Divergent 4K UHD (2014)

[Sky_Captain]

No, it's encoded that way.

[lgans316]

Originally Posted by RockyIII

I'm getting grey bars on this title on my LG Oled TV. Did I end up with a defective disc?

You will have reduce brightness on this and Insurgent.

[RockyIII]

Originally Posted by lgans316

You will have reduce brightness on this and Insurgent.

So in standard HDR settings the bars will in fact appear grey rather than black? If I reduce brightness the picture is too dark. Only the black bars seems to be affected not the content itself. A little distracting and I'm surprised this was not mentioned in the video reviews

[levcore]

Buyer beware! It was certainly mentioned in this thread.

[lgans316]

Originally Posted by RockyIII

So in standard HDR settings the bars will in fact appear grey rather than black? If I reduce brightness the picture is too dark. Only the black bars seems to be affected not the content itself. A little distracting and I'm surprised this was not mentioned in the video reviews

Been a while since watching this series but if memory serves me right, I think reducing the Brightness by few notches helped without impacting the overall picture quality.

[RockyIII]

Originally Posted by levcore

Buyer beware! It was certainly mentioned in this thread.

Where exactly? I read the thread + official video review. Nothing of that sort was mentioned

[RockyIII]

Originally Posted by lgans316

Been a while since watching this series but if memory serves me right, I think reducing the Brightness by few notches helped without impacting the overall picture quality.

Reducing brightness to make bars black results in severe black crush within content. The issue being that it's just the bars that seem affected by elevated brightness. I rather keep the grey bars than lose information in the content itself

[levcore]

Originally Posted by Adam_ME

This one was underwhelming. I almost prefer the Blu-ray transfer. It looks washed out like Ender's Game and Expendables 3. I don't what the hell is going on with Lions Gate and their catalog titles, but they need to get this under control.

Originally Posted by DGilberts

I second that, Absolute garbage!!! Avoided Enders Game and Expendables 3, but I can see from comments on both of them that this is the same. I hear Insurgent suffers from the same issues. Hopefully the Alligaint disc isn't the same.

Just giving Now you see me a try and that's fine, so they can do a descent HDR grade of catalogue title.

Originally Posted by DGilberts

Allegiant does not suffer from the raised black levels. Thank god. However Insurgent does. So it looks like a standard Blu-Ray watch for Divergent & Insurgent and UHD for Allegiant.

Originally Posted by d514

I've got all three movies yesterday. Each one is ~57GB in size. No additional audio or subtitles tracks that are just not mentioned on the case.

I've skipped through the film for a few minutes. Picture quality is pretty good. Blacks are a little grey-ish sometimes but nothing serious. Details are slightly better than the Blu-ray. I'd say it's worth the $16.96 even if you already have it on Blu-ray.

Originally Posted by DJR662

The workaround concerning the black levels worked for me but this is unacceptable ofcourse. Get your sh*t together, Lionsgate!

Digital code from the US disc:

77T4P97Y9FRA

Originally Posted by Geoff D

Holy thread necro Geoffyman! I saw the Divergent trilogy for cheap on decluttr (£25 for all three, I've wanted to see them for a while now and thought 'eh, why not?') and they turned up yesterday. Watched Divergent (2014) and yes, just to double-triple confirm, this is indeed one of Lionsgate's discs that's been mastered with completely wrong video levels, looking ultra-washed out where even the letterbox bars are a filthy grey. I wouldn't even attempt a 'review' if this couldn't be corrected in some way, and as the 'player to Full levels, TV to Limited levels' trick doesn't work with HDR on my Sony ZD9 + OPPO 203 setup (though it still works with SDR, strangely enough) I had to resort to other methods.

Assuming that the disc is so washed out because black levels have been incorrectly mapped out to 0 (Full 0-1023 10-bit levels) prior to mastering and not the intended 64 (Limited 64-940 10-bit levels) then I'd have to adjust black manually by 64 points using the TV's controls, I did this using Ryan Masciola's excellent HDR10 test patterns. Using his 'black clipping' image I adjusted the black level to start at level 128 (the pattern is correctly encoded for Limited levels so it starts at 64, I need to adjust it by another 64 = 128) which involved changing the black level on the Sony TV from 50 to 33.

Alas, unlike a levels conversion, changing the black level so drastically using the TV's controls has a direct impact on contrast and APL (brightness output) and it reduces HDR brightness by about half which makes the image look a lot dimmer than it should be. As backlight is already maxed out in HDR then we must adjust the contrast control to compensate, this would ordinarily clip out more highlight detail but because the image has been mastered too brightly anyway then it's not damaging it. From comparing back and forth I eyeballed a level of 95 for contrast to get the same brightness as with my normal contrast setting of 86 for HDR10, upon measuring a 75% (1000 nit) HDR window the contrast needed to be set to 97 for equivalent brightness. I wasn't too far off with my guess.

So, with all that extreme nerdery out of the way I could get on with watching the disc and I liked what I saw. Despite the 2K finish the detail on this is phenomenal, there's so much texture visible on people's faces like pores and stubble it's almost unnerving (you can even see the make-up dusted onto Shailene's nose in one shot) and because it wasn't shot anamorphic apart from the hallucination scenes there's a sense of wall-to-wall crispness there. Even the VFX looks excellent. The SDR Blu-ray is similarly endowed as the detail looks superb too but it's just missing the extra layer of clarity that the 4K has (and the 1080p has got problems in other areas).

The HDR grade is a subtle but effective expansion of what's visible in the SDR version, not pulling down masses and masses of highlight detail but doing more than enough to render out more depth to skies and other brighter elements like the massive white-walled atrium that Kate Winslet's evil Erudite queen works in. Colour is interesting as it's a touch more dour, looking more of a steely grey than the yellowy-tinged but more colourful SDR Blu-ray and the DP spoke to American Cinematographer (April 2014 issue) about actually wanting this movie to initially look like a bright, colourful future rather than the grimmer look that dystopia is so often saddled with.

It's not that there's no colour at all in the HDR because scenes lit with orange or contrasting colours still look very vibrant, as does the usage of brightness in general, it's more the overall effect of the change to a more neutral balance that stands out. Black levels - assuming that my levels adjustments are nearer the mark than not - are very similar between the two versions with the BD perhaps looking a touch denser, there's not a lot of 'true' black here but it's not all greyed-out murk either, it sits nicely above black.

There's one area that the UHD stomps all over the BD though and that's with banding/posterisation, where large swathes of the image breaks up into harsh 'bands' rather than smooth gradations and this is typical of Lionsgate when it comes to 1080p Blu-ray (sorry Cliff but it's true, it's true). The brighter scenes are fine on the BD but in the darker scenes it's just awful, the worst being when Triss is on the rooftop and has her final Dauntless initiation by riplining through the dark city, the dim sky around her breaks up horribly. The UHD still shows a trace of banding in these scenes but it's nothing like as bad.

I took a photo to demonstrate this, neither scene looks anything like as bright as these images because the exposure is longer so it's soaking up more light and it's exaggerating the effect of the banding for sure but it's there alright, and even with the exaggeration the UHD is much, much betterer. Note also the greyer look to the UHD as mentioned above. If Shailene looks out of focus it's because she is, the photo is while she's sliding down the ripline.

[Show spoiler]
BD



UHD

Here you go rocky

[RockyIII]

Originally Posted by levcore

Here you go rocky

Are those comments from another thread. This thread is only 3 pages long and does not include any of what you quoted

[lgans316]

Originally Posted by RockyIII

Are those comments from another thread. This thread is only 3 pages long and does not include any of what you quoted

Comments are valid but don't get put off by it unless you are striving for perfection. Judge the PQ with your own eyes by reducing the brightness.

[DJR662]

Originally Posted by lgans316

Comments are valid but don't get put off by it unless you are striving for perfection. Judge the PQ with your own eyes by reducing the brightness.

I would kindly suggest trying the "full/limited" trick first.

[levcore]

Originally Posted by RockyIII

Are those comments from another thread. This thread is only 3 pages long and does not include any of what you quoted

They're all from page 2 of this thread, I'm done trying to help you out.

[RockyIII]

Originally Posted by levcore

They're all from page 2 of this thread, I'm done trying to help you out.

I'd have no reason to lie. I honestly didn't see those comments through my phone. But it doesn't matter really, I found out what I needed to find out

[RockyIII]

Originally Posted by DJR662

I would kindly suggest trying the "full/limited" trick first.

That would affect the whole picture not just the bars

[RockyIII]

Originally Posted by lgans316

Comments are valid but don't get put off by it unless you are striving for perfection. Judge the PQ with your own eyes by reducing the brightness.

PQ looks great as long as I dont let my eyes look at those get bars. No sense in crushing the picture itself just to make bars fully black. I'm not that OCD

[Geoff D]

Originally Posted by lgans316

Comments are valid but don't get put off by it unless you are striving for perfection. Judge the PQ with your own eyes by reducing the brightness.

Yes, woe betide anyone using actual scientific reasoning to try and correct what is a fundamentally incorrect image.

Originally Posted by DJR662

I would kindly suggest trying the "full/limited" trick first.

I wouldn't, because although it may correct the levels it'll forcibly clip the range of the image and lead to much more pronounced banding. (I noted in my comments that the 'full' trick didn't work at all on my OPPO but when I got another Panasonic player it worked on that, only with the result of greatly increased banding for the reasons mentioned.)

Originally Posted by RockyIII

That would affect the whole picture not just the bars

Originally Posted by RockyIII

PQ looks great as long as I dont let my eyes look at those get bars. No sense in crushing the picture itself just to make bars fully black. I'm not that OCD

The whole picture has been encoded incorrectly, not just the bars.

[lgans316]

I think several LG titles release during the early days have encoding issues and I doubt if they are going do anything about it in the near future. Just have to suck it up. At least this is not another 3:10 or T2.

[Geoff D]

Dude, if T2 looked as good as Divergent does then I'd be over the ****ing moon.

Seriously though, why do people have to "suck it up" if they can actually correct it? What is it with you and this constant railing against using reasoning and science and stuff? If this was a few hundred years ago you'd probably be burning me at the stake for witchcraft

[DJR662]

Originally Posted by Geoff D

I wouldn't, because although it may correct the levels it'll forcibly clip the range of the image and lead to much more pronounced banding. (I noted in my comments that the 'full' trick didn't work at all on my OPPO but when I got another Panasonic player it worked on that, only with the result of greatly increased banding for the reasons mentioned.)





The whole picture has been encoded incorrectly, not just the bars.

This trilogy happens to be on my "soon to watch" list. So will try your black level and contrast settings for this particular title then. I take it this also "works" for Insurgent and Ex 3 as well then?

[Geoff D]

Yes indeedy. Exact same procedure for those, and Ender's Game too.