The Fog (1980) 4K UHD

[Geoff D]

Originally Posted by Matt89

So mine showed up yesterday, wow these are really nice sets. Had to check out the climax of The Fog that everyone's been talking about and wow yeah, the compression in that shot is shockingly bad. YouTube-level bad. There is also a bit of weird grain on the first daytime shot with Andy on the beach. It looks sort of frozen, so I popped the blu-ray in to compare and it seems to be better resolved on the blu-ray but I feel like the issue is more to do with the shot itself. Overall though, honestly it's a gorgeous transfer. The blu-ray is really nice too (it definitely has better compression in those select scenes and it's a big step above the SF transfer) but the film grain on the UHD is glorious.

Yes, I pegged the first shot of Andy at the beach also, the grain does some very funky things. While the shot itself is an optical (for the fade in) I can assure everyone that an optical doesn't make the grain freeze and break up into lots of ugly macroblocks, it's another example of SC taking their eye off the ball. The weird thing is, I could swear that most of the opticals in the movie seem to be quite blocky and nasty (only not as obvious as the Andy shot), it's almost as if StudioCanal's encoder turned the bitrate down every time there was an optical which is a very stupid thing to do as the coarser, noisier grain of those shots needs MORE bitrate, not less.

Originally Posted by The Fallen Deity

I just don't understand how SC can drop the ball on the compression when they did a great job with They Live.

There's a bit in They Live's 4K where it definitely goes down macroblock avenue, and - surprisingly enough - it's on a shot with a lot of smoke and bright light (when Nada is running away from the second police raid and there are lots of those red flares on the ground) which is what trips up The Fog's 4K so badly. I don't think there's any deliberate improvement on SC's behalf here, that's giving them way too much credit. IMO it's because the source itself is so much brighter and a lot less grainy than The Fog that the encoder isn't troubled by it, but as soon as it comes under any kind of pressure it shits the bed big time. This is what makes me very worried for how EFNY's UHD will turn out as it's another earlier effort shot with less than stellar glass (made only a year after The Fog) and featuring a lot of darkness and a fair bit of flame and smoke here and there.