Lawrence of Arabia 4K UHD (1962)

[50strat54]

Originally Posted by James Luckard

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

Amazon is a poor guide for used or OOP music or movie items. They have restricted a lot of third party sellers. I closed my account due to the amount of paperwork they now require.

Ebay gives you your best idea of how much something used or new will cost.

Soooo Lawrence again going for decent money. I probably should sell and just wait for the inevitable 4K standard release especially since I have the digital in 4K.

[HeavyHitter]

Originally Posted by dorian

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.

Yes, they need to just optimize what they are working with today. It would be more than great. By and large, the newer scans today are quite good but the f'ing compression just craps all over them especially Paramount, but some others as well need improvement (SF, etc.).

[James Luckard]

Originally Posted by 50strat54

Amazon is a poor guide for used or OOP music or movie items. They have restricted a lot of third party sellers. I closed my account due to the amount of paperwork they now require.

Ebay gives you your best idea of how much something used or new will cost.

Soooo Lawrence again going for decent money. I probably should sell and just wait for the inevitable 4K standard release especially since I have the digital in 4K.

Lawrence UHDs are going from 100 to 200 to as high as 300 on ebay, based on completed sales from the last month or so.

I only gave the Amazon price because Brandon B said he bought it there new for $19.99.

Maybe they found a box of them in a warehouse, it happens pretty often at Amazon

[James Luckard]

Originally Posted by HeavyHitter

Yes, they need to just optimize what they are working with today. It would be more than great. By and large, the newer scans today are quite good but the f'ing compression just craps all over them especially Paramount, but some others as well need improvement (SF, etc.).

Yep, compression is a HUGE issue. Just last week, I watched Thelma & Louise on UHD, which looked like I was watching projected film, and The Firm on UHD, which looked like a poorly compressed Blu-Ray.

[CatBus]

Originally Posted by matbezlima

Always the one to bring down the mood and be negative.

What you unnecessarily said is just the obvious logic that leads to the need of backups, if one can do them. I try to have as much as possible duplicated in the two external HDs I have.

Or that the use of the term "backup" is inverted and the shiny disc is your true offline backup copy, and your rips are merely a format-shift for convenience purposes. If a lightning strike takes out both your RAID and your online backups, you may just be re-ripping again. Which is fine, because that's what backups are for.

[matbezlima]

Discs can suffer disc rot, so I wouldn't say they are a true backup. I lost my Schindler's List DVD, which is not even 10 years, to disc rot.

Hard drives and servers are the true backups, when always properly monitored.

[Brandon B]

Originally Posted by James Luckard

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

Brain fail. Thought I was in The Good the Bad and the Ugly thread. Sorry.

[Fjodor2000]

Originally Posted by James Luckard

Maybe they found a box of them in a warehouse, it happens pretty often at Amazon

But then why sell them for $19.99 when they could easily sell them for e.g. $99.99 instead?

[samuelkhan999]

Anyone still got the JP Mastered in 4K blu ray and also the 4k Blu ray? If so which is better?

To me the Mastered in 4k looks better o the caps a holic page but a first hands viewer would be appreciated.

[teddyballgame]

Putting all the quibbling aside for how it woulda coulda shoulda been 10% better, the 4k disc on a quality HDR display still trumps any SDR presentation to date. Don't kid yourself

[JohnCarpenterLives]

Originally Posted by 50strat54

Soooo Lawrence again going for decent money. I probably should sell and just wait for the inevitable 4K standard release especially since I have the digital in 4K.

Have you been paying attention to the thread for the past month or so?

It would be smart to sell now, and then get the steelbook reissue but there might actually never be a standard release. I find it baffling but here we are.
....Come to think of it, will there be Starship Troopers w/DV standard release?

[James Luckard]

Originally Posted by Fjodor2000

But then why sell them for $19.99 when they could easily sell them for e.g. $99.99 instead?

It turns out Brandon B was posting in the wrong thread, he was speaking about a different film.

That said, when Amazon finds a box of old product, they're obligated by their deals with the distributor to sell it at no more than the MSRP.

They found a box of Tarsem Singh's The Fall once, when it had been OOP for years and was going for $100 or more. They listed them at $19.99 and a bunch of us got copies before they vanished the next day.

[matbezlima]

Originally Posted by samuelkhan999

Anyone still got the JP Mastered in 4K blu ray and also the 4k Blu ray? If so which is better?

To me the Mastered in 4k looks better o the caps a holic page but a first hands viewer would be appreciated.

First, colors and brightness in the UHD won't be accurate because it's HDR converted to SDR.

Second, I still haven't found any screenshot in caps-a-holic in which the japanese blu-ray looked more detailed than the UHD.

[samuelkhan999]

Originally Posted by matbezlima

First, colors and brightness in the UHD won't be accurate because it's HDR converted to SDR.

Second, I still haven't found any screenshot in caps-a-holic in which the japanese blu-ray looked more detailed than the UHD.

I've got the LoA 4k (LG 55OLEDBX; UB820 player; DV Cinema mode). I'm thinking of switching off the HDR and emulating the Mastered in 4K blu ray.

I could be totally wrong but in the caps a holic the Mi4K looks more natural in colours whereas the 4k blu ray looks darker and feels like a silvery touch to the picture.

[matbezlima]

Originally Posted by samuelkhan999

I've got the LoA 4k (LG 55OLEDBX; UB820 player; DV Cinema mode). I'm thinking of switching off the HDR and emulating the Mastered in 4K blu ray.

I could be totally wrong but in the caps a holic the Mi4K looks more natural in colours whereas the 4k blu ray looks darker and feels like a silvery touch to the picture.

Are you sure there isn't anything wrong with your display? Whatever criticisms there are of this UHD, the color grading and HDR are not among them. This thread is filled with comments about how stunningly beautiful it is. Please check out Geoff D's review, he goes in deep detail about it all.

https://forum.blu-ray.com/showpost.p...&postcount=531

"Colour-wise I though this looked marvellous. The sunrise scenes in the desert burn with fiery intensity, blue skies run genuinely, deeply blue, and the splashes of red in the costumes are eye-catchingly vivid, all more saturated than they are on the 2012 Blu-ray. But this is not some simple global boosting of the colour as the skin tones actually appear slightly cooler than they do in the previous 2012 Blu-ray, losing that orangey tone and retaining more variance, and even the desert sands themselves have less of a ruddy tint, looking harsher and more foreboding on UHD. Interestingly enough the 2013 Japanese 'Mastered in 4K' Blu-ray release already made some of these changes to the grading, so what we see on the UHD isn't an intervention solely derived from the HDR pass. Lawrence's flowing white robes had something of a creamier hue on the 2012 BD but now look a purer white.

The HDR implementation is, as already mentioned, fairly restrained for Sony. I say "for Sony" because it still hits over 1000 nits peak brightness in the first part of the film and still has quite perky average brightness throughout, so it never looks too dim or dark unless it's supposed to. You don't really gain much range in the vast expanses of sky - apart from the restoration artefacts - because they're so broad and flat a lot of the time, looking either blue or a diffuse white. There's a little tickle of extra range there but it's mainly Lawrence's robes and other items of white clothing where the differences are more keenly felt. Again, you don't get masses and masses of extra highlight detail but the way that the light reflects off of the costumes adds so much nuance and texture to them, when Lawrence is admiring his reflection in his dagger his robes look bright but dull in SDR, while in HDR they're transformed. One of my favourite moments is when Auda sees that white horse on the train, the way that the horse's coat shimmers in HDR is almost mystical. I loved the black levels too, they're not so fierce as to destroy detail in the shadows in the exteriors but there are several interior shots inside tents and whatnot that have a sumptuously dense look, creating that truly glossy 'large format' feel at last."

[matbezlima]

Originally Posted by samuelkhan999

I've got the LoA 4k (LG 55OLEDBX; UB820 player; DV Cinema mode). I'm thinking of switching off the HDR and emulating the Mastered in 4K blu ray.

I could be totally wrong but in the caps a holic the Mi4K looks more natural in colours whereas the 4k blu ray looks darker and feels like a silvery touch to the picture.

Again, you shouldn't judge the colors on the 4K disc based on caps-a-holic screenshots. They're not accurate. This applies to all screenshots EVERYWHERE of 4K HDR discs.

[d3nt0n]

Originally Posted by matbezlima

Again, you shouldn't judge the colors on the 4K disc based on caps-a-holic screenshots. They're not accurate. This applies to all screenshots EVERYWHERE of 4K HDR discs.

It's crazy we still haven't found a good way of taking HDR screenshots. You'd probably get a better comparison if you tonemapped the SDR image to HDR instead of the other way around, but then you'd need an HDR monitor to properly view.

[matbezlima]

Originally Posted by d3nt0n

It's crazy we still haven't found a good way of taking HDR screenshots. You'd probably get a better comparison if you tonemapped the SDR image to HDR instead of the other way around, but then you'd need an HDR monitor to properly view.

With the tone-mapping problems and not wide enough color gamut of the vast majority of TVs (even within DCI-P3 space, it should have at least 95% coverage if I'm not mistaken), even HDR screenshots would often be deceitful.

[Rusty100]

Originally Posted by matbezlima

I don't think you really opened fully the pictures and zoomed in properly. The UHD looks a bit blurrier in the super fine detail overall. And if Geoff D is right, the filtering happened to alleviate film grain and restoration artefacts exposed like they weren't before by HDR.



Physical media releases will always exist, even though as a niche, and being rarer than now, specially wide releases. Like the LP market. At the worst case scenario, limited editions, in Disney Vault style, will be the standard, and often the only way films will get physical media releases in the future. I also believe there will be more services like Kaleidescape for films in the future, such services are already pretty popular in music. It's the gigantic size of film files that make it very difficult to implement any time soon. It's already a pain in the ass to download huge files to start playing a game, for example, and that's a big and fair complaint among gamers. Internet still need to improve a lot for such services to be more appealing outside of music. But the internet evolves fast. We have gone a long way from those modem connections that struggled to load even a second of a YouTube video in 144p resolution. I know that suffering.

To elaborate on a long dead discussion:
I upscaled the included 1080p to 4K and noticed it looked completely identical to the 4K UHD. There is no doubt in my mind that the UHD is just an upscale of the 1080p, be it an error or something else. The iTunes version, despite it's poor compression, resolves so much more fine detail that is completely absent in the UHD. The golfball sized grain really gives the game away. There is no greater detail on the UHD than the 1080p version

[Ernest Rister]

Originally Posted by matbezlima

For the cinematography alone, Doctor Zhivago, Ryan's Daughter and A Passage To Índia should have 4K releases too. I feel like it's their mixed critical reception (and extremely negative in Ryan's Daughter case), often seen as lesser works, that truly keeps them from being released in the format. But I believe we'll eventually get in the next few years at least Doctor Zhivago.

David Lean, outside of Kwai and Lawrence, doesn't have the same level of directorial prestige as Hitchcock or Kubrick, which means nowhere near the same amount of push to have all his films available in the latest and greatest format.

I think it might be a sales issue...not a prestige issue, Matbezlima. Ryan's Daughter and A Passage to India were not big movers in home video units, but everybody has nothing but respect for David Lean. His acclaimed version of Oliver Twist wouldn't be a revenue smash, either, but its well-regarded among film buffs. I think well see Snakes on a Plane in 4K before Lean's Oliver Twist.