Bram Stoker's Dracula 4K UHD (1992) (25th Anniversary Edition)

[Synchg]

Originally Posted by PrestonXI

yikes!

i knew it! online version has opening prologue in true 4k as a"digital exclusive"! wow amazing!

[Geoff D]

Originally Posted by Pyoko

I couldn't figure out a really logical explanation either. The only thing I can think of is that a clean dupe was created for international subtitling, and then the English titles and subtitles were all spliced into the negative. Essentially the negative for those parts would be gone or reside in the same place where negatives used for opticals go, and the dupe is the only clean version they have handy now.

That does make sense, thanks. It's a shame that when they return to the negative to do these new transfers they can't track down the clean trims and reinsert them, that is if they're not going to give us the original subs in the first place for which I'll tolerate a bit of dupey jankiness to get the proper subs. Pity that the clean dupe looks just as janky though, but I guess they didn't really care because it would've looked like ass anyway when it had the new subs overlaid and was printed back out to pos then interneg then print.

As you hint at, that stuff will hopefully have been vaulted somewhere but as countless other movies didn't get their camera original trims dug out just to redo a few subtitled scenes then I doubt FFC's Dracula would be deemed worthy of such treatment. That certainly doesn't explain why the whole opening stanza looks like that on the UHD though, I like what you're saying about the unevenness caused by the alternating opticals/first gen material but it's not like Sony to get so precious about such things, e.g. they didn't dumb down the surrounding material around the lap dissolves in River Kwai.

[Thread_Astaire]

Netflix used the clean version for their UHD stream, and NO forced subs for the Romanian dialogue. You have to turn on the HoH subs.

[jaaguir]

Originally Posted by Geoff D

That does make sense, thanks. It's a shame that when they return to the negative to do these new transfers they can't track down the clean trims and reinsert them, that is if they're not going to give us the original subs in the first place for which I'll tolerate a bit of dupey jankiness to get the proper subs. Pity that the clean dupe looks just as janky though, but I guess they didn't really care because it would've looked like ass anyway when it had the new subs overlaid and was printed back out to pos then interneg then print.

As you hint at, that stuff will hopefully have been vaulted somewhere but as countless other movies didn't get their camera original trims dug out just to redo a few subtitled scenes then I doubt FFC's Dracula would be deemed worthy of such treatment. That certainly doesn't explain why the whole opening stanza looks like that on the UHD though, I like what you're saying about the unevenness caused by the alternating opticals/first gen material but it's not like Sony to get so precious about such things, e.g. they didn't dumb down the surrounding material around the lap dissolves in River Kwai.

But if the blu-ray and the streaming version aren't like this, then there's no explanation that makes any sense. And the blu-ray caps do look better in that comparison. I men, if we are to believe the source for both the blu-ray and the uhd was the same, then the uhd was heavily filtered for some reason.

[OutOfBoose]

To be fair, the prologue jumps in quality quite rapidly between optically composed shots, hard subs shots and OCN 4K. Maybe they tried to even quality a bit for UHD? I think it's a bad idea, but who knows...

[jaaguir]

HDNumerique did one of their nice comparisons for this but unfortunately they didn't include any prologue screencap. It seems they didn't even see this problem.

[andreasy969]

I noticed this as well and wanted to upload caps before, but was/am rather busy ...

Anyway, here you go and it's rather hard to miss imo. Having said that, I'd like to think that they really did this on purpose, because imo it is kind of distracting on the Mi4K BD, because the scenes in question actually stand out there imo. On the UHD-BD the (whole) prologue is somewhat "consistently poor" now. In case it really was done on purpose, I'd still leave it for discussion whether that was the right decision though. But it is what it is.

I made shots of the scenes where the "degradation of image quality"compared to the Mi4K BD really stood out to me. I included a 4th shot to show that the UHD-BD smokes the Mi4k BD after the prologue.

UHD-BD (200 nits) left, Mi4K BD right: (the shots are not swapped!)

[Geoff D]

Originally Posted by jaaguir

But if the blu-ray and the streaming version aren't like this, then there's no explanation that makes any sense. And the blu-ray caps do look better in that comparison. I men, if we are to believe the source for both the blu-ray and the uhd was the same, then the uhd was heavily filtered for some reason.

My Paragraphs™ above are merely musing upon the wider phenom of hard-subbed shots still appearing to be dupes even without the subs, so I'm not making excuses for what they did to the prologue in general. As I said at the top I haven't even watched Dracula properly yet, and as I said at the end it's not like Sony decided to 'even out' some of Kwai's poorer stretches of optical work. So it's a puzzle for me too.

BUT, while I'm here, I might as well opine I can only think that these apparently blatant shifts in quality were deemed to be of lesser importance on both the lower resolution version (BD) and the even-more-heavily compressed 4K version (streaming) whereas it might've been too distracting to whomever was mastering the 4K BD. That they've reverted to some kind of sub-1080p rendering is a poor show though, it seems to have been well enough intentioned but executed rather sloppily. Could've been worse though, as Batman Begins' heavily DNR'ed sections will attest.

[Pyoko]

Originally Posted by Geoff D

That does make sense, thanks. It's a shame that when they return to the negative to do these new transfers they can't track down the clean trims and reinsert them

Would love that too, but it's probably a bit of a catch-22 situation in that the newer the movie the more likely it is they have the trims in order somewhere, but at the same time that kind of effort is only expended on complete restorations of reconstructions, which newer movies are unlikely to be in need of...

[jaaguir]

Originally Posted by andreasy969

I noticed this as well and wanted to upload caps before, but was/am rather busy ...

Anyway, here you go and it's rather hard to miss imo. Having said that, I'd like to think that they really did this on purpose, because imo it is kind of distracting on the Mi4K BD, because the scenes in question actually stand out there imo. On the UHD-BD the (whole) prologue is somewhat "consistently poor" now. In case it really was done on purpose, I'd still leave it for discussion whether that was the right decision though. But it is what it is.

I made shots of the scenes where the "degradation of image quality"compared to the Mi4K BD really stood out to me. I included a 4th shot to show that the UHD-BD smokes the Mi4k BD after the prologue.

UHD-BD (200 nits) left, Mi4K BD right: (the shots are not swapped!)

[Show spoiler]

I can only see tiny png-s. Am I doing something wrong?

Originally Posted by Geoff D

Could've been worse though, as Batman Begins' heavily DNR'ed sections will attest.

An even bigger mystery.

[andreasy969]

Originally Posted by jaaguir

I can only see tiny png-s. Am I doing something wrong?

Yes.

I don't know if that's your problem, but you did click on the thumbs, did you? (and I use my browser's "view image" from there on)

Other than that, I'd prefer sth like screenshotcomparison.com myself, but I always failed to upload 4K pngs there (they might be too big - not getting any error message ...) and I won't upload jpgs. Since screenshotcomparison.com also lost plenty of (if not all) uploaded pics not so a long ago, I don't like that site anyway. So imagebanana it is with me. Take it or leave it.

[Geoff D]

Finally watched this, what a batty film. Started to enjoy it by the end though.

As for the UHD itself, I was a bit hard on it before when I said it was verr similar to the Mi4K BD. It's clearly got the finer detail and lusher, more bountiful grain - opening scene aside, although it didn't bother me even knowing about it as it just looks like one long optical - and although the upper end of the highlight range is rarely touched upon in HDR it's the lower end where the UHD excels.

The BD has very thick, dense blacks which swallow shadow detail on people's hair and in the darker recesses of the image, of which there are many, and some of the VFX scenes look a bit posterised as a result, but the UHD lightens the blacks without going full Nolan (never go full Nolan) and it brings back shadow detail and makes those VFX shots a lot more respectable.

More excellent work from Sony.

[veganrichy]

Hi everyone,

I am new to the forum and website, so if there was a post about this or other 4k disc playback issues (or known discs) -- I apologize if I missed those threads.

Anyway, I was excited to play my Bram Stoker's Dracula 4k disc on my OPPO-UDP 203 player during my lunch hour. My Library actually purchased some 4k films (thank goodness); this one in particular has a stingray overlay tag on it as well (not that it should matter, but read on and use your best judgement to figure this out). To my surprise, the disc would get "stuck" at certain times/scenes of the film. For example, within the first minute of the film -- the disc got stuck/stopped playing. I had to "skip" ahead and then rewind to a "comfortable" time-frame to play it; it would again get "stuck" at the 12 minute mark, and so on.

Has anyone else had this issue with this particular disc? Or, other discs? Not saying that the stingray overlay tag over it is causing the issue, since I have played numerous library bound discs with these types of tags on my player before, and they have NEVER caused a problem.

Thank you in advance!

[FilmFreakosaurus]

Originally Posted by veganrichy

Hi everyone,

I am new to the forum and website, so if there was a post about this or other 4k disc playback issues (or known discs) -- I apologize if I missed those threads.

Anyway, I was excited to play my Bram Stoker's Dracula 4k disc on my OPPO-UDP 203 player during my lunch hour. My Library actually purchased some 4k films (thank goodness); this one in particular has a stingray overlay tag on it as well (not that it should matter, but read on and use your best judgement to figure this out). To my surprise, the disc would get "stuck" at certain times/scenes of the film. For example, within the first minute of the film -- the disc got stuck/stopped playing. I had to "skip" ahead and then rewind to a "comfortable" time-frame to play it; it would again get "stuck" at the 12 minute mark, and so on.

Has anyone else had this issue with this particular disc? Or, other discs? Not saying that the stingray overlay tag over it is causing the issue, since I have played numerous library bound discs with these types of tags on my player before, and they have NEVER caused a problem.

Thank you in advance!

UHD Blu-ray discs are far more suseptable to reading errors if there are light scratches, smudges, and/or fingerprints on their surfaces.

A library lending scenario will probably only exacerbate the situation.

Also, the Oppo is a little less forgiving than some other players.

[veganrichy]

Originally Posted by FilmFreakosaurus

UHD Blu-ray discs are far more suseptable to reading errors if there are light scratches, smudges, and/or fingerprints on their surfaces.

A library lending scenario will probably only exacerbate the situation.

Also, the Oppo is a little less forgiving than some other players.

That's a shame, honestly, and it's my first time the OPPO has given me a "stoppage" of play on a disc.

I will attempt to "wipe" the disc clean and see if that helps.

It kind of sucks; I wanted to watch it in all of it's UHD 4k glory, too :-( But thank you for the information.

[FilmFreakosaurus]

Originally Posted by veganrichy

That's a shame, honestly, and it's my first time the OPPO has given me a "stoppage" of play on a disc.

I will attempt to "wipe" the disc clean and see if that helps.

It kind of sucks; I wanted to watch it in all of it's UHD 4k glory, too :-( But thank you for the information.

Wipe with a very soft cloth center out. Do not rub in circles.

It's worth a purchase anyway. Good Atmos track too.

[veganrichy]

Originally Posted by FilmFreakosaurus

Wipe with a very soft cloth center out. Do not rub in circles.

It's worth a purchase anyway. Good Atmos track too.

Definitely; I am going to attempt that at home, soon.

I was just disappointed by the fact it just froze up! I already sent a tech support ticket to Oppo; I did read some 4k discs (jason bourne is one that comes to mind) that have playback issues. Not sure if this was part of that small "list" with it, but yeah -- who knows.

Glad you mentioned the ATMOS track; I have an entire surround sound system; equipped with Klipsch reference, centers, and two 10" subs -- you better believe I wanted the volume "UP" when watching this thing :-)

[bradnoyes]

I've never had playback issues on my Oppo with this, and I've watched it quite a few times. This is still a Top 10 UHD for me. Definitely crank up that Atmos track.

[oddbox83]

Zero issues with my Oppo too. Must be a bad disc.

[FilmFreakosaurus]

Originally Posted by veganrichy

Definitely; I am going to attempt that at home, soon.

I was just disappointed by the fact it just froze up! I already sent a tech support ticket to Oppo; I did read some 4k discs (jason bourne is one that comes to mind) that have playback issues. Not sure if this was part of that small "list" with it, but yeah -- who knows.

Glad you mentioned the ATMOS track; I have an entire surround sound system; equipped with Klipsch reference, centers, and two 10" subs -- you better believe I wanted the volume "UP" when watching this thing :-)

Speaking of cranking up the volume, unless the upcoming Japanese version is even better, import the Sony UHD Blu-ray release of Blade Runner 2049. It's a somewhat sharper video encoding than the U.S. version from Warner Bros.

Outside of Gravity, I have not heard a better Dolby Atmos immersive mix that really used object placement to enhance the on and off screen action. It's spectacular and the bass lines are unreal.