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4K Blu Ray - anyone collecting?

strider

By strider,
in Film, TV & Radio

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Jamie John

Jamie John

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Zavvi are currently doing 3 for £30 on over 300 different 4K films.

 

Are the 4K versions of older films, like Goodfellas and Blade Runner, really *that* much better than the Blu-Ray versions? They're two of my favourite ever films, but the Blu Rays versions of them are currently £4 at HMV. I understand 4K for more modern stuff, but I've struggled to appreciate that much of an improvement in my 4K versions of The Shining and 2001, for example, over their Blu Rays.

 

I might just get them in 4K anyway, for posterity.

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Jamie John

Jamie John

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37 minutes ago, strider said:

Blade runner yes, Goodfellas not so much. Generally I much prefer how older films look compared to the blu rays. Hdr makes a massive difference.

some good deals there.

 

Cool! Going to go for Blade Runner, Arrival - two favourites - and 1917, which I've not seen, but the 4K transfer is supposed to be excellent.

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strider

strider

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1 minute ago, jon_cybernet said:

I’ve only got a PS5 and and Xbox Series X for playing 4K discs. Am I missing out massively by not having a dedicated player with Dolby vision etc? 

Personally I always prefer dedicated players. Dolby Vision can also add a lot to a movie as well.

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Couch Corpse

Couch Corpse

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14 hours ago, Jamie John said:

I've struggled to appreciate that much of an improvement in my 4K versions of The Shining and 2001

Two of the better examples, if you didn't see the benefits in those the format may be lost on you.

 

 

The collection is getting big, anyone recommend an app for tracking physical media?

 

signal-2022-08-19-231048_002.thumb.jpeg.ba2ea56b3de9dd912f54742954df3498.jpeg

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CarloOos

CarloOos

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On 19/08/2022 at 11:15, strider said:

Personally I always prefer dedicated players. Dolby Vision can also add a lot to a movie as well.


I genuinely don’t understand what difference Dolby Vision makes for Blu-Rays. When you’re watching DV content on something like Netflix, the dynamic metadata is used for when you’re watching HDR content in SDR (as the majority of people still do).
 

But when it comes to UHD Blu-Ray the entire format is designed around HDR, nobody is watching those in SDR. So what’s the Dolby Vision adding? If all it’s doing is reading how the file was mastered (1000nits), then those are the exact same specs almost all HDR10 files are mastered to also. 
 

Totally agree that HDR can make a massive difference to a film, especially older ones, but generally speaking I think the whole Dolby thing is a massive placebo. 

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Steve McQueef

Steve McQueef

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Standard HDR does not contain dynamic metadata. The content is therefore at the mercy of the equipment being used to display it. 

 

That's why you get ten people watching the same disc and wildly varying opinions emerging.

 

"It's too dark!"

 

"The colours don't look right!"

 

Dolby Vision seeks even things out a bit, especially for people with lower-end equipment. 

 

It can also fix errors that exist in the HDR10 base layer. There are a number of discs that look fragile compression wise in standard HDR, whereas the Dolby Vision version largely cleans them it up

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Alex W.

Alex W.

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Basically, few TVs available to consumers have a high enough peak brightness to display the full dynamic range in any of the HDR standards. (In the case of Dolby Vision, the only display with the full dynamic range is a “concept car” prototype.) This is especially true of OLED. The TV has to crunch down the peak brightness of the movie to fit in to its own peak brightness limit.
 

With dynamic metadata, you can do that for (in principle) every single frame of the movie, so it’s only getting crunched as much as is necessary to get that scene’s peak brightness to fit. Without it, you set a single peak brightness value for the movie which means that (as mentioned above) dark scenes will be far darker than they need to be.
 

HDR10+ also includes dynamic metadata. Many sets can analyse the signal and invent metadata on the fly, at the cost of some latency and inevitably not doing it very well. Games, as real time content, simply render the content to match the TV’s  peak brightness as set by the user - that’s what the HDR calibration screens on consoles do.

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Alex W.

Alex W.

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There’s no cap on how frequently you can tag metadata; the file has no notion of a “shot”, after all. They’re just time stamps. Per frame is not how it’s done of course, but the point is that there is tone mapping data arbitrarily frequently in the file versus just one value for the whole thing.

 

Tone mapping is definitely done on HDR displays. That’s literally what the metadata is for.

 

Edit - I was replying to a post that’s gone now.

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CarloOos

CarloOos

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16 minutes ago, Alex W. said:

There’s no cap on how frequently you can tag metadata; the file has no notion of a “shot”, after all. They’re just time stamps. Per frame is not how it’s done of course, but the point is that there is tone mapping data arbitrarily frequently in the file versus just one value for the whole thing.

 

Tone mapping is definitely done on HDR displays. That’s literally what the metadata is for.

 

Edit - I was replying to a post that’s gone now.

 

Sorry, I hid that post to rewrite it but now can’t see an option to bring it back. I’m quite bad for post first/edit later.

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Jamie John

Jamie John

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On 19/08/2022 at 08:45, Jamie John said:

Zavvi are currently doing 3 for £30 on over 300 different 4K films.

 

Are the 4K versions of older films, like Goodfellas and Blade Runner, really *that* much better than the Blu-Ray versions? They're two of my favourite ever films, but the Blu Rays versions of them are currently £4 at HMV. I understand 4K for more modern stuff, but I've struggled to appreciate that much of an improvement in my 4K versions of The Shining and 2001, for example, over their Blu Rays.

 

I might just get them in 4K anyway, for posterity.

 

Amazon is now matching this deal for anyone who doesn't want to pay the delivery charge. I should have waited!

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