The Ten Commandments 4K UHD (1956)

[DrEricVornoff]

Absolutely Day 1 for me as well! I already have my 4K Spartacus!

[BenjaminG]

Originally Posted by Scottishguy

Paramount really is weird though when it comes to choosing what gets put on UHD Blu-ray outside of tie ins.
Ghost? Airplane? Nope.

Or, y'know. Star Trek.

[Scottishguy]

Originally Posted by BenjaminG

Or, y'know. Star Trek.

Can't wait to hear all the complaints about the TNG film's looking visually bland.

[daycity]

Keeping an open mind but I'm none too happy that they're going to go with just the 1 disc for this.

Nearly 4 hours of footage with uncompressed audio and HDR seems to be pushing their luck.

[Poya]

150 hours? That’s 5 times Kino spent on the GBU remaster!

[Scottishguy]

Originally Posted by Poya

150 hours? That’s 5 times Kino spent on the GBU remaster!

Well, they can afford to pay them for 150 hours of work.

[Archivy]

Gorgeous covert art!

[FilmFreakosaurus]

Originally Posted by daycity

Keeping an open mind but I'm none too happy that they're going to go with just the 1 disc for this.

Nearly 4 hours of footage with uncompressed audio and HDR seems to be pushing their luck.

If this was Disney they would put it all on a BD-66 too. The cheap f**kers.

[Geoff D]

Originally Posted by FilmFreakosaurus

Did anyone cringe at their statement that they smoothed out the optical effects? Slathered DNR all over the image is what they are talking about unless they were able to take the raw matte negative plates and digitally re-comp them.

You can still stabilise disparate elements, clean up mattes, remove wires etc without having to recomp it from the OG plates. Then again, I'm pretty sure that Paramount did indeed recomp some of the martian death ray shots in the 4K remaster of War of the Worlds '53.

Originally Posted by daycity

Keeping an open mind but I'm none too happy that they're going to go with just the 1 disc for this.

Nearly 4 hours of footage with uncompressed audio and HDR seems to be pushing their luck.

I'm 50/50 on it. Unlike, say, LOTR, these kinds of old-school epics don't have a vast amount of sweeping camera moves or super hectic fight scenes to have to deal with, a lot of it is just people talking. There are still some 'busier' scenes of coursh, but in the right hands the encode will be fine. It'll be in 1.78 so that won't help though (as black bars mean less image to encode) but at least it won't have a zillion language tracks vying for space.

The current BD has a few, however they're all low bitrate DD 2.0 tracks that take up less than 1 Mb/s between them so that won't hurt. And HDR as a system takes up a tiny amount of extra space, it's a myth that it's a space hogger...although as this will have Dobly then it'll prolly be FEL and so that will indeed eat into the main layer's bitrate. Say, 4 Mb/s for that, 6 Mb/s for the combined audio, that leaves 45 Mb/s for the main movie. But those are just average bitrates, they'll go higher and lower and I think it'll be okay.

[Scottishguy]

You took your time showing up Geoff.

[Geoff D]

Originally Posted by Scottishguy

You took your time showing up Geoff.

[TheBondFan]

Imagine if we had a 6k disc.

[Scottishguy]

Anyway, back to.

As Geoff has explained numerous times, Paramount seems to at least have 2 teams. A very very A team, and a very very B team. Though I'd say there is 3, the archive one. Which is essentially a specialised A team for your 40s/50s/60s stuff.

And it seems like said archive team has been extremely busy. Maybe this is a response to strong sales of It's A Wonderful Life. Hence why SB never landed for it's anniversary. It was just caught between sales figures coming through, and plans being drawn up for future restorations and releases.

Whatever the case may be, the ball is rolling like the boulder in Raiders now.

So I'd not sweat the one disc thing. If the archive lot have green lit that, I'm 99% confident it's going to be fabulous.

[FilmFreakosaurus]

Originally Posted by TheBondFan

Imagine if we had a 6k disc.

Paramount probably scanned it at 6k to over-sample the data when converting to a 4k master. I would have thought something like a VistaVision negative would at least get scanned at 8k.

[Scottishguy]

Originally Posted by FilmFreakosaurus

Paramount probably scanned it at 6k to over-sample the data when converting to a 4k master. I would have thought something like a VistaVision negative would at least get scanned at 8k.

Probably cost them a fortune at the time to do 6K, no idea how many weeks that would take to process back then. David M?

[Geoff D]

Originally Posted by Scottishguy

Probably cost them a fortune at the time to do 6K, no idea how many weeks that would take to process back then. David M?

You make it sound like 2010 was the dark ages. 6K was/is a lot of data to be sure, but the image would've likely been reverted to 4K for actual mastering and clean up, just like what Sony did with Lawrence a couple of years later (8K scan, with resultant files vaulted, but all restoration work was done on 4K downrezzed data).

Originally Posted by FilmFreakosaurus

Paramount probably scanned it at 6k to over-sample the data when converting to a 4k master. I would have thought something like a VistaVision negative would at least get scanned at 8k.

VistaVision is scanned perf to perf just like regular 35mm so it used the same scanner as what they'd use for regular 35mm, but instead of the usual 4096x3112 they output it at 4096x6144 instead, with the 4K as the 'height' of the image and 6K as the 'width' (becuz VV is turned 90 degrees). Spartacus was scanned the same way for its 4K restoration six years ago.

[sfmarine]

If this restoration was done by the same team that ended up working on It's A Wonderful Life, then I am very excited.

Really loving that they went with the classic poster for the artwork.
Add me to the Day 1 club!

[Scottishguy]

As explained here, from 5 year's ago. A 4K scan took 16 days.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Odjq...ature=youtu.be

[Geoff D]

Originally Posted by Scottishguy

As explained here, from 5 year's ago. A 4K scan took 16 days.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Odjq...ature=youtu.be

One thing is not the other. The physical scanning process will always take time, you can't just whizz thousands of feet of precious OG negative through there as quickly as possible. What happens to the data from there on out depends on a variety of factors. Of coursh it took time but I'm not sure of what you mean by "how many weeks it took to process", it's not like they had to wait hours just for each frame to ouput from the scanner. They won't have worked in 4K resolution when grading the show, just 2K proxies, nor would they for the QC pass when checking the raw scans for damage, they could do that stuff in real time. But as the dirt/scratch removal is usually very labour intensive anyway then working on the 2K or 4K (in 2K quadrants if need be) doesn't add a great deal of extra time into the process, it's the final render of those finished files that's always the killer, then and now.

[ilenewoodsfan99]

Originally Posted by Geoff D

You can still stabilise disparate elements, clean up mattes, remove wires etc without having to recomp it from the OG plates. Then again, I'm pretty sure that Paramount did indeed recomp some of the martian death ray shots in the 4K remaster of War of the Worlds '53.


I'm 50/50 on it. Unlike, say, LOTR, these kinds of old-school epics don't have a vast amount of sweeping camera moves or super hectic fight scenes to have to deal with, a lot of it is just people talking. There are still some 'busier' scenes of coursh, but in the right hands the encode will be fine. It'll be in 1.78 so that won't help though (as black bars mean less image to encode) but at least it won't have a zillion language tracks vying for space.

The current BD has a few, however they're all low bitrate DD 2.0 tracks that take up less than 1 Mb/s between them so that won't hurt. And HDR as a system takes up a tiny amount of extra space, it's a myth that it's a space hogger...although as this will have Dobly then it'll prolly be FEL and so that will indeed eat into the main layer's bitrate. Say, 4 Mb/s for that, 6 Mb/s for the combined audio, that leaves 45 Mb/s for the main movie. But those are just average bitrates, they'll go higher and lower and I think it'll be okay.

The only scenes that would worry me greatly "action" wise are the parting of the red sea and the "orgy" sequence.