The Wages of Fear 4K UHD (1953) (BFI)

[nicwood]

Originally Posted by JohnCarpenterLives

To my amateur eyes BFI beats Crit. What is the consensus amongst the professionals here?

In my unprofessional opinion, it’s the other way round:

Originally Posted by nicwood

I’ve now received my Criterion 4K set and am now also convinced that the Criterion is the one to go - not because it appears slightly finer-grained than the BFI, which it does, but the vastly different grayscale the SDR and HDR versions have.

I imagine Fidelity did the HDR grade but can’t say for certain as there’s no info about that in the BFI booklet. Still, as much as I love and respect David’s work, I don’t think it’s an entirely convincing grade now that I’ve seen the (likely) original SDR grade. The HDR grade is flatter, leans more monochrome grey without real highlights rather than the contrasty black and white we see in SDR on the Criterion.

When the BFI came out, I highly praised their 4K disc and would do exactly the same again *because we didn’t have any other 4K disc to compare against*. Isolated from the Criterion, it’s still a beautiful encode and I would’ve been glad to ride into sunset with that release had we not received Criterion’s alternative.

Everything else’s been said re. the two versions and I believe the only thing that wasn’t mentioned is that the Criterion has minor blocking in the brightest of highlights here and there. Nothing I’d call substantial enough to pick another option solely because of that.

I also watched the restoration BTS video on the BD and it’s relatively insubstantial. They scanned the negative on a Scanity via wetgate and made sure to preserve and restore the original look of the film as much as possible without filtering or NR. According to the person speaking, they used a 35mm print from the time to base their grading on, which Guillaume Schiffman supervised as he’s an admirer / student of the film’s DP’s work. Sound was also restored from the original soundtrack negative (I believe) without altering the original mix. The sound neg scan was done to avoid the result sounding muffled or "metallic" depending on the settings. Afterwards they removed all the imperfections as usual.