Ghostbusters 4K UHD (1984)

[HD Goofnut]

Originally Posted by DR Herbert West

Part II Caps

Even less of a difference than the first film.

[Torgon]

Originally Posted by Geoff D

Oh I get it, I mean I literally said in my own review that some, maybe even many, won't see any differences at all when viewing them on their own setups, and might even come away thinking that the new one is softer because the grain is finer and the DV playback slightly duller. Hell, things like this are one of the great forum divides because to some folks they can see it clear as day, others wouldn't in a month of scrutinising, and many are sitting far enough away to the point where things like DNR, sharpening and poor compression are all but invisible.

Paraphrasing and out of context (from original post): This is who I think buy DVDs in general and watch them on their 4K sets, lol.

[PonyoBellanote]

Originally Posted by HD Goofnut

Even less of a difference than the first film.

Same exact master, just different HDR treating and less compressed. And that's not a bad thing, it's an enhancement. Did people really expect any visual difference when if so it'd mostly be visible on TVs with DV panels?

[George.P]

Originally Posted by andreasy969

EDIT: I'm afraid no one, except for some of us nerds, even knows how such Dolby Stereo tracks are supposed to be played these days...

I would be one of these unknowing people, and have been curious about this issue. I am into CDs and vinyl, so mostly 2-channel audio. In such a case, I wouldn’t typically pump the stereo track into more than 2 speakers, but I keep reading about folks here taking 2.0 stereo and pushing it through a 5.1 setup. It would seem that in most cases the way it works for movies is that you should be able to decode 2.0 in such a way that you can run it multichannel without “vocals” being sent to all the speakers. Or at least that is how interpret the issue, but not not sure if I am missing something.

[batman2000]

Originally Posted by DR Herbert West

Part II Caps

What’s the point it doesn’t show if the contrast isn’t overblown anymore on the sequel either. so both caps a holic caps show no true difference it was a waste of time putting them up on the site in the first place then in my eyes.

[Geoff D]

Originally Posted by batman2000

What’s the point it doesn’t show if the contrast isn’t overblown anymore on the sequel either. so both caps a holic caps show no true difference it was a waste of time putting them up on the site in the first place then in my eyes.

This and the first film are virtually identical, master-wise, to the first UHDs. If anything they're fractionally BRIGHTER on the new ones and GBII has a tiny extra point of red. It's the Dobly making the key difference as to whether they look hot AF on whatever TV any more.

[andreasy969]

Originally Posted by George.P

I would be one of these unknowing people, and have been curious about this issue. I am into CDs and vinyl, so mostly 2-channel audio. In such a case, I wouldn’t typically pump the stereo track into more than 2 speakers, but I keep reading about folks here taking 2.0 stereo and pushing it through a 5.1 setup. It would seem that in most cases the way it works for movies is that you should be able to decode 2.0 in such a way that you can run it multichannel without “vocals” being sent to all the speakers. Or at least that is how interpret the issue, but not not sure if I am missing something.

I also pump 2.0 stereo into my 2 speakers (and actually despise upmixing and run almost source direct), but Dolby Stereo isn't stereo. Dolby Stereo is a legacy 4-channel surround format (from the old analogue days) where 4 channels have been matrix encoded into a 2 channels signal. One can listen to this in stereo or extract the 4 channels via an according decoder. It is kinda the poor man's surround compared to modern discrete multi channel formats, but it adds (relatively poor) mono surround and sends the dialogue to the center, hence is better than stereo for movies at any rate. And it's not an upmix.

For home entertainment systems the according decoders were called Dolby Surround, Dolby Pro Logic, Dolby Pro Logic II (upmixing started with this one IIRC) and a couple more (IMO unimportant) iterations.

[George.P]

Thank you, extremely helpful.

[andreasy969]

Originally Posted by George.P

Thank you, extremely helpful.

This here (the interesting part starts at "Four From Two"), it's the next best site I just found mind you, also explains how the 4-channels-in-2-channels are achieved - I'm afraid I can't explain this from scratch myself anymore and would have to read it up again. But it's not voodoo.

Anyway, with the 2.0 Dolby Stereo of the Ghostbusters 4Ks, something has to be wrong in regard to how they achieved it - something being out of phase whatsoever. With the 2.0 of the BDs it works as expected. With my setup that is at any rate.

[PonyoBellanote]

By the way, who and how are the comparisons submitted to that site? Because I find it funny the comparisons are done only a bit after the discs "leak"..

[Geoff D]

Originally Posted by andreasy969

This here (the interesting part starts at "Four From Two"), it's the next best site I just found mind you, also explains how the 4-channels-in-2-channels are achieved - I'm afraid I can't explain this from scratch myself anymore and would have to read it up again. But it's not voodoo.

Anyway, with the 2.0 Dolby Stereo of the Ghostbusters 4Ks, something has to be wrong in regard to how they achieved it - something being out of phase whatsoever. With the 2.0 of the BDs it works as expected. With my setup that is at any rate.

I think that might be the problem with the GB 2.0s, yep: they've been mastered with the phase inverted. So what's in-phase and would normally come from the fronts is coming from the rears, and vice versa. How someone even manages to flip the phase when mastering it is baffling but there was still some kind of demented/misguided thought process there as both of the 2.0 tracks are affected as we know.

[Gold Ranger]

Didn't this happen but with the Left and Right Rears swapped with the Star Wars DVDs?

[Geoff D]

Originally Posted by Gold Ranger

Didn't this happen but with the Left and Right Rears swapped with the Star Wars DVDs?

Not quite. They flopped the music in the rears on the Star Wars DVD, not the whole mix of music & effects. This "deliberate creative decision" was explained away as the masters for the music not containing any surround information, so they added some reverb of the stereo music to the rears and flopped it to decorrelate it (so it didn't sound exactly the same as the music coming from the front). I think that was a load of bullshit, but when has that ever stopped Star Wars from getting ****ed up by LFL?

[KMFDMvsEnya]

I get that some perceive the difference in the encodes to be imperceptible but for me even on my lowly 60" VT60 the encode for GB1 is a very appreciable improvement with superior fine detail fidelity and increased temporal visual information. Literally getting more actual whole original images rather than partial reconstructed frames.

Considering they stem from the exact same transfer it is an interesting comparison between the older but relatively speaking respectable encode with the new one the improved fine detail fidelity shows how grain is impacted with more lean encode settings.
Qualities that one or two have argued in the past are due to scanner noise or whatever excuses to bang on why grain is unnecessary or screenshots provide no evaluative value.

Even with HDR-SDR GB1 average picture level is unnecessarily elevated yet acceptable for the most part via madvr, a friend with a recent OLED says it is still way too elevated, but GB2 far too often looks overly lit. Ridiculously so but not as bad as Starship Troopers.

Cannot comment yet on the stereo tracks while being upmixed to surround but may rip the blu-ray stereo tracks to compare them later.

[Rayjg]

So this release was pretty much a full cock up. Missing and duplicated discs and slips, shitty packaging, messed up original audio, wrong TV cuts, yada yada yada. I’d say they’ll fix these for the next release a year from now but this sold out as is, so...

[Geoff D]

Originally Posted by KMFDMvsEnya

I get that some perceive the difference in the encodes to be imperceptible but for me even on my lowly 60" VT60 the encode for GB1 is a very appreciable improvement with superior fine detail fidelity and increased temporal visual information. Literally getting more actual whole original images rather than partial reconstructed frames.

Considering they stem from the exact same transfer it is an interesting comparison between the older but relatively speaking respectable encode with the new one the improved fine detail fidelity shows how grain is impacted with more lean encode settings.
Qualities that one or two have argued in the past are due to scanner noise or whatever excuses to bang on why grain is unnecessary or screenshots provide no evaluative value.

Even with HDR-SDR GB1 average picture level is unnecessarily elevated yet acceptable for the most part via madvr, a friend with a recent OLED says it is still way too elevated, but GB2 far too often looks overly lit. Ridiculously so but not as bad as Starship Troopers.

Cannot comment yet on the stereo tracks while being upmixed to surround but may rip the blu-ray stereo tracks to compare them later.

Yep, spot on re: the improved motion resolution for GB, it’s why seeing it in action is so crucial. The differences are much less pronounced on old vs new for GBII but at least you know it’s wringing as much out of that source as possible.

[IndyMLVC]

Originally Posted by Rayjg

So this release was pretty much a full cock up. Missing and duplicated discs and slips, shitty packaging, messed up original audio, wrong TV cuts, yada yada yada. I’d say they’ll fix these for the next release a year from now but this sold out as is, so...

Not to mention the book is a re-printing of a fan-created scan.

[Jason One]

Does anyone know if this release contains the same BDs (with the correct 2.0 tracks) that were included in the 2019 4K steelbook?

[Rayjg]

Originally Posted by IndyMLVC

Not to mention the book is a re-printing of a fan-created scan.

Ouch.

[megafan2000]

Quick checking - what's the current status of this - like is there going to be a second wave? I pre-ordered back on January 2 and still waiting. Not high on my priorities at the moment as life overall has been in the crapper since holidays but just kept it there to maintain the 100 price from Amazon. Anyone else still waiting?