For those that care about the digital codes, I did submit a ticket with WB. I tried a code again this morning and got the Heisman, so I figured it was time to ping them about it. If they respond, I'll update.
It's not that I'm overly anxious about it, but my family does use Vudu from time to time and it's nice to have them up there.
The digital codes won't work until Rocky V and Rocky Balboa flip to 4K DV. They are still in HD at the moment.
Not just that, Balboa single release DC is supposed to give both cuts of the film, so it’s possible they might add another collection bundle whenever WB sends the necessary stuff for FAH to add the redemption links.
The digital codes won't work until Rocky V and Rocky Balboa flip to 4K DV. They are still in HD at the moment.
I know that is ostensibly why. Even if it was merely that though, the code shows operational on WB's site, just not on Vudu/FAH. WB needs to get back on schedule for it to be fully armed and operational. It's not like there are shipping delays here or anything.
I've just seen this review on YouTube and they share a shot from Rocky V that looks horrendous with DNR and a few shots from Rocky Balboa, one of which also looks horrible.
This whole thing (this franchise on 4K) has been so frustrating...
I've just seen this review on YouTube and they share a shot from Rocky V that looks horrendous with DNR and a few shots from Rocky Balboa, one of which also looks horrible.
This whole thing (this franchise on 4K) has been so frustrating...
..Are we sure that Rocky V's dub tracks are DTS-HD MA 5.1.. and 24bits? Are we reaaally sure, Randy? I just have my doubts because it's the most random thing EVER, as it's rarely ever done with dubs, keeping to Dolby 5.1 like the rest of discs..
Just watched the first Rocky and was pleased with the transfer. Not sure if they could have mastered it any better considering the movie's age, but overall pleased. The audio is definitely much much much improved. In fact I was pleasently surprised how clean it sounded. I watched the movie with the 5.1 track.
Ehhhhhhh. I'm gonna knock together a review right now but the gist of it is...no.
Here is the review of Rocky V on this website. He is saying the total opposite of what you are saying about the transfer.
Presented in its original 1.85:1 aspect ratio, this new 2160p/HDR10 presentation of Rocky V is an absolute stunner and easily among the best of the franchise's recent 4K UHD restorations. More than anything else it looks extremely faithful to its source, with subtle but tasteful uses of HDR enhancement that bolster its era-specific color palette and bring out plenty of mid-range details lost on the much older Blu-ray master. Speaking of which, I popped in the included Blu-ray for comparison and it's not even close: specific scenes like low-lit exterior shots and Rocky's talk with Adrian in their attic are are night-and-day with much better fine detail and stability now, while the regular appearance of natural film grain is present from start to finish. Only the climactic street fight occasionally wavers in quality with heightened and varying levels of noise... but the Blu-ray never looked great in that respect either, so any problems might be baked into the source material at this point. The bit rate is also sky-high, regularly staying in the 90-100Mbps range and rarely if ever showing any trace signs of macro blocking or other such compression issues. Simply put, it's a top-tier effort that might actually increase your enjoyment of the film and I wish all the Rocky films looked this good.
Here is the review of Rocky V on this website. He is saying the total opposite of what you are saying about the transfer.
I'll let Geoff answer this one, but I don't think we're on opposite sids here. (I praised it as "among the best", for the record, not necessarily the best.)
Last edited by Randy Miller III; 07-23-2024 at 01:52 AM.
DC of Rocky Balboa was even better than the TC. Nice that we got to see the og bar owner and more personal moments. Just wish they didn't let the "Paulie girlfriend" thing slip since they left out a scene involving her. It kinda doesn't make sense with the rest of the film. In any case, a solid capper made even stronger.
Rocky V (1990) 4K Dolby Vision review, Italian Warners/MGM UHD disc. HDR metadata: Mastering display colour primaries: P3. Mastering display luminance levels: 1000/0.0001 max/min nits. Maximum Content Light Level: 2129 nits. Maximum Frame Average Light Level: 164 nits. Disc type: UHD100.
First of all I would like it entered into the record that I really like Rocky V. As I just said in another post I like it unironically and unashamedly. Yeah, the overall riches to rags story is something of a contrivance to take Rocky back to where he started, but tales of sportspeople losing everything are not uncommon and it just works for me. With Stallone writing, Bill Conti on scoring duties and John G. Avildsen back in the director's chair it's a literal reteaming of the people who made the first film so great and while it was never likely to recapture that lightning it doesn't feel like some soulless retread having Rocky back on the street. Stallone has always written what he knows, Rocky is his story inside and out and it's fascinating how the series basically maps his entire career, I mean he may never have been as desperate again as Rocky gets in V and he was still a viable leading man right into the '90s (Demolition Man is the bomb yo), but Rocky's slide into obscurity presaged Stallone's own fall into DTV purgatory. It may not make for a feel-good treat like the other Rocky movies but it's a refreshing change after the escalating comic-book silliness of the others. Don't get me wrongo, I love them for that but I don't see how Rocky IV - which is quite possibly the most '80s movie ever made - could've been topped, so they went in an entirely different direction, circling back to the start in many ways.
Sly casting his son as his, er, son brought the movie more flak than it deserved, I mean it's Hollywood nepotism at its finest but what Sage Stallone lacks in nuance he makes up for it with heart, he's not nearly as impassive as 1990's other widely-panned nepo-baby performance, that of Sofia Coppola in Godfather Part III. And I love how flamboyant Richard Gant is as Don King George Washington Duke, something these movies have always lacked is that larger-than-life promoter figure (tho Apollo Creed certainly filled in some of that gap) and he's flippin' brilliant. Burgess Meredith's cameo flashback thingy provides one of the most heartfelt moments in the entire series (IMO) and feels like a betterer send off for the character than the dribbling mess of Rocky grieving in III. Even actual boxer Tommy Morrison doesn't disgrace himself, and having a real boxer there gives the fights a little less of the theatricality that pervades the other films. The final Terry Funk-choreographed street fight between him and Rocky is aces too as it almost foreshadows the rise of MMA, both fighters using more than their fists to make their point. So yeah, I like it more than ever.
Director Avildsen brings a lot of his trademarks to the movie, like tons of lap dissolves and long takes as characters walk and talk. Steven Poster was brought in to lens the show and the brief wasn't to reinvent anything, but apart from shooting spherical 1.85 on 35mm there's no other info out there, AmCin didn't cover it so any guesses as to what emulsion(s) it was shot on are just that, guesses. But five years had passed since Stallone made Rocky IV and there had been advances in film during that time, the fastest stocks of the day finally starting to break free from the excessive graininess that plagued those mid '80s lines, as well as newer daylight stocks which were so pristine they were almost grainless in the right conditions. To that end I think Rocky V was shot on faster stuff for interiors and some of those liquid gold daylight stocks for the bright exteriors, so it'd never look as balls-out grainy as its predecessors.
HOWEVER....they've still taken a bit off the top for this brand new 4K transfer of V. In my reviews of the previous Rocky movies on 4K I noted how they'd pretty much left the opticals alone but here they've been obviously 'managed', not destroyed or anything but still given some treatment, and as there are SO many opticals - Avildsen loving his trick editing, punching in tighter on loads of shots as well as all those dissolves as said - it means a big chunk of this movie isn't camera negative (sadly no sign of an A/B neg cut). On that added zoom-in on Sage's face in the gym at the hour mark the grain even seems to pop in and out due to the processing, tho it's hellishly grainy on the old Blu as it's such an extreme bit of optical printing. And yet it's not just those opticals, as even in the 1st gen footage there's definitely a trace of the grain lagging and smearing around moving objects, like the lawyer set against the window at around the 15-minute mark, there's a 'halo' of grain that follows his head about. That's not me dooming, it rarely seems too waxy as there's still a fine layer of grain and it still looks terrifically fresh and filmic otherwise, with the bright exteriors like Rocky getting a benediction from the priest looking almost grainless but detailed with it.
Detail is nice and tight, easily beating the old Blu-ray into next week, tho there's still some in-camera filtration there to soften the edges and cast a bit of gentle halation on the photography. That old Blu is REALLY unstable and the opticals are dirty as hell, like in that Mickey flashback scene, while the 4K is super steady and pretty much pristine throughout. You gain more picture area on the new transfer too on all four sides of the image. Not enough to throw any compositions off but it gives it a little more air. Some shots are just bang out of focus tho, and while they may stand out more on the 4K owing to the increased resolution they still look betterer than they do on the old Blu, which is already losing a lot of detail to the jittery old HD telecine off an IP so the out of focus shots look even worse.
Colour is also interesting between how those prior Rocky UHDs were handled and this one. I noted how most of them just looked a lot more vital than the old transfers, with primaries that really leapt off the screen and more varied skin tones, but the first thing that hits you with V on UHD is how orange everyone looks. There's certainly the twin menace of ye olde green push and ye olde magenta push on the extant SDR Blu of V - the 'black and white' flashback shots in the opening recap are literally a bluey-green, while Duke's white satin top as Rocky calls out to him from the shower has an almost purple cast to it, both are much more neutral on the UHD - but the skin tones generally look healthier on the Blu, not blazing pink or mahogany surprise but a good middle ground. On the UHD they're generally a lot warmer and it doesn't always work, there's still some variance there but sometimes they look very one-note, almost jaundiced. Hmmm. Reds also lose that zest from the prior Rocky UHDs and veer more towards that orangey tone. But the shots with blue lighting like the Xmas party at Tommy Gunn's pad still carry that colour over at least.
HDR usage is regulation stuff, taking the crazy blown out highlights of that old Blu and restoring an absolute crap-ton of range. When Rocky is looking at his son's picture of his French teacher under the lamp light it nukes it completely on the old transfer, just a blown out blob, while the UHD resolves it all. This trends across all the bright highlights in the film and brings so much depth to the image. Good solid average brightness too. I'm sure that even a new SDR transfer would still have done a betterer job here, but we can only compare what we've got. Black detail also gets a boost, not that the old Blu is badly crushed because it's not, but it loses some shadow detail vs the UHD which manages to restore the lowlights without raising the blacks, they still look plenty dense when required.
Compression is essentially transparent, helped not only by the varying amounts of grain management applied to the film but also the decision to use a triple-layer disc. Not that that alone guarantees greatness but the average bitrate hovers in the 80s and 90s for most scenes, with regular peaks over 100 Mb/s, and I could spot nothing wrong in HDR10 or DV (I'm assuming this is MEL DV so there's no video extension data anyway). I don't want to complain when they get something right but GODDAMN it's ridiculous that some of the first four films got saddled with such dreadfully poor encodes while the most maligned one of the lot gets the absolute bestest encode out of all of them. I mean, how the fook does that even work?? I guess it shows that Warners/MGM might actually have listened to our complaints re: compression on the other Rocky UHDs but it's come far too late to help those presentations. I say this as someone who really likes V but if there was one movie in this whole set that I wouldn't have minded getting lowballed at the expense of another it's this one, yet it won the triple-layer lottery (and isn't having to share space with another version of the film like IV and Balboa) Blows my mind, man.
It's absolutely fair to say that the UHD of Rocky V is a vast improvement over the old 1080p disc in most respects as you get a clean, stable new transfer with a massive increase in highlight detail, a bit more in the low end, and plenty more spatial resolution. But the colour is kinda weird, the UHD loses the traditional SDR biases (which ain't unusual) yet manages to stuff up the skin tones in the process (which is unusual). And unlike the previous four Rockys on UHD (Rocky vs Drago recut aside) there's a lick of grain management on this one and not just on the vast amount of opticals. And also unlike I-IV this has had an excellent compression job, it's almost as if Warners/MGM listened to the complaints about the first set re: excessive grain and piss-poor compression and reacted accordingly. So while we get superb compression on a fat UHD100 disc we now get some mildly tinkered grain to go with it. *le sigh*
I should’ve bought this set. But that $29 prime day/Gruv 20% off price on the 1-4 set was too good to resist. I just hope Warner gets these replacement discs out by the end of August… if not I’ll be tempted to order the bigger set just to get decent discs of the first two.
DC of Rocky Balboa was even better than the TC. Nice that we got to see the og bar owner and more personal moments. Just wish they didn't let the "Paulie girlfriend" thing slip since they left out a scene involving her. It kinda doesn't make sense with the rest of the film. In any case, a solid capper made even stronger.
Yep, that's 3 out 4 new Stallone cuts that I prefer (not a fan of the new Rocky IV cut).
I'll let Geoff answer this one, but I don't think we're on opposite sids here. (I praised it as "among the best", for the record, not necessarily the best.)
Yep, that's 3 out 4 new Stallone cuts that I prefer (not a fan of the new Rocky IV cut).
I wish I'd enjoy his director's cut as much as you do. The only one I feel that is truly a huge improvement over the theatrical cut is his director's cut of The Expendables.
Yep, that's 3 out 4 new Stallone cuts that I prefer (not a fan of the new Rocky IV cut).
I overall prefer the new cut of IV, but I do think he omitted some stuff that he didn't need to as well as making the intro too long. I woulda kept the birthday robot scene as a funny joke for Rocky's terrible excessive spending habits(a la Rocky II) and of course at Paulie's expense, but leave out the reprogrammed "sweetie" vibe at the dinner table and the "wires tied" bit. I woulda kept in the dialogue scene in Apollo's dressing room for the fight, and I woulda kept the entire argument with Adrian intact. Everything else Sly did, loved it. The funeral was perfect and hits way harder.
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