. This doesn’t affect anything in B&W and monochrome, just what’s in the touches of colors we see. I haven’t caught a moment where Oleg Yankovsky’s eyes looked blue but some other moments, definitely yes. Again, I’m not sure how this happened and whether this is a byproduct of the bleach bypass reproduction attempt by the colorist. Maybe this is less noticeable when watching the entire film and being immersed in the visuals more deeply. Other than that, it’s a very impressive new master and restoration and a definite success when considering the very unique and delicate look of the film.

Sound-wise, the film appears much better to my ears than the horrible track on the old KL BD which always sounded to me as if it was recorded off an old gramophone. I still don’t want to judge with authority whether the new track is perfect as I don’t have anything to compare the new track against. Hopefully our audio pros can chime in here.

The included BD of the film doesn’t do this master justice. It’s a badly encoded disc and heavily low-pass filtered. This is a case of UHD or nothing in my estimation.

The interview with DP Giuseppe Lanci runs 27 minutes and is beautiful, candid and very personal. He goes in depth about him getting involved with the film, Tarkovsky’s working methods, their great working relationship and details about the look of the film. I had no idea that Tarkovsky also wanted Lanci to film The Sacrifice in Sweden but it fell apart as soon as Rai, the financier of Nostalghia, backed out of the film and that’s how Sven Nykvist got hired. Lanci mentioned that there are no copies (I assume prints) of the film available any more with the exception being one in the library at the National Film School in Rome where he also teaches but they don’t lend it out any more. He didn’t mention anything else of note about the restoration.

Overall, I’m happy with what I got as it could’ve been a lot worse but there’s still potential for improvements which I hope will be addressed in international (UHD) releases. Finch, I’d add the UHD to the blue / solid category.

[MichaelB]

No regrets whatsoever about buying Carlotta's Béla Tarr box. even though I ended up double-dipping on Damnation as I already had the FiM-encoded Arbelos release. I don't think I'll bother with the Criterion.

And I'm greatly looking forward to Nostalghia, which is currently in transit.

[nicolas]

No regrets whatsoever about buying Carlotta's Béla Tarr box. even though I ended up double-dipping on Damnation as I already had the FiM-encoded Arbelos release. I don't think I'll bother with the Criterion.

And I'm greatly looking forward to Nostalghia, which is currently in transit.

I hope you get your copy soon! Amazon did the unimaginable and sent my $14.99 price error pre-order with UPS a day before release even though I took standard shipping.

Just wanted to add that after writing my first impressions of the Nostalghia UHD, I gave the old KL BD another spin to refresh my memory about its look. The audio on that disc is much, much worse than I remembered. It’s absolutely a night-and-day difference to the restored (?) mix on the 4K. The upgrade is essential for that improvement alone.

[Drucker]

Reiterating the comment I made when I saw the film in 35mm years ago at Film Forum, but this shot was definitely bathed in the blueish hue as seen here, and was not neutral gray like the other screen shot on DVD Beaver.