violence
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4K UHD/Blu-ray/DVD Community Thread: Bringing the Theater Home!
- Thread starter KDash31987
- Start date
Audiophile
Member
Got Arrow's release of Sam Raimi's A Simple Plan (1998) recently and I have to give props to the encoding house they use (Fidelity In Motion). It's a really solid transfer barring a few shots, but on the technical side the star of the show is the encode. It's not just a BD-100 with a high bitrate, but it's impeccably encoded in terms of efficiency (FiM do a lot of manual adjustment and tweaking vs an automatic encode).
When I finished watching I scrubbed back over and paused it on multiple shots to take a gander with my TV's zoom and there isn't a single foot wrong. Macroblocking, coarse clumped up pixel errors along each axis or any tell-tale compression signs were completely absent. Even some of the more well-regarded discs out there by the majors (and occasionally boutique labels too) have rough patches and errors that are not only noticeable in paused, zoomed in images but catch the eye in motion too, especially as you push to larger displays..
Here though? Complete consistency across the frame! This is probably the best encode I've seen on the format. If you told me this was a lossless video or at least a JPEG2000 DCP I wouldn't bat an eyelid; and considering a disc at this bitrate in HEVC is still only ~3% of the original image data, that's impressive.
Paramount have been putting out some rough encodes and even Kino, Criterion & Warner have been half-arsing it quite regularly. Other studios/distributors/authoring houses need to take note that this is the level of quality which is expected on a premium, relatively-niche format like 4K UHD BD. When you're putting something out on the best format available and charging a premium for it, this is should be the standard.
I know some folks don't go this deep, but I think it's important, given that these are likely the last physical releases many movies will be getting. I don't just think of Blu-rays as something to buy, but in terms of the larger picture, a form a lightweight, distributed mass-archival and preservation. The last consumer-available record of something important. It's all very well having the original elements in a vault and raw scans on a server. But availability and things being in the hands of the people in the form of the best possible facsimile is vital. Avoiding revisionism (or at least not having revisionist version replace or be the only version available) and faithfully presenting the content not just in terms of the master but in terms of an encode as transparent as possible. They need to get it right now, otherwise we may be forever stuck with something subpar. And again, if I'm spending £18-35 for a single release, the multibillion dollar owners of the property need to hold up their end of the bargain and do a solid job (or better yet, license out to people who care like Arrow).
When I finished watching I scrubbed back over and paused it on multiple shots to take a gander with my TV's zoom and there isn't a single foot wrong. Macroblocking, coarse clumped up pixel errors along each axis or any tell-tale compression signs were completely absent. Even some of the more well-regarded discs out there by the majors (and occasionally boutique labels too) have rough patches and errors that are not only noticeable in paused, zoomed in images but catch the eye in motion too, especially as you push to larger displays..
Here though? Complete consistency across the frame! This is probably the best encode I've seen on the format. If you told me this was a lossless video or at least a JPEG2000 DCP I wouldn't bat an eyelid; and considering a disc at this bitrate in HEVC is still only ~3% of the original image data, that's impressive.
Paramount have been putting out some rough encodes and even Kino, Criterion & Warner have been half-arsing it quite regularly. Other studios/distributors/authoring houses need to take note that this is the level of quality which is expected on a premium, relatively-niche format like 4K UHD BD. When you're putting something out on the best format available and charging a premium for it, this is should be the standard.
I know some folks don't go this deep, but I think it's important, given that these are likely the last physical releases many movies will be getting. I don't just think of Blu-rays as something to buy, but in terms of the larger picture, a form a lightweight, distributed mass-archival and preservation. The last consumer-available record of something important. It's all very well having the original elements in a vault and raw scans on a server. But availability and things being in the hands of the people in the form of the best possible facsimile is vital. Avoiding revisionism (or at least not having revisionist version replace or be the only version available) and faithfully presenting the content not just in terms of the master but in terms of an encode as transparent as possible. They need to get it right now, otherwise we may be forever stuck with something subpar. And again, if I'm spending £18-35 for a single release, the multibillion dollar owners of the property need to hold up their end of the bargain and do a solid job (or better yet, license out to people who care like Arrow).