Pitch Perfect 4K UHD (2012)

[Geoff D]

Been meaning to watch this flick for years (not just on 4K, I mean in general) and colour me surprised, I really dug it. Love the humour, love the music, the story's routine underdog fayre to be sure but it's brought to life by Kendrick and co. The goofball announcers are what won me over almost immediately, when the dude said "women are about as good at a capella as they are at being doctors" I damned near spat out my beer and there's plenty more madness like that in the film.

The UHD though, oh mai. Oh MAI is it pretty. One thing to state is that the 1080p Blu-ray already looks excellent, particularly in terms of spatial resolution as it looks so crisp and the upscaled UHD can do no better. I'd even say that the UHD looks a fraction - just a fraction - softer because of a de-noising pass that's been carried out, not that this is some DNR disaster as it's nothing of the sort but there's a tiny bit more texture on the BD and a bit more glossiness on the UHD, if that makes sense. Something that I've found with digitally-shot movies vs film is that the digital stuff reacts much better to being de-noised, it rarely looks plasticky and false because digital has so much underlying acuity and repeatable stability that it still retains a bucketload of detail, usually enough to break through any notion of it looking artificially waxy e.g. 10 Cloverfield, Deadpool.

But so much of what makes film film is due to the detail being an intrinsic component of the grain and vice versa, along with film's inherent instability that also affects resolution, however slight. When film gets de-grained something happens to the very finest details, they're usually obliterated because they're just not constant from frame to frame and you end up with something that's terminally smooth, no longer looking like film but not looking like the true sharpness of video either, being some bastard child that belongs to neither world. (This is why Lowry's process rebuilds detail by analysing each frame against its neighbours, basically extracting whatever's there in one frame and replacing it in another frame that's not as sharp. It's a very expensive process though, and its effect hasn't always been as, ah, transparent as people would like so it seems to have fallen out of favour.)

Back to the UHD then, the thing that sets it apart is the colour and the HDR. Colour gets a beautiful boost, skin tones looking fuller and richer than they do on the SDR Blu-ray and the various coloured lighting used in the stage performances has a more intensely saturated feel. The Blu doesn't have a blanket tint as such which is why it already looks so damned good but the UHD ramps it up some more without looking too gaudy. HDR I thought was excellent, it's not the most revealing of grades when you compare certain things to the SDR like blown-out skies and other exterior lighting sources, as the HDR adds a touch of extra highlight but generally still has quite a clipped feeling to it - and yet with the HDR brightness it still has an immediacy and a realism and a three-dimensional quality that the SDR sorely lacks.

The same generally holds true for the interiors as you won't see every filament in every bulb BUT it seems to retain more highlight detail indoors, as the light bouncing off of the stage floors doesn't burn out as quickly as it does in SDR. The backlighting on the characters looks so stunning though, I can't emphasise enough how delicious I think this looks in HDR. Black levels are very good as well, all too often the temptation for colourists is to reverse whatever decisions were made in the SDR version for the sake of it (turning letterbox blacks into just above black and vice versa) but there's a welcome sense of continuity here between the two grades and the darker scenes are just very well balanced, not looking grey as shit but not soaking up all shadow detail either.

No encoding issues to report and it was shot on digital so naturally there's no dirt, damage or wobble to contend with. One very nerdy niggle (as if this post isn't nerdy enough, oy vey) is that for the UHD they replaced the 'Universal 100th Anniversary' logo - the movie having been released in 2012, Uni's centenary year - with the regular logo. I mean, sure, the 100th logo wasn't some incredibly lavish piece of custom animation but I still hate to see stuff like this getting removed. I'll live, mind you.