HDR heatmaps and torch mode UHDs

[nissling]

I did do Schindler's List a few months back and posted it on another forum so I could just reuse all the screenshots.

[nissling]

Schindler's List (Universal Studios)

HDR10, Dolby Vision FEL
Mastering display luminance: 1000 nits white level / 0.001 nits black level
MaxCLL: 1000 nits
MaxFALL: 311 nits

Averages are somewhat higher than expected, maybe even when compared to other Universal titles, but highlights are greatly expanded when compared to the regular Blu-Ray and its peaks are often noticeable. Gunshots, flashes, lights, reflections etc all have excellent impact without ever looking too bright. Roll-off is really good and smooth without any clipping whatsoever.

While not being a typical catalog title on UHD-BD from one of the major studios, Schindler's List offers a very fine HDR presentation that makes the film even more haunting than I remembered. This is a very important film and will always have a special place in my collection.

Albums

Heatmaps

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Gamut visualization

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Tonemaps (BT.2100 to BT.709)

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[Geoff D]

Got some hefty black clipping on it vs the Blu-ray...BUT as it's black and white it still kinda works in that chiaroscuro kinda way

[matty746]

Originally Posted by nissling

I did do Schindler's List a few months back and posted it on another forum so I could just reuse all the screenshots.

Thank you! There’s another forum similar to this one? Would you mind linking it?

[nissling]

Originally Posted by matty746

Thank you! There’s another forum similar to this one? Would you mind linking it?

Not really but I do have a thread on a Sweclockers, which is a Swedish forum for computer geeks. Usually I feel more comfortable doing in-depth analysis in my native language but if you're interested you can use a translation service of some sort. I've done a few unique titles there like Ghost Dog.

https://www.sweclockers.com/forum/tr...cg-nordvarning

EDIT: Some terms can be strange when translated though, like "Ljussättning" which is an old term for color timing. When using Google Translate it becomes "lightning"...

[UFAlien]

Predator
20th Century Fox - USA
HDR Formats: HDR10

Measured Max Peak Brightness: 1,799 nits
Measured Max Frame Average: 1,286 nits

A pretty nice filmic transfer of a very grainy movie. There's usually not a ton of really fine detail, but that's down to the original production, and this certainly blows the prior Blu-rays out of the water. It's got a nice, fairly aggressive HDR grade with very bright highlights that retain a lot of delineation, depending of course on your display's tone mapping. Strong P3 color gamut use. A very good presentation overall.

HDR brightness plot:


HDR Heatmaps:


WCG Visualization:

[UFAlien]

Predator 2
20th Century Fox - USA
As included in the Predator 4-Movie Collection set
HDR Formats: HDR10

Measured Max Peak Brightness: 1,755 nits
Measured Max Frame Average: 1,400 nits

A very similar transfer to the first film's - a very grainy, slightly soft, but high-fidelity image with very bright highlights that retain a lot of detail and strong P3 color use. If you like how the original looks you'll like how this one does too.

HDR brightness plot:


HDR Heatmaps:


WCG Visualization:

[UFAlien]

Predators
20th Century Fox - USA
As included in the Predator 4-Movie Collection set
HDR Formats: HDR10

Measured Max Peak Brightness: 1,521 nits
Measured Max Frame Average: 1,394 nits

This movie was mostly shot in 1080p on the Panavision Genesis, a very capable digital cinema camera for the time. It looks surprisingly good given its source limitations - despite being an upscale from an HD source it often looks subjectively sharper than the first two movies. No troublesome filtering or tweaking is apparent. Sensor noise is visible in places and obviously lacks the organic, pin-sharp appearance of the film grain from its predecessors, but is mostly pretty well handled.

The HDR grade is broadly similar, getting almost as bright and featuring equally strong use of the P3 color space. The major difference is again down to the way the movie was shot; highlights are still very bright and don't really clip, but the roll-off is much sharper and there's a lot less detail in large bright areas of the frame. It's still a very dynamic HDR experience - to the point where I found myself squinting in shots of the characters wandering down dark corridors while shining flashlights into the camera.

HDR brightness plot:


HDR Heatmaps:


WCG Visualization:

[UFAlien]

The Predator
20th Century Fox - USA
HDR Formats: HDR10

Measured Max Peak Brightness: 1,238 nits
Measured Max Frame Average: 1,114 nits

Shot digitally and upscaled from a 2K master, this has a lot of similarities to Predators in terms of the transfer - a clean image that's about as sharp as it can be given the source, free of problematic tweaking in the upscale process. Like that movie, highlights roll off abruptly without a lot of detail, but don't quite clip. The transfer doesn't get quite as bright at its peaks, but it's a relatively small step down in that regard and still offers plenty of HDR "pop." There is, however, a noticeably more reserved use of the wide color gamut, with less of the movie pushed out into the P3 space. All told, it still looks quite good.

HDR brightness plot:


HDR Heatmaps:


WCG Visualization:

[Geoff D]

Originally Posted by UFAlien

Predators
As included in the Predator 4-Movie Collection set
HDR Formats: HDR10

Measured Max Peak Brightness: 1,521 nits
Measured Max Frame Average: 1,394 nits

This movie was mostly shot in 1080p on the Panavision Genesis, a very capable digital cinema camera for the time. It looks surprisingly good given its source limitations - despite being an upscale from an HD source it often looks subjectively sharper than the first two movies. No troublesome filtering or tweaking is apparent. Sensor noise is visible in places and obviously lacks the organic, pin-sharp appearance of the film grain from its predecessors, but is mostly pretty well handled.

The HDR grade is broadly similar, getting almost as bright and featuring equally strong use of the P3 color space. The major difference is again down to the way the movie was shot; highlights are still very bright and don't really clip, but the roll-off is much sharper and there's a lot less detail in large bright areas of the frame. It's still a very dynamic HDR experience - to the point where I found myself squinting in shots of the characters wandering down dark corridors while shining flashlights into the camera.

[Show spoiler]HDR brightness plot:


HDR Heatmaps:


WCG Visualization:

While it may seem clamped in and of itself re: HDR it absolutely smashes the Blu-ray which has some massively clipped highlights in comparison.

[UFAlien]

Prey
Disney - USA
HDR Formats: HDR10

Measured Max Peak Brightness: 646 nits
Measured Max Frame Average: 238 nits

This one is a pretty stark departure from the look of the earlier films on UHD. For one thing it's by FAR the sharpest and most detailed thanks to the clean large-format digital capture and native 4K master. Conversely, though, the HDR grade is dramatically less "punchy." The movie is much dimmer overall - not to the extent the HDR is ineffective, but the highlights never stand out nearly as well as they do on the four prior movies. There is, however, a more natural roll-off and more detail to the highlights when compared to Predators or The Predator, which is partially a testament to how far digital cinema camera tech has come.

Adding to the low-contrast look is the treatment of darkness - Prey is graded to avoid true blacks almost entirely in favor of dark greys, even in large, featureless swaths of shadow. This seems to be an intentional creative choice, not a defect of the transfer, as HOW elevated the blacks are varies quite a bit from scene to scene. Still, I found it a bit distracting sometimes, with the pure black of the letterbox bars standing out against the darkest parts of the image content.

The wide color gamut doesn't get the same workout it did in the first three flicks, but that's more to do with the setting and aesthetic of the film. When it's called for, with deep orange firelight or the otherworldly hues of the alien's heat vision, color gets pushed out all the way to the borders of the P3 space.

Overall - it looks quite good, but the choices made with the HDR grade do make it stand out against the earlier franchise entries in a way that makes it less viable as a showcase for the format.

HDR brightness plot:


HDR Heatmaps:


WCG Visualization:

[UFAlien]

Originally Posted by Geoff D

While it may seem clamped in and of itself re: HDR it absolutely smashes the Blu-ray which has some massively clipped highlights in comparison.

Good to know. I never saw the Blu-ray; I hadn't seen this movie since it came out theatrically until I got the UHD release. I never had the impression this transfer was limited by anything but the relatively low resolution and dynamic range of digital cameras at the time - in fact, I was really struck by how great it looked overall.

[UFAlien]

Pumpkinhead
Shout! Studios - USA
HDR Formats: HDR10 and Dolby Vision FEL

Measured Max Peak Brightness: 1,590 nits
Measured Max Frame Average: 424 nits
Max Peak Brightness in DV Dynamic Metadata: 1,001 nits
Max Frame Average in DV Dynamic Metadata: 92 nits

Another solid transfer of a very grainy low-budget 80s horror flick. As you might expect from the title there are a lot of really deep, saturated reds and oranges here that take full advantage of the P3 color space. Blues and purples from the highly stylized nighttime lighting slide out into the wider gamut too, and in one shot here it looks like there might even be some deliberate Rec. 2020 usage. My shot selection managed to miss all the brightest highlights, but I can report that subjectively the movie looked good in HDR without obvious brightness issues. It didn't look especially "flashy" the way that, for example, the earlier Predator movies do on the format, though.

HDR brightness plot:


Dolby Vision Metadata plot:


HDR Heatmaps:


WCG Visualization:

[UFAlien]

The Mummy (1999)
Universal - USA
HDR Formats: HDR10

Measured Max Peak Brightness: 1,243 nits
Measured Max Frame Average: 1,085 nits

Firstly, this is obviously a huge improvement over the standard Blu-ray, which was quite bad. That said this is a pretty uneven presentation on UHD. Obviously there's an extensive use of visual effects, and as you'd expect, shots with CGI appear a bit soft thanks to the limitations of the processes used at the time. Thankfully they still look reasonably filmic, but they're lacking fine detail and sometimes show visible artifacts from the film-out process. A few shots are so blurry they must have actually been shot out-of-focus, which isn't the fault of this transfer. In ideal conditions - shots without CGI that were properly filmed - this disc can look wonderfully sharp and detailed with really good grain reproduction.

The biggest issue to me is that the transfer has a very "hot" contrast-y look to it. As you can see it's mastered with a wide brightness range, but it doesn't feel appropriate for the amount of actual dynamic range in the image content. With a few notable exceptions, there's generally not much highlight detail here - almost every torch or lantern or explosion is a featureless white blob with the brightness values dialed way up. The specular reflections on the gramophone in my 14th shot here are a notable and welcome exception, but not indicative of the norm. Conversely, sometimes a shot will be comparatively dim for no apparent reason - shot #15 demonstrates this, where both the lit torch and reflected sunbeam have brightness values wildly out of line with how those elements are treated for most of the movie.

The use of the wide color gamut is actually pretty reserved here, though things do sporadically push out into the P3 space. I'd wager this was an intentional choice to preserve a sort of sandy, old-fashioned look to the picture. The colors didn't stand out as being inappropriately dull on my viewing.

My overall impression sitting through the movie before doing any analysis was that most of the film looked too bright, almost overexposed, on my OLED; it was the first time I'd felt that way about a UHD transfer. In places this can look very good and, again, it's obviously superior to the heavily filtered Blu-ray, but I found it to be a subpar visual experience overall for the format. Opinions (and the way your equipment handles tone-mapping) may vary.

HDR brightness plot:


HDR Heatmaps:


WCG Visualization:

[UFAlien]

I have everything done and written up for The Mummy Returns, but the image host is having upload issues at the moment so I'll need to try to post it again later.

[UFAlien]

The Mummy Returns
Universal - USA
HDR Formats: HDR10

Measured Max Peak Brightness: 1,541 nits
Measured Max Frame Average: 1,139 nits

Similarly to its predecessor, this release is an improvement over the earlier Blu-ray basically by default, as that was a subpar HD transfer. This, however, is also - in my estimation - a pretty subpar UHD transfer. It has all the same problems as the 1999 film's release on the format, but worse, and it's picked up some new ones along the way. The brightness values go even higher without an appreciable increase in actual highlight detail - once again, flames and the like are almost always just white blobs. Most of the movie - certainly all of the well-lit scenes - subjectively looked over-brightened on my OLED.

The bigger issue is with the VFX scenes. The Mummy Returns is, to put it lightly, not remembered for the high quality of its CGI. Putting aside the effects work itself, though, there is a lot more VFX work crammed into this movie than its predecessor, and the image quality of these shots is significantly worse. The opening scene depicting the Scorpion King's army is a ghastly watercolor abomination that would hardly pass muster on DVD. Thankfully most of it isn't quite THAT bad, but whereas the shots with CG on the prior release looked like decent scans of 35mm film-outs, here they look harshly filtered, with heavily compromised or even completely absent grain fields and smudgy, artificial softness. Whether this is the fault of the original VFX mastering process or a choice made for this transfer I can't say, but the effect is obvious and highly unpleasant. And again - these shots make up a very large portion of the movie, so it's not an occasional nitpick.

Shots without VFX are much better and confirm this is an actual 4K transfer after all. They're sharper, more detailed, and with an intact, natural grain field - albeit one that sometimes runs into minor compression issues. Another upside - this movie makes somewhat stronger use of the P3 color space than the film that came before.

It's watchable, but definitely problematic.

HDR brightness plot:


HDR Heatmaps:


WCG Visualization:

[Geoff D]

Again, I don't know if you've run any direct comparisons between the Blus and the UHDs but the Mummy UHDs are so much betterer I almost don't know where to begin. Maybe they're 'problematic' in themselves if one is searching for ultimate UHD nirvana with colours extending beyond all known space and highlights resolved to the nth degree (tho you still get more than the Blus even if the UHDs look blown out on their own), but in comparison they slaughter those wretched old Blus. IMO.

[Mierzwiak]

Originally Posted by ufalien

The Mummy (1999)
(...) that said this is a pretty uneven presentation on uhd

what the what?

[UFAlien]

I acknowledge they're better and even quite good-looking in places (especially the first one which I think looks good overall, with caveats). Didn't do direct A-B comparisons, nor was that really the point of my post or any of the posts I do in this thread - just judging what I see when I watch the UHDs and go back and do screenshots and analyses. In isolation, I thought they looked worse than average for the format in my admittedly somewhat limited experience. Not a disaster, but underwhelming.

"Problematic" may not be the best word choice, but I only described Returns as problematic and that's mostly because it frequently looks like this:




I know it's probably a source issue, likely not the fault of the transfer itself... but it still looks bad, whether or not it was even worse on the Blu-ray (which I'm sure it was).

[Geoff D]

Top two pics have had some 'treatment' but don't look diabolical to me...and what's supposed to be wrong with the bottom one? Grain looks a bit smudged laterally, if that makes sense, but 'bad'? I know I'm thought to have impossibly high standards but you're edging me out here