Sony Black Crush on late-2014 / early-2015 BDs

[tama]

Originally Posted by jscoggins

I was using it to express my feelings, not my thoughts.

Nothing wrong with Ghostbusters.

[MisterXDTV]

This is interesting:

Whiplash

http://caps-a-holic.com/hd_vergleich...ess=#vergleich

I think the Sony version is right in this case, and the Swiss version has black level too high....

[James Luckard]

Still no word from Sony US on a replacement program.

Now that the German, UK, and Brazilian editions have all been proven to be corrected, they really owe it to their American customers to fix this issue, hopefully with all of the BDs, including the catalog titles.

[Naiera]

Having watched the first 20 minutes of my German The Interview, I know I wouldn't want to watch a black crushed version of this movie

[jscoggins]

Originally Posted by MisterXDTV

This is interesting:

Whiplash

http://caps-a-holic.com/hd_vergleich...ess=#vergleich

I think the Sony version is right in this case, and the Swiss version has black level too high....

I think it's just darker (no black crush applied).

[James Luckard]

Originally Posted by Naiera

Having watched the first 20 minutes of my German The Interview, I know I wouldn't want to watch a black crushed version of this movie

Yep, it's a SUUUUUUUPER dark film to begin with, so the crush makes it unwatchable. It's not like MBFW, for example, a comedy shot in broad daylight, where the shadowy areas just get more black.

So glad we now have this title available fixed, it's the one I care most about.

[tama]

Originally Posted by MisterXDTV

This is interesting:

Whiplash

http://caps-a-holic.com/hd_vergleich...ess=#vergleich

I think the Sony version is right in this case, and the Swiss version has black level too high....

Looks like a gamma issue. (Not incorrect on Sonys part I might add).

[Naiera]

I don't know why I'm tripping so much over Lizzy's cleavage. It's not like I haven't seen those beautiful boobies in Masters of Sex

Also, I thought the glasses looked like the ones I have.

[jscoggins]

Originally Posted by Naiera

I don't know why I'm tripping so much over Lizzy's cleavage. It's not like I haven't seen those beautiful boobies in Masters of Sex

You got honeypotted.

[Naiera]

Honeycombed.

[Gold Ranger]

[dvdmike]

This thread needs black crush, then I couldn't see how creepy this page is.

[AlexBC]

Originally Posted by Geoff D

Oh, great. Now every movie with a bit of crushed shadow detail is faulty. See, I don't mind it when actual problems are brought to light, but the inevitable side effect is that people start seeing the DNR/black crush/latest buzz word everywhere.

I saw Ghostbusters on a 2K DCP and I can assure you the gamma was far more in keeping with the new 4K transfer than the horribly contrasty original Blu-ray. But now it looks like "crap". Whatever.

Just to make myself clear, I think all the titles I listed have superb 4k transfers and definitely look better than any other version before. And I also know the original Ghostbusters BD was contrast boosted. However that doesn't mean that haven't gonne a little far on contrast or color saturation that might have caused this crushes. In fact, I noticed these crushes the very fist time I watched each one of them and it was long before this debate here ever came up.

It's something I have mentioned before on some discussion boards but it was overlooked, and I'm briging this up now because the issue gainned some relevance.

As I also mentioned on my previous post, they are clearly not on the same range as Fury and The Interview, and the fact that for the most part they are bright movies (like Troop BVH and My Girl) helps making them look alright.

[Blu-21]

Originally Posted by jscoggins

Yeah, but look at the trees, they're just a black blob in the 4K BD.

I'll take slightly darker blacks (even if they are a bit too dark) over the contrast boosted orignal release. The orignal release makes the film look more dated than what it really is with regards to exposing things that were never intended to be seen.

The detail, colour and grain structure is also a hell of a lot better.

[StingingVelvet]

Those trees are dark next to Stay Puft, but they probably were always supposed to be. The other looks washed out and boosted. Also we're all looking at it on a monitor or phone or whatever, it might look more detailed on a calibrated set. I know all the "black crush" people saw in caps of the Goodfellas remaster showed detail on my actual TV.

[chip75]

Originally Posted by jscoggins

Yeah, but look at the trees, they're just a black blob in the 4K BD.

I think a good indicator is what detail you see in the lighter scenes, it's still there, if it was similar to Fury you'd lose detail in the actors hair and clothes and their skin tones would push towards purple. The Master in 4K release of Ghostbusters doesn't have those issues.

[Pyoko]

Originally Posted by AlexBC

Just to make myself clear, I think all the titles I listed have superb 4k transfers and definitely look better than any other version before. And I also know the original Ghostbusters BD was contrast boosted. However that doesn't mean that haven't gonne a little far on contrast or color saturation that might have caused this crushes. In fact, I noticed these crushes the very fist time I watched each one of them and it was long before this debate here ever came up.

As I also mentioned on my previous post, they are clearly not on the same range as Fury and The Interview, and the fact that for the most part they are bright movies (like Troop BVH and My Girl) helps making them look alright.

As Geoff D already pointed out, the issue being talked about in this thread and affecting discs like The Interview, was purely a technical error. No one intended the discs to look this way, no one pulled down the shadows a bit too far in the grading suite. There's no having this problem "to some degree", either a disc was affected or it was not.

None of the titles you linked to have this issue. You can still see a lot of shadow detail and there's a difference in brightness against the pure black letterbox.

Of all the screenshots posted there is only one single shot which looks even remotely like it could have some kind of technical problem and that is the Stay Puft shot of Ghostbusters. Given that it's an optical I think it's more likely a grading decision. Perhaps a compromise was needed to make them match; crush the opticals a bit so you wouldn't have to unduly lift all the regular footage. Either way it's just a handful of shots (that aren't going to look particularly good no matter what you do), the rest of the movie looks beautiful and is obviously unaffected, so you're just wasting your time trying to look for problems there.

[Geoff D]

The higher gamma actually helps the opticals, as one of the age-old problems of translating VFX to home video is that the latter is just too bright compared to the relatively low brightness of cinema projection, which shows up garbage mattes in particular. I've said it before and I'll say it again: the mattes around the Terror Dog scampering across the street are extremely obvious on the old Blu-ray, whereas they're virtually invisible on the Mi4K which is exactly in line with the theatrical screening I saw a few years back.

[StingingVelvet]

Does that mean the gamma/brightness is off for Star Wars? 'Cause the original trilogy is a matte-apalooza circus.

[Geoff D]

Yes. I waffled on about it here: https://forum.blu-ray.com/showthread...epre&page=2537