The Piano 4K UHD (Studio Canal)

[Geoff D]

Originally Posted by mande2013

Aside from Le Cercle Rouge and the John Carpenter films, StudioCanal's UHDs haven't been all that bad honestly. Breathless, however, does have a compression slip-up in one brief scene towards the end.

Criterion's UHD encodes are all over the map. The Red Shoes and Raging Bull are stellar though, and Le Cercle Rouge does have a much improved encode on the Criterion disc.

Breathless’ compression is kinda shit too. Even in Dobly it looks very ‘fragile’. And Lock Up and Red Heat also say “hi”, the latter in particular is terrible. The Doors is another that’s a bit crunchy too. SC have this reputation for godawful compression for a reason, with Total Recall the gleaming turd in their crown of incompetence, as said above. Three Days of the Condor has some appalling artefacts too.

Criterion’s UHD compression is vastly betterer than what SC generally put out, but the thing with Criterion is that their authoring house seems to pre-filter everything. You get sturdier compression at the expense of losing a sliver of high frequency informazione. Tough call.