Lawrence of Arabia 4K UHD (1962)

[matbezlima]

Originally Posted by Captain Keen

I think you might be right. Though honestly, this film looks incredible on just regular ol blu ray. I’ve seen it twice presented on 70mm and the home presentation isn’t that far off, all things considered. This film has been wonderfully preserved.

Oh yes, the regular 1080p blu-ray beats many UHDs, not to mention 4K streams. It's absurdly, unbelievably fantastic.

[James Luckard]

Originally Posted by matbezlima

I think Sony will do a new scan and restoration of Lawrence later in this decade, or in the beginning of next decade, for a new release in 2027 or 2032. Technology to scan 70mm film has improved a lot.

While not 70mm, I think Sony will do a new scan someday of Doctor Strangelove as well, it's only a matter of how long it will take.

That's the great thing about film negatives, especially large format film negatives, there's always more information to mine for digital remasters.

It's similar to how Fincher has remastered Se7en for DVD, BD and now 4K, because each one gives a chance to extract more from the negative.

I agree, I have no doubt that in 10 years it'll be possible to remaster Lawrence in a way that will make the current master look like garbage. Think of how excited we all were by DVD masters that now look like VHS.

[matbezlima]

I wouldn't say it would make the current master look like garbage, but there can be indeed a good deal of improvement, specially regarding super fine detail.

For the vast majority of films, I think 4K is close to the ceiling of how much actual detail you can get out of them. But in large-format, specially 70mm, I can see we eventually getting enough detail out of it to be worthy of 8K! Of course, factors like camera focus, cinematography style, optical effects and preservation state often eat away a bit of resolution.

[James Luckard]

Originally Posted by matbezlima

I wouldn't say it would make the current master look like garbage, but there can be indeed a good deal of improvement, specially regarding super fine detail.

I dunno, I look back on how most of us all loved new transfers in the early HD era, and they now look shockingly bad. We'll see.

Originally Posted by matbezlima

For the vast majority of films, I think 4K is close to the ceiling of how much actual detail you can get out of them. But in large-format, specially 70mm, I can see we eventually getting enough detail out of it to be worthy of 8K!

True, the raw, unmolested 4K scan, or even the final uncompressed 4K master, can extract pretty much everything from 35mm, but when it's as ineptly compressed as Paramount's latest UHDs (The Firm, The Truman Show) they end up looking no better than decent BDs.

I wonder if uncompressed 4K will ever be made available to consumers, once disc size or (more likely) streaming is able to handle the gargantuan files. 20 years ago it would have seemed impossible to stream movies in compressed 4K, as we do now. I'm sure, in 20 years, it'll be technically possible to offer uncompressed 4K to consumers, the question will be whether studios are willing to do it.

And yep, all the 70mm and VistaVision titles out there will look magnificent in 8K in a decade or two.

[WBMakeVMarsMovieNOW]

Originally Posted by James Luckard

I dunno, I look back on how most of us all loved new transfers in the early HD era, and they now look shockingly bad. We'll see.



True, the raw, unmolested 4K scan, or even the final uncompressed 4K master, can extract pretty much everything from 35mm, but when it's as ineptly compressed as Paramount's latest UHDs (The Firm, The Truman Show) they end up looking no better than decent BDs.

I wonder if uncompressed 4K will ever be made available to consumers, once disc size or (more likely) streaming is able to handle the gargantuan files. 20 years ago it would have seemed impossible to stream movies in compressed 4K, as we do now. I'm sure, in 20 years, it'll be technically possible to offer uncompressed 4K to consumers, the question will be whether studios are willing to do it.

And yep, all the 70mm and VistaVision titles out there will look magnificent in 8K in a decade or two.

Or even just frame by frame compression like they use for DCP.

[matbezlima]

Originally Posted by James Luckard

I dunno, I look back on how most of us all loved new transfers in the early HD era, and they now look shockingly bad. We'll see.



True, the raw, unmolested 4K scan, or even the final uncompressed 4K master, can extract pretty much everything from 35mm, but when it's as ineptly compressed as Paramount's latest UHDs (The Firm, The Truman Show) they end up looking no better than decent BDs.

I wonder if uncompressed 4K will ever be made available to consumers, once disc size or (more likely) streaming is able to handle the gargantuan files. 20 years ago it would have seemed impossible to stream movies in compressed 4K, as we do now. I'm sure, in 20 years, it'll be technically possible to offer uncompressed 4K to consumers, the question will be whether studios are willing to do it.

And yep, all the 70mm and VistaVision titles out there will look magnificent in 8K in a decade or two.

When internet connections and storage capacity get to a point that higher-quality streaming and downloads are reasonably affordable, there will be a market for this just like it happens with lossless music. There are plenty of digital stores and streaming services offering uncompressed music. But that is far harder to do with video, an actual uncompressed video file would need many UHDs of capacity of 100GBs each! That, and internet speeds, are why such services haven't yet taken off in movies, and won't for years. But they will someday, it's a matter of time. How long will it take? I have no idea!

The jump to High Definition was indeed huge, while the jump from that to 4K has diminishing returns (though 4K is still easily more than worthy and palpably superior to 1080p, I'm not bashing 4K!).

Point is: the jump was so huge that it was easy to be blinded by the problems. It was truly awe-inspiring. Hell, one of these days I put on the 1970s Wonder Woman TV series on streaming to watch, I had only ever watched it in standard definition. Even though I was well-aware that it was Full HD before watching it, I still was shocked with the image quality in comparison to anything I had ever seen before from the show!

Regarding Lawrence specifically, the problem is that was restored in 4K to a SDR blu-ray and DCPs way back in 2012. That was really long ago. According to Geoff D, the application of HDR in the 4K blu-ray release a few years ago revealed cracks in the restoration that had been hidden before by SDR, like coarser grain and restoration artefacts. It's why he said that Sony should have at least returned to the vaulted 8K raw-scan to rework the most problematic shots, like Omar Sharif's entrance.

Point is: the 2012 4K restoration was pretty much perfect for its time, but it is dated now. It predates 4K blu-ray by years.

[matbezlima]

As this YouTube upload is in 4K SDR, I wonder if it's actually the 4K SDR version, or if it's the 1080p blu-ray upscaled to 4K, or if it's the 4K HDR version converted to SDR.

YouTube

[Fjodor2000]

Originally Posted by James Luckard

I wonder if uncompressed 4K will ever be made available to consumers

The question is how much quality improvement we'd get from a well produced 4K BD vs lossless 4K master.

Depends on the movie of course. E.g. for a modern movie that is digitally shot with low noise and without grain, which is easy to compress, I doubt there would be much difference.

But what about a standard 35 mm movie shot in on medium quality film negative from various decades (60ies, 70ies, 80ies, ...), in various lighting conditions, which has noise and grain, and thus is harder to compress? Would be nice to see some caps differences between 4K BD vs 4K Master for such movies. When the 4K BD is well produced, so we know what is technically possible. But the question is if any such comparison is available? Where to get the 4K master caps from?

[Geoff D]

Originally Posted by matbezlima

I wouldn't say it would make the current master look like garbage, but there can be indeed a good deal of improvement, specially regarding super fine detail.

For the vast majority of films, I think 4K is close to the ceiling of how much actual detail you can get out of them. But in large-format, specially 70mm, I can see we eventually getting enough detail out of it to be worthy of 8K! Of course, factors like camera focus, cinematography style, optical effects and preservation state often eat away a bit of resolution.

The resolving power of 60-year-old film is going to be limited by that factor as older stocks were simply not as sharp as modern ones, ditto for the optics used. So the talk of getting 8K’s worth of information out of the likes of Lawrence is a little misleading IMO. A newer restoration done at 8K would certainly show more than what the extant UHD does if only for the mild filtering of the latter, but wouldn’t be an 8K showcase in itself. You can see a similar effect on the UHDs of Spartacus and Ten Commandments, both shot to 8-perf 35mm and yet there is only the merest increase in fine detail between the respective BDs and UHDs minted from the same restored masters. 8/35 is not 5/65, which is bigger still, true, but even so it neatly demonstrates how little >4K information can be mined from such elderly sources, even large format ones.

[matbezlima]

Originally Posted by Geoff D

The resolving power of 60-year-old film is going to be limited by that factor as older stocks were simply not as sharp as modern ones, ditto for the optics used. So the talk of getting 8K’s worth of information out of the likes of Lawrence is a little misleading IMO. A newer restoration done at 8K would certainly show more than what the extant UHD does if only for the mild filtering of the latter, but wouldn’t be an 8K showcase in itself. You can see a similar effect on the UHDs of Spartacus and Ten Commandments, both shot to 8-perf 35mm and yet there is only the merest increase in fine detail between the respective BDs and UHDs minted from the same restored masters. 8/35 is not 5/65, which is bigger still, true, but even so it neatly demonstrates how little >4K information can be mined from such elderly sources, even large format ones.

True. Actual 8K level of detail would probably be possible only in the most ideal cases, if ever, and you gave good examples of such limitations that are already shown in 4K releases of very old large-format films. My point is that large-format films are probably the only ones from which we might actually be able to get a meaningful amount of extra detail and sharpness than what 4K resolution allows.

[JRcanReid]

Originally Posted by James Luckard

I have no doubt that in 10 years it'll be possible to remaster Lawrence in a way that will make the current master look like garbage. Think of how excited we all were by DVD masters that now look like VHS.

As strange as this is going to sound, I truly think the most “blown away” I’ve ever been by a home video experience is still my very first DVD, Aliens, sometime in the late 90s. And I’m saying that through the lens of “relativity” I guess, meaning, relative to how I had been viewing things before, that first DVD was absolutely stunning in a way that perhaps hasn’t been topped for me personally (I would say my UHD of 2001 comes the closest).

If I’m remembering correctly, I was watching that disc on a 35 inch, 4:3 shaped CRT/Tube TV from about six feet away, and the image was jaw-dropping. Laser sharp, but not in a DNR’d to death way. I actually invited some friends over to watch it and I really became kind of a zealot about the new format.

I have since watched that same disc on my current 4K TV and it looks like absolute dog ****. Was it the marriage between CRT/DVD that made it look so great? Was it simply the jump in quality from VHS/broadcast to that sweet sweet 480p? Why can’t a $1800 TV make that disc look as awesome as it did then?

[James Luckard]

Originally Posted by JRcanReid

As strange as this is going to sound, I truly think the most “blown away” I’ve ever been by a home video experience is still my very first DVD, Aliens, sometime in the late 90s. And I’m saying that through the lens of “relativity” I guess, meaning, relative to how I had been viewing things before, that first DVD was absolutely stunning in a way that perhaps hasn’t been topped for me personally (I would say my UHD of 2001 comes the closest).

If I’m remembering correctly, I was watching that disc on a 35 inch, 4:3 shaped CRT/Tube TV from about six feet away, and the image was jaw-dropping. Laser sharp, but not in a DNR’d to death way. I actually invited some friends over to watch it and I really became kind of a zealot about the new format.

I have since watched that same disc on my current 4K TV and it looks like absolute dog ****. Was it the marriage between CRT/DVD that made it look so great? Was it simply the jump in quality from VHS/broadcast to that sweet sweet 480p? Why can’t a $1800 TV make that disc look as awesome as it did then?

Ha, yep, I remember being staggered by DVDs on my old CRT TV that my mom nicknamed William Howard Taft, because it was so freaking enormous, haha.

That said, the most astounded I've ever been by a new home video format was when I got my new OLED and tried out the flawless UHD of Gattaca, and saw genuine film grain represented clearly for the first time on home video. My mind was blown, I would never have thought it was possible.

[matbezlima]

Old TVs handled low-resolution better. And this is even truer regarding video games. Any old videogame in a modern TV looks like crappy. Old games knew perfectly how to use all the unique aspects and quirks of CRT to create a far more natural and detailed image than what one would think when considering the very low resolution of those old consoles.

[manwithnoname64]

Originally Posted by matbezlima

Old TVs handled low-resolution better. And this is even truer regarding video games. Any old videogame in a moferm TV looks like crappy. Old games knew perfectly how to use all the unique aspects and quirks of CRT to create a far more natural and detailed image than what one would think when considering the very low resolution of those old consoles.

There are ways for those knowledgeable enough to make old school video games look great on modern TVs. You’re just going to have sharp pixels and games will not look like they did originally because game developers took CRT tv displays into consideration during design. The thing I do miss from CRTs is the motion handling and input lag of modern TVs.

[matbezlima]

With all the talk about how much actual resolution detail one can get out of film, and the limitations of old film, I can't help but wonder how much detail is in a modern IMAX film. Specially the black-and-white IMAX film developed for the black-and-white scenes in Christopher Nolan's future film, Oppenheimer.

[Brandon B]

This was $19.99 for a few hours on Amazon this morning. Put it in my cart to grab with other things later, by lunch it had jumped to $39.99. Frick

[thebarnman]

Originally Posted by JRcanReid

Why can’t a $1800 TV make that disc look as awesome as it did then?

Because the disc doesn't have 4K worth of information. It's taking the SD source and the TV or disc player doesn't really have that much information to work with to fill a true 4K display...so it's going to look kind of soft maybe even blurry and unresolved at some point.

[James Luckard]

Originally Posted by Brandon B

This was $19.99 for a few hours on Amazon this morning. Put it in my cart to grab with other things later, by lunch it had jumped to $39.99. Frick

Really? I thought it was OOP, it's over $200 used at Amazon right now.

[dorian]

Originally Posted by James Luckard

I dunno, I look back on how most of us all loved new transfers in the early HD era, and they now look shockingly bad. We'll see.



True, the raw, unmolested 4K scan, or even the final uncompressed 4K master, can extract pretty much everything from 35mm, but when it's as ineptly compressed as Paramount's latest UHDs (The Firm, The Truman Show) they end up looking no better than decent BDs.

I wonder if uncompressed 4K will ever be made available to consumers, once disc size or (more likely) streaming is able to handle the gargantuan files. 20 years ago it would have seemed impossible to stream movies in compressed 4K, as we do now. I'm sure, in 20 years, it'll be technically possible to offer uncompressed 4K to consumers, the question will be whether studios are willing to do it.

And yep, all the 70mm and VistaVision titles out there will look magnificent in 8K in a decade or two.

Uncompressed 4k is unnecessary. All we truly need is visually lossless video but that in itself can be a bit of a subjective target. A well encoded UHD is maybe 98% of the visual fidelity of an uncompressed master. As arbitrary as it sounds, I think 200gb discs with HEVC compression can be virtually indistinguishable from the master, assuming the compression is optimised.

8k is utterly pointless IMO. We've seen that the biggest difference between 2k and 4k is how the grain is rendered in film based content with marginal but welcome improvements in true spatial resolution. Modern, digitally shot 4k content looks almost the same in 2k as it does in 4k. The increase in bandwidth for 8k will never be worth the almost imperceptible increase in visual fidelity. You'd probably have to sit less than a meter away from a 90"+ TV to notice any difference.

[matbezlima]

I mean, it's true that the vast majority of films wouldn't benefit from 8K. And the ones that might benefit from it would need truly gigantic screens, theater screenings.