Inglourious Basterds (2009) 4K HDR10 review, US Universal UHD disc. HDR metadata: P3-D65 colour primaries. Mastering display levels: 1000/0.005 max/min nits. Maximum Content Light Level: 970 nits. Maximum Frame Average Light Level: 478 nits.
Quentin Tarantino's fantastical WWII adventure marked his third movie with cinematographer Robert Richardson after Kill Bill Vols 1 & 2, and after shooting those films on 3-perf Super 35 they switched to anamorphic 35mm for the Basterds. Unlike some directors Tarantino is not fascinated by old lenses for the sake of it, his production employing Panavision's newer Primo and G-series anamorphics to retain a crisp, sharp look that wasn't beholden to the peripheral distortion and lens flares that other directors characterise - or almost caricature - as being traits of anamorphic. With minimal flaring and a deeper depth of field obtained by closing down the lenses an extra stop (smaller aperture = greater depth of field) Richardson's camera assistant remarked to American Cinematographer (September 2009 issue) that "the Primos held up best in terms of overall resolution".
And, yes, the movie was finished to a 2K Digital Intermediate (DI). Richardson first twisted Tarantino's arm to use a DI on the Kill Bills because they were shooting in Super 35 and couldn't get first generation prints to view in dailies (the spherical process having to undergo an optical squeeze on prints to be viewed in the intended 'scope 2.35 ratio, edit: tho it's likelier that they couldn't get hold of any 3-perf projektors which is why they couldn't screen first gen dailies), and both men were also leery of their past experiences with Super 35 and the quality of the final prints that resulted. Despite the switch to anamorphic capture for Basterds they continued with the digital process, albeit under Tarantino's ever-sceptical eye of anything marked 'digital', enlisting colour-timer-turned-colourist Yvan Lucas to grade the show and he's worked on every Tarantino movie since then. And yet despite Tarantino's stated distaste for ones and zeroes there's far more digital trickery in Inglourious Basterds than people may think:
https://www.awn.com/vfxworld/dykstra...rious-basterds.
Not so much for vast swathes of entirely CG creations but the sort of digital tidy-up that's common to films nowadays to erase rigs, squibs, wires, people etc that shouldn't be in the shot and also to enhance what's there, like muzzle flashes from guns, greenscreen inserts for windows (the scene in M. LaPedite's farmhouse was shot partly on location and partly on a soundstage, you'd never know the difference), and even the cows in the background of the opening scene are digitally composited in there. So this 2K digital master is the final finished record of the film, the primary source from which all other subsequent deliverables are created, even including the film prints as they are printed from an internegative that's recorded out from the digital master. A negative cutter is listed in the credits for the film alongside the colourists and the DI (performed at EFilm) but it's unclear as to whether a complete conformed negative was created or whether this person was enlisted to cut together all the material once it'd been recorded out.
Does this mean that the UHD is presumably an upscale from that digital source master, like so many other 2K movies before it? Yes, but the answer isn't as straightforward as people may think because the movie was shot anamorphic, 'squeezing' a widescreen image onto an almost square piece of film using special lenses. As was pointed out by Chris Muth in this thread, if the anamorphosis is kept throughout the mastering chain of the digital intermediate - say, 2048x1716 as a very rough guide, slightly less if scanning 2K fullap and then extracting the sound offset frame from that - then it will literally retain double the pixels of the eventual 'desqueezed' 2.39 output of 2048x858 as intended for digital projection. When you do that desqueeze to flat 2K and halve the vertical resolution for projection then you lose that advantage, but if you upscale the horizontal resolution x2 you end up with a 4096x1716 4K master that retains everything in that 'squeezed' 2048x1716 source file. Double the pixels than flat 2K doesn't mean it becomes "true 4K" but it results in appreciable differences nonetheless, there have been a great many upscales on UHD that I've seen which have palpably more spatial resolution than the Blu-ray counterpart and most of them were shot anamorphic. Other reasons like a pre-filtered Blu-ray might factor into the UHD looking so much sharper in comparison, but there are too many anamorphic shows that give great upscale for it to be a coincidence. Inglourious Basterds not only joins those ranks but may yet be one of the best-looking UHD upscales
ever.
The very first thing that washes over you when you see the first shot on the farm is the grain, oh it's delicious. So utterly delicious. It's extremely fine, delicate perhaps when compared to the coarseness of some movies, but it's also wonderfully dense at the same time and imparts a fabulously filmic feel from the start. The 1080p Blu-ray in comparison looks surprisingly soft, virtually grainless in many scenes, not DNR'ed as such but the compression can't hang on to everything and the high frequency information seen on this UHD is simply not there on the Blu-ray. It's just gone. The Blu still has a nice 'look' in itself but my god, the detail increase is incredible on the UHD. Practically everything gets a boost, from the lines, hairs, pores and stubble on people's faces to the weave and stitching on clothing to the deepest background details. I mean, if it wasn't for the aliasing I'd swear that this actually IS "true 4K" such is the level of sharpness here, and doing a 2K downscale->4K upscale test on still images reveals a sigificant loss in those high frequencies i.e. there IS 2K+ detail here, no question.
Ah yes, the aliasing: bane of the ultra-zoomed in cap comparison, yet literally invisible in motion from my 65" TV when viewed from 7ft away. Not saying it isn't there because it is, but I cannot see it from where I'm sitting. Bigger screens and closer viewing distances may well be less forgiving, and if the aliasing were on horizontal details rather than vertical I'd be much more sensitive to it, but dumb ****ing luck aside it's still a non-issue. And there is no "edge enhancement" here whatsoever, no haloing or ringing around contrasting edges
unlike the Blu-ray, which shows some ringing inside the white lettering of the titles and chapter headings whereas the UHD is much cleaner. Heck, even the lettering itself looks more jagged and aliased on the Blu, the yellow subtitles for dialogue (thankfully burnt in on this US disc) in particular look VERY sharply defined on the UHD. Dare I say they've been re-rendered in 4K for this master?
Regarding the HDR, first another little primer: the cinematographer is famous for his style of having a hard, fierce light beaming down onto his actors. Remember all that top lighting in Casino? That was Richardson. He might even bristle at the notion of being pigeonholed as 'the top-light guy' but it permeates his filmography and it's omnipresent in Inglourious Basterds. Richardson isn't even all that concerned about there being an 'in world' source for that top light in whatever scene, it's the lighting itself that's more important in creating the mood and atmosphere that he and the director wants. And when we get that first interior scene with Landa interrogating LaPedite, wow, the intensity of that top light is dazzling in HDR...yet not overwhelming to this viewer. Not uncomfortable visually. It's entirely in-keeping with translating Richardson's style - that some commentators are clearly blissfully unaware of - into HDR, and contrary to what the screen caps in the usual places might indicate there is no highlight detail being lost vs the SDR version, quite the opposite in fact. It's fair to say that the additional amount of highlight information that's retained doesn't expand massively on the SDR but it's there anyway, like with the empty glass on the table in the farmhouse, you can see more of the graining on the wood as well as more of the dregs of milk in the glass itself. And this manifests in every scene lit with such strong light, indoors and out, that intensity is there and it doesn't give up every last bit of range because it wasn't meant to, but it still extracts more range that gives volume to those areas that are just blank, white and washed out on the SDR. Some of those shots of Shoshanna hit with loads of backlight are just amazing. Still look gorgeous in the SDR, but a knockout in HDR.
The black levels are another bone of contention and, well, people just don't like thin milky blacks, it's not something we're programmed to respond to visually (unless you're Chris Nolan, lol) and so whenever the black level gets 'opened up' like this it's always going to be controversial. The white-on-black credits and chapter titles have indeed gone from a deep letterbox black in SDR to much more of a raised grey in HDR, but you know what? In the live action proper the blacks don't drop to a total letterbox darkness in the SDR - save maybe a shot or two during 'the bear jew's introduction - and they have quite a thin, 'raised' look throughout the movie. Now, does the UHD lighten this black level
further in the live action? Yes. Did it affect my enjoyment one iota? No, and I'll tell you for why: the UHD genuinely looks MORE contrasty than the BD because of that piercing brightness of the highlights in the HDR. And on top of that you get far more coherent shadow detail in the darker portions of the image on the UHD, which when combined with the additional highlight detail (however minimal it may appear) gives this HDR grade a more expansive feeling than the SDR Blu. Not something that's completely wrecking the intent but just opening it up a little at either end which gives the image more depth, more shading, and less of a two-dimensional appearance.
The colour falls under that remit as well, it doesn't seek to reinvent what's already there but there are subtle differences here. In a reversal of the normal situation the UHD has a yellower tint than what the Blu does, the latter having much warmer, rosier skin tones while the UHD's are more buttery. Slightly less romantic perhaps, given that this is another of QT's "Once Upon a Time..." fairytales, but it works for me. Primaries still seem sumptuously saturated mind you, like the rolling green fields of the farm or the red Nazi banners strung up in Shoshanna's cinema. Though where the SDR still has an excess of a bluey/green tint is in the darker scenes, they seem a bit more 'blue steel' than the yellower look on the UHD. One other thing I really loved about the UHD's colour is how the uniforms look, Landa's grey SS garb skews towards a very faint purple in the SDR, such is the abundance of warmth in the SDR colour balance, whereas in the UHD his outfit is now properly green/grey as it should be. Fire still has a strong yellow/orange hue much like the Blu does, only now it feels 100x more striking with the HDR brightness added to it.
Compression-wise this is very much a Universal joint: not great, not terrible. When there's as much grain and high frequency detail as this then the chroma containment always seems to get shortchanged, it can make colour seem a little smudgy and noisy when you get a big close-up of someone's face but that is entirely a compression issue (starting to think that HEVC wasn't cut out for this HDR lark) and has absolutely nothing to do with this being an upscale. But something that can happen whenever black levels are 'opened up' on an older DI like this is that things are exposed in the shadows that weren't meant to be exposed, often resulting in visible power windows, posterisation in areas of gradation from light to dark or when scenes fade up/down from black, but this here UHD has a superb grasp of that tonal range, never breaking up into banding in the lowlights (or highs for that matter) and as this is a QT film then he doesn't do power windows in his DIs so the shadows are very 'clean', there's no digital schmutz lurking.
Basically this UHD is glourious. Super-sharp grain and detail plus zingy HDR that really plays up the style of the cinematographer. The aliasing is curious but thankfully proved to be a non-issue in motion, same for the lighter black levels.
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(caps' #1 says it all) And would've thought you saying so and complaining about it instead of goshing about it tbh. If the DI looks like that at source, fine, it is what is, but it doesn't look filmic, no. And I get the same sharpened/harsh impression elsewhere as well. I am by no means devaluating your opinion, I'm just giving another one. 
(not saying that I prefer the soft BD)
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