List of UHDs that utilize 4K or Higher Masters

[Pieter V]

Originally Posted by gkolb

On my iPhone your pic of Do the Right Thing is just a tiny blank square.
Don’t know why that’s happening as you used the /bd wrapping feature.

Temp art isn't approved yet. It will work afterwards.

[qwertyuio]

Originally Posted by legends of beyond

If that's the case, you've missed out on some of the best discs on the format, and possibly bought some of the more underwhelming upgrades as well. DI/master resolution has proven to be an unreliable predictor of disc quality.

Is there another list for this, too ? Seems like it would require it's own list somewhere. Looking up individual reviews on 2K upscale 4K releases would be playing roulette with the way most people review them.
I was planning on building my collection around this list as well. A movie I shyed away from was Dracula Untold which was a 2K upscale but now I have to re-evaluate that.

[Pieter V]

[HD Goofnut]

Originally Posted by Pieter V

[Show spoiler]

Done.

[Pieter V]

[HD Goofnut]

Originally Posted by Pieter V

[Show spoiler]

Done.

[puddy77]

I was doing some reading on Pixar's Soul and came across this paper from 6 months ago: Deep Learned Super Resolution for Feature Film Production

TL;DR: They've been testing new methods of upscaling because rendering at 4k is still too expensive. One parenthetical stood out to me:

typically a small fraction of each show is rendered at 4K, and the rest is upscaled from 2K with TVIScale, as large-scale 4K rendering is cost-prohibitive

So it seems that even though Toy Story 4 and all Pixar stuff moving forward are getting 4k DIs, only a portion of each is truly rendered at 4k. For the purposes of this list, I don't think it makes a difference because it still has a 4k DI and IMO should still be included (because as we know, most 4k DI's do not contain 100% 4k elements). But it goes to show how 4k CGI (be it FX in live action or animated movies) is still crazy expensive, even for the mouse house. Plus, the examples they show with the new deep learning method are impressive. Onward looked great, and so does Soul.

[PeterTHX]

Funny how there's very much a chicken/egg issue with 4K rendering costs since the more 4K pipelines are available the cheaper it will get - except nobody wants to make the initial investments.

[Pieter V]

[HD Goofnut]

Originally Posted by Pieter V

[Show spoiler]

Done.

[Geoff D]

Originally Posted by PeterTHX

Funny how there's very much a chicken/egg issue with 4K rendering costs since the more 4K pipelines are available the cheaper it will get - except nobody wants to make the initial investments.

But who makes those investments? That's the real chicken and egg scenario here IMO. It's not the studios' responsibility as they don't own the VFX houses, so it's left to the vendors themselves.

The problem is that the VFX industry is caught up in a perpetual race to the bottom, needing to pump out thousands of shots for any given big-bastard blockbuster in an ever-decreasing amount of time, so even when pipeline improvements are made does that mean the studios would want 1000 4K shots or 4000 2K shots for the same amount of time and money spent on them?

People keep citing examples of them personally being able to crank out 4K VFX in an afternoon on a toaster or the simple numbers of how computing power is advancing, but it just doesn't scale up to the reality of the breadth and complexity of creating feature film 4K VFX. If every VFX house could quadruple their processing power and storage capacity overnight then sure, 4K would work, but again: would the studios use it to create better VFX or just crank out more VFX?

The outlier is streaming though, e.g. Netflix have been demanding 4K VFX for their in-house productions for years. But they throw a lot of money at their native productions and it helps that most of their projects aren't wall to wall VFX anyway, nor do said projects have 101 deliverables which have to be completed by X date (3D, IMAX etc) which shrinks your turnaround time. With Netflix you just deliver one 4K Dolby Vision mezzanine file and that's it.

[Geoff D]

Originally Posted by puddy77

I was doing some reading on Pixar's Soul and came across this paper from 6 months ago: Deep Learned Super Resolution for Feature Film Production

TL;DR: They've been testing new methods of upscaling because rendering at 4k is still too expensive. One parenthetical stood out to me:

So it seems that even though Toy Story 4 and all Pixar stuff moving forward are getting 4k DIs, only a portion of each is truly rendered at 4k. For the purposes of this list, I don't think it makes a difference because it still has a 4k DI and IMO should still be included (because as we know, most 4k DI's do not contain 100% 4k elements). But it goes to show how 4k CGI (be it FX in live action or animated movies) is still crazy expensive, even for the mouse house. Plus, the examples they show with the new deep learning method are impressive. Onward looked great, and so does Soul.

It's a short paper but highly revealing as to the state of things. I read it after my post above but noted with interest the comment where they say that this deep-learning enables them to make 1K renders simulate 2K. For them it helps with all their intermediate renders, i.e. not the final product, whereas all the studios will see is the ability to crank out more stuff in less time.

Also interesting was the comment about not being able to use a shot that'd been finalled because it'd still been changed after the fact, highlighting the issues that face VFX houses when things can be altered right up until the last minute. Plus the fact that the final render doesn't actually contain everything, they still need to composite in various separate elements.

I see some people talk in threads about how studios use AI upscaling blah blah to make their UHD upscales but that's bollox, most such things are still done using the nodes in Nuke or whatever as the paper says.

[Pieter V]

[HD Goofnut]

Originally Posted by Pieter V

[Show spoiler]

Done.

[Pieter V]

[HD Goofnut]

Originally Posted by Pieter V

[Show spoiler]

Done.

[Pieter V]

[HD Goofnut]

Originally Posted by Pieter V

[Show spoiler]

Done.

[Pieter V]

4k dcp.

[HD Goofnut]

Originally Posted by Pieter V

[Show spoiler]



4k dcp.

Done.