Superman: The Movie 4K UHD (1978)

[Mocorongo]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sUbe...ature=youtu.be

Interesting comments about this UHD-BD release:

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This Ultra Blu-ray is sharper perhaps, but except for the yellow on Superman's costume, i find the regular Blu-ray version to be much better lit with the colours far more vibrant from the previous releases than this new; 4K treatment. And even the 3 hour TV version showed much superior colour contrasting of the blue levels in Superman's costume overall. Yeah hope for the Superman sequels to receive some treatment like this in the near future (Ultra HD Blu-ray), but hopefully the colours won't see a huge drop off or reduction in brightness quality like this however! Cheers for the insight though Oliver Harper, its always much appreciated! Will look forward to your documentary dude!
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You must have a crap tv or its not set up correctly

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Shut up man, my widescreen TV a Pioneer alright. they specialized in home cinema output when most folks were still buying a boody; Tandy or Hitech from Dixons o.k. Mostly everyone else has recognized the fact the picture is way darker on this release than in previous versions. Its not the setup here pal as it'll only read whats there on the disc. iIs the way the film has been mastered for Ultra Blu-ray at 4K which is the problem.

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Problem is, Pioneer stopped making TV's almost ten years ago now so you are watching a 4k Dolby Vision HDR with dynamic metadata on what is now a pretty old TV on a player that probably can't deal with dropping HDR to SDR. Unless people have bought their TV and source player in the last 6 months to a year or so, you will get something inferior to the 1080p Blu Ray master. I'm not saying you have a crap TV like what Phil said but the landscape has changed a lot.

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I captured both the 4K/2160p (UHD-BD) and regular 1080p Blu-ray (the latter in the theatrical cut) while watching in my iPAD... see below.

https://vimeo.com/437534667

P.S. In case someone asks: what the Youtube video is streaming is this:

- Two matroska files, both in lossless and both from the UHD-BD and regular 1080p Blu-ray. The capture is lossy (of course) but the sources I was watching are both lossless (they are hosted in Google Drive), so the video is accurate to what the original discs look like.

[david_blu]

Originally Posted by david_blu

Finally got around to putting up my review of the new 4K UHD of Superman the Movie.

Not pleased with it.

While I do see some improvement in some scenes there are some howling errors that just ruin this for me. I don't have the ability to post 4k screen grabs so you'll have to do some AB comparisons yourself to the Theatrical Blu Ray.

First off the good:

New restored sound mix is nice, dialogue track is so clear listen to some of the Daily Planet stuff or Lex in his hideout and compare to the Blu Ray it is much better. Also great removing all those annoying new sounds they added in the modern mix.


Now the Bad:

The following are scenes that look way worse than the blu ray:

The titles, the more cyany looking title highlights have returned whilst they were more blue looking on the Blu Ray now the inner highlights are more cyan than the Theatrical Blu Ray.

Krypton Council: punchy white suits gone, they all need a liver change due to how yellow they all look

Smallville stuff looks good colour wise but no definition on anything the hazy looks as some have called it.

First shot of Metropolis street through taxi lacking colour.

Lex in the viewing room seeing the cop get catch the train, I can see the project leader here saying "we cant have red shadows on the view screen in UHD make it black" So here we drop the red shadow and now the whole scene looks devoid of red.

Chapter 20 the Helicopter rescue, Clark walks out of the Daily Planet whistling its a grey World after all, what happened compare to the Blu Ray.

This is further highlighted by the laughable change in colour of the street before Clark looks at the phone booth and then immediately after, hello Yellow. No quality control here obviously.

My most annoying change, the first part of Supes take off, not the overhead but the shot of Supes on the left of frame just after excuse me. This has to be the worst colour I have seen of this shot in 40 years across all formats. Honestly compare the colour of his costume here to any previous version and tell me it looks correct.

Start Chapter 21 and Supes flying over the city after saving Lois. Supes is now flying over Matrixopolis, GREEN lights for the city. They used to be just about borderline green/yellow now full on green.

After 40 years still cant get right Supes taking off from Lois' balcony before Clark turns up to make it match the shot before. Even though one is a projection you can still make them nearer each other than they are.

Lois car is pink/red/less red,bright pink?

Supes tunneling into to the gauntlet, the transition looks better but now his cape looks orangey red on landing not bright red.

Lex's hideout now doesnt match the de red version from earlier and is back to normal, ok good but not consistent.

Supes taking off from Lois to change the World back his suit is now a lovely shade of Cyan again despite most other versions making this the blue it should look great oversight.

The clouds: So now Supes looks like a cut and paste over the clouds this is new but they have got rid of the yellow on the left handside that plagued this scene and fixed one arm to be really blue as he flies into the clouds.

The shot of Supes flying over land whilst Lois is saying "who knows some day if he's lucky" so this looks worst than it has ever looked before.

Lastly this doesnt appear to be as sharp as the blu ray.

All in all, the bad outweigh the good massively, I am seeing errors on here never seen before, how can anyone in the industry give this 10/10 based on the errors I have explained above.

It might be a great 4k master in terms of technical babble but not in terms of what Superman should look like.

I miss the red, they could have manipulated the highlights without completely removing the red in places.

5/10 I cannot possibly recommend this title.

Please WB review the shots I have stated above and fix for the next release.

Im just going to refer to my earlier review. The colour is terrible on this UHD even if the sharpness is better. The ipad comparison and 4k review from Oliver back this up.
Look at the take off shot, how was that ever approved?

I have the Sony ubp x700 and 49 xf9005 so they are both new enough to display this properly, it's just bad colour mastering in my view.

[Agent Kay]

[Geoff D]

Wait - so that video 'review' has come from someone watching it in 1080p converted SDR on some old Pio plasma? Seriously? *waits for the regular spammers to say it's "all in good fun"*

[Pgcmoore]

[brian9229]

Pioneer makes some dope TV's.

[brainofj72]

Originally Posted by Geoff D

Wait - so that video 'review' has come from someone watching it in 1080p converted SDR on some old Pio plasma? Seriously? *waits for the regular spammers to say it's "all in good fun"*

Out of morbid curiosity I just sampled his video overview of his 4K collection. First of all, he only has 40 titles. Second of all, he keeps talking about how HDR makes colors “bleed.”

It makes my soul hurt to know that there are people out there who will listen to this guy.

[Agent Kay]

Originally Posted by brainofj72

Out of morbid curiosity I just sampled his video overview of his 4K collection. First of all, he only has 40 titles. Second of all, he keeps talking about how HDR makes colors “bleed.”

It makes my soul hurt to know that there are people out there who will listen to this guy.

Oliver is good people, don't make it personal

[brainofj72]

Originally Posted by Agent Kay

Oliver is good people, don't make it personal

Never said he isn’t. Just said he clearly shouldn’t be trusted when it comes to 4K Blu-rays.

[Desk.]

Originally Posted by Agent Kay

Oliver is good people, don't make it personal

His retrospectives are good, but I'm not sure on his technical knowledge. One of his first comments in the Superman piece is about the fact that being a 4K disk means that it's a less compressed version of the film than on blu-ray.

That didn't inspire a lot of confidence.

Desk

[Agent Kay]

Originally Posted by brainofj72

Never said he isn’t. Just said he clearly shouldn’t be trusted when it comes to 4K Blu-rays.

Look we all know people with less than 400 UHD discs can't be trusted

[Agent Kay]

Originally Posted by Desk.

His retrospectives are good, but I'm not sure on his technical knowledge. One of his first comments in the Superman piece is about the fact that being a 4K disk means that it's a less compressed version of the film than on blu-ray.

That didn't inspire a lot of confidence.

Desk

Technically that isn't wrong

[brainofj72]

Originally Posted by Agent Kay

Look we all know people with less than 400 UHD discs can't be trusted

Yes that’s exactly what I said

[chip75]

Originally Posted by Agent Kay

Oliver is good people, don't make it personal

I like Ollie's content for the most part, but that video was infuriating with all the upscale talk. There's a blurry line between upscale and native, he mentions Jurassic Park as native, but we know the effects weren't 4K, but if you scan a film source at 4K does that count? Hopefully one day we'll get past such talk and rate the content on its own merits. Otherwise people will be avoiding great releases for pretty arbitrary reasons.

I think he mentioned he hoped something like Avengers: Infinity War would get a proper 4K release someday ... It had around 80 shots that didn't require effects work, there’s 2,623 visual effects shots in the film. Over 97%. We're never going to get new effects, the best we could hope for is hybrid releases like The Martian, but with all the great Faux-K™ releases does it really matter?

I think his BenQ projector is just over Rec.709 and hits a contrast ration of just over 700:1, so it may not be the best to judge HDR and WGC.

It also doesn't really matter how many titles you've got (I'm not having a go at the OP), 40 is a decent start, especially for a genre guy where most his favorites haven't made it over yet.

[ROSS.T.G.]

Originally Posted by brian9229

Pioneer makes some dope TV's.

You mean made.

[imsounoriginal]

What was it today that brought the trolls out? This and the Alien thread were... amusing.

[Geoff D]

Originally Posted by Agent Kay

Oliver is good people, don't make it personal

We're happy enough to stick the boot in to Bill Hunt, no? Whether you like this guy or not, it's plainly clear that he's not got a goddamned clue about HDR. But hey, nor does most of the tech site/vlogger world so he's not alone in that respect.

Originally Posted by Agent Kay

Technically that isn't wrong

Only by about the relative width of a cigarette paper. Boiling down an 8 terabyte 4K master into 30-odd gigs or 60-odd gigs, using very different compression codecs on both, isn't exactly apples to apples. But clearly you want to let your chum's technical incompetence slide, so even if he said UHDs were made from crushed antelope horns I suppose you'd let that go too.

[Mocorongo]

Originally Posted by david_blu

Krypton Council: punchy white suits gone, they all need a liver change due to how yellow they all look

I am not going to say what is right and wrong with this 4K disc since I am not an expert on it, however even if this release is disappointing for whatever reason that doesn't mean at the same time the regular Blu-rays are all OK...

As I said here

https://forum.blu-ray.com/showpost.p...postcount=4850

And here:
https://forum.blu-ray.com/showpost.p...postcount=4847

The sequels were all modified for the worse and the 1st movie didn't escape from these changes at least in past releases from what I've seen. Superman 2 (theatrical cut) is too warm and vibrant to my taste. The Richard Donner Cut, on the other hand, looks bland and dull, yet that disc was released in 2006 and it was a mix of many sources which put together can't look as good as the rest, of course.

The best transfer for STM is probably between the 1080p and 4K. I would wait for a longer cut.

[Thunderball]

I’m so confused about this release. Sit has some positive reviews but the comments and scream grabs here say otherwise. I was planning on getting this but now I dont’t know.

[JEDGAR1000]

Originally Posted by Thunderball

I’m so confused about this release. Sit has some positive reviews but the comments and scream grabs here say otherwise. I was planning on getting this but now I dont’t know.

The screenshots are HDR images improperly converted to SDR, so they'll always look worse & darker than they actually are. (As a general rule of thumb, always trust Geoff D, if he says it's good, it's good.)