The Fifth Element 4K UHD (1997) (20th Anniversary Edition)

[Hombre1]

The Sony audio:
Audio
ID : 4352 (0x1100)
Menu ID : 1 (0x1)
Format : MLP FBA AC-3 16-ch
Format/Info : Meridian Lossless Packing FBA with 16-channel presentation
Commercial name : Dolby TrueHD with Dolby Atmos
Muxing mode : Stream extension
Codec ID : 131
Duration : 2 h 5 min
Bit rate mode : Variable
Bit rate : 640 kb/s
Maximum bit rate : 9 309 kb/s
Channel(s) : 8 channels
Channel layout : L R C LFE Ls Rs Lb Rb
Sampling rate : 48.0 kHz
Frame rate : 31.250 FPS (1536 SPF)
Compression mode : Lossless
Stream size : 576 MiB (1%)
Service kind : Complete Main
Number of dynamic objects : 11
Bed channel count : 1 channel
Bed channel configuration : LFE

Originally Posted by SeeMoreDigital

MediaInfo reports the following audio spec for my UK disc version: -

Audio #1
ID                                       : 4352 (0x1100)
Menu ID                                  : 1 (0x1)
Format                                   : MLP FBA AC-3 16-ch
Format/Info                              : Meridian Lossless Packing FBA with 16-channel presentation
Commercial name                          : Dolby TrueHD with Dolby Atmos
Format settings                          : Dolby Surround EX
Muxing mode                              : Stream extension
Codec ID                                 : 131
Duration                                 : 2 h 6 min
Bit rate mode                            : Variable
Bit rate                                 : 640 kb/s
Maximum bit rate                         : 6 342 kb/s
Channel(s)                               : 8 channels
Channel layout                           : L R C LFE Ls Rs Lb Rb
Sampling rate                            : 48.0 kHz
Frame rate                               : 31.250 FPS (1536 SPF)
Compression mode                         : Lossless
Stream size                              : 578 MiB (1%)
Service kind                             : Complete Main
Number of dynamic objects                : 11
Bed channel count                        : 1 channel
Bed channel configuration                : LFE

Audio #2
ID                                       : 4353 (0x1101)
Menu ID                                  : 1 (0x1)
Format                                   : AC-3
Format/Info                              : Audio Coding 3
Commercial name                          : Dolby Digital
Format settings                          : Dolby Surround EX
Codec ID                                 : 129
Duration                                 : 2 h 6 min
Bit rate mode                            : Constant
Bit rate                                 : 640 kb/s
Channel(s)                               : 6 channels
Channel layout                           : L R C LFE Ls Rs
Sampling rate                            : 48.0 kHz
Frame rate                               : 31.250 FPS (1536 SPF)
Compression mode                         : Lossy
Stream size                              : 578 MiB (1%)
Service kind                             : Complete Main

Note the Dolby Digital core is Dolby Surround EX...

[Peter_A]

Originally Posted by Vintrus

there is a bit of audio issue with SC version not being a proper atmos 7.1 it seems SC did something odd with there sound.

Originally Posted by David M

The audio for the StudioCanal disc was encoded in 2020 (less than 4 months ago, actually) and used the latest version of the Dolby Atmos encoder, which uses some kind of audibly lossless noise-shaping process to achieve better compression efficiency (the data rate savings are apparently in the region of 30-40%). I'd be curious to hear both versions compared side by side, but you're making a mistake if you look at the audio bitrate alone.

Full disclosure, I encoded it.

Originally Posted by Hedrox

Nice smiley face and all, but I don't think that settles it. I did actually read David M's response when he initially posted it in this thread, and "audibly lossless" sounds to me like a weaselly way of stating that it's not lossless (especially with data savings "in the region of 30-40%," which is substantial). Do you think that Dolby improved its lossless encoding by 30-40% between encoder versions? I think that "audibly lossless" means "not lossless (but you won't be able to tell, we swear!)." Similar things have been said in the past (e.g., MP3 112 or 128 kbps being "CD quality," etc.), so I'm generally suspicious of such claims.

For the record, I'm not questioning David M here; I'm questioning Dolby's language. If the audio is indeed not lossless (which I think is reasonable to assume by the quoted language and data size differences), it's perfectly valid to question whether or not it's inferior to a true lossless track. I'd be interested to learn if this just an option in the newer Dolby Atmos encoders or is it the only way; if it's an option, is it the default? I also wonder how many other releases use this new way of encoding? I haven't read much else about this other than with this release (likely because in this case there is a previous release with Dolby Atmos with which to compare). Maybe this is common now on newer releases with Dolby Atmos. I don't know.

Since we are discussing audio, I am curious why StudioCanal's Mulholland Drive UHD disc (also done by David M's company, which is why I'm mentioning it here) has "fake" 24-bit audio. The DTS-HD MA 5.1 track is encoded as 24-bit, but the audio is actually 16-bit (and "padded" to 24-bit with zeroes), which is why I'm calling it "fake" (as it could have been encoded as 16-bit DTS-HD MA, instead). The Criterion UHD disc also has a DTS-HD MA 5.1 24-bit audio track, but the decoded audio actually is 24-bit (not 16-bit). I only looked into this, because I was curious about the huge audio bitrate difference between the 2 UHD releases, when they both had DTS-HD MA 5.1 24/48 audio tracks (the SC track did have a lower "core" DTS bitrate, but that would only account for a portion of the large bitrate difference). There's nothing necessarily wrong with the audio being 16-bit, but I think that it should have been encoded as such, so as not to appear to be "better" than it is.

[Geoff D]

Maybe I'm missing the point but isn't lossless MLP compression all about being "audibly" lossless anyway? Isn't that the point? If they've come up with greater efficiencies in the encoding then the proof of the pudding is in the eating, i.e. listening to see if it makes a difference, not wanking over bitrates or getting hung up on some antics.

[Peter_A]

Originally Posted by Geoff D

Maybe I'm missing the point but isn't lossless MLP compression all about being "audibly" lossless anyway? Isn't that the point? If they've come up with greater efficiencies in the encoding then the proof of the pudding is in the eating, i.e. listening to see if it makes a difference, not wanking over bitrates or getting hung up on some antics.

No, I don't think that is what "lossless" means, with respect to the audio. For DTS-HD MA, Dolby TrueHD (which uses MLP), and FLAC (and I assume ALAC, as well), "lossless" means that the decoded output is identical to the (pre-encoded) input. So, for example:

PCM1 --(encode)--> DTS-HD MA
DTS-HD MA --(decode)--> PCM2

PCM1 = PCM2 (bitwise identical)

This is objectively lossless (as they are identical). "Audibly lossless" is subjective. Has any of this changed, with the newer object-based audio formats? I don't think so, but please correct me, if that's not the case.

Isn't there enough space on a UHD disc for a true "lossless" track? The better case, in my opinion, for an "audibly lossless" (lossy) track (with significant space savings over a true lossless track) would be for streaming, where bandwidth and data-cap limitations are a significant factor. Claims of "audibly indistinguishable" have proven to be false in the past. Maybe there's a difference; maybe there's not. For UHD discs (and HD BD discs, for that matter), I'd err on the side of preferring a true lossless track, to one that "may" sound as good (according to someone or some company). We've had true lossless tracks on BD since the beginning, so fake lossless tracks (if that's indeed what they are) seem like a move backward to me. Just my 2 cents though; people are certainly free to disagree.

Edit:
In this particular case, we can see that the audio is being reported as "Meridian Lossless Packing FBA / Dolby TrueHD with Dolby Atmos." The MLP encoding should be truly lossless. I don't think that it was tweaked to not be lossless in this case. What I'm assuming is that some (lossy) transformation was performed on the original (PCM) audio, to make it smaller and/or compress more easily/efficiently, prior to the lossless MLP encoding. Maybe someone with more intimate knowledge of these newer encoder settings can chime in. I'd certainly be interested to learn more details.

[Geoff D]

Still...have you actually listened to the two versions? I haven't, and I won't be doing so (don't have a surround set up any more, and I sold the US UHD anyway), so that's not rhetorical snark. I'd just like to know if you can tell the difference, if any.

[Peter_A]

Originally Posted by Geoff D

Still...have you actually listened to the two versions? I haven't, and I won't be doing so (don't have a surround set up any more, and I sold the US UHD anyway), so that's not rhetorical snark. I'd just like to know if you can tell the difference, if any.

No, I have not. Like you, I no longer have the Sony disc, which I did watch, though it was a few years ago at this point. I currently only have the StudioCanal disc, which I have not yet watched. I did briefly compare the video between the two, before unloading the Sony disc, but it didn't even occur to me to compare the audio (as I assumed that both being Dolby Atmos tracks, they'd be the same). Maybe I wouldn't have noticed any difference. But if what I think the new encoder option is doing (some lossy pass, with the goal of saving space and possibly affecting quality, before doing the lossless pass), I hope that's a trend that does not continue.

Audio comparisons are fairly difficult, though, in general. The need to switch between the sources rapidly, match the volume of sources very closely (otherwise, louder is perceived as sounding better), and not know which is which (to prevent bias) present challenges. It's a lot easier to compare video, for example.

BTW, I forgot to add in one of my previous posts (though I intended to) that I agree with you about not obsessing over bitrates and numbers, which I don't generally do, but I also think that the couple of issues that I mentioned are a bit different than doing that.

[Geoff D]

I get why you're concerned but if you don't even think you could tell them apart anyway then does it matter?

[Peter_A]

Originally Posted by Geoff D

I get why you're concerned but if you don't even think you could tell them apart anyway then does it matter?

I'm not sure if I could, because I didn't try (or even know to try before getting rid of the old disc). And even if I couldn't, that doesn't mean that no one can (people with better ears, training, equipment, etc.). I think it's a good thing that BD/UHD discs generally have lossless audio; I think that most others do, as well, at least from what I've read and observed (do people not complain heartily when a disc has lossy audio only?). I keep all of my music in lossless, as well, at the expense of greater storage (so, I put my money where my mouth is, so to speak). Why settle for good enough (according to whom?), when it only takes (relatively) moderately more space to keep it original (without any quality loss)? If you don't care, that's fine, but others clearly do.

In this particular case, why drop the quality at all (whether or not Dolby claims it's imperceptible)? The Fifth Element GBR UHD disc is less than 79GB (on a 100 GB disc). There is no reason for the audio to be lowered in quality at all to save space. Is it not that simple? Again, for streaming (or even on a disc where the size is a concern), that may very well be a different story.

Furthermore, the audio is placed in a lossless container on the disc, which would lead one to believe that it's truly lossless, so I think it's a bit deceptive if it really isn't. As an (admittedly extreme) example, say you buy a (lossless) FLAC file of a song from an album, but, unknown to you, the original PCM had been converted to MP3 prior to being converted to FLAC. Is that not dishonest? I call this example "extreme," because the MP3 (MPEG-1 compression) would be demonstrably inferior to the original PCM audio. Is that the case here? I don't know, but I also don't think that there is a reason to have done the encoding that way (as there was no need to "save space").

[Geoff D]

But what if that's just what the new Atmos encoder does in general? Is everything out there lossless but not really now then? I still think you're getting way too hung up on what "audibly" lossless is referring to, that one single word has put you in a tizzy. If this newer process is shaving off information that is inaudible to human hearing - which again is what I always thought 'lossless' referred to anyway, though I'm wrong - then what does it matter? You'd rather have those empty bits that you're complaining about with those fake 24-bit tracks?

[bigrob]

Ok so interestingly on the UK 4K release of The Fifth Element, the end music finishes 40 seconds before the credits actually ends. Having compared the US 4K release, the French Blu-ray (with French titles and credit) and the original US Blu-ray, there is music until the very end?

So I'm aware that the UK release uses the US master as its foundation with a tweak at the beginning to remove the Columbia logo and replace it with the Gaumont logo (hence why the logo sounds different) and there is some variations between the English French language credits

But I honestly cannot figure out why the music stops playing whilst the credits are still rolling on the UK release?

[slimdude]

Originally Posted by bigrob

Ok so interestingly on the UK 4K release of The Fifth Element, the end music finishes 40 seconds before the credits actually ends. Having compared the US 4K release, the French Blu-ray (with French titles and credit) and the original US Blu-ray, there is music until the very end?

So I'm aware that the UK release uses the US master as its foundation with a tweak at the beginning to remove the Columbia logo and replace it with the Gaumont logo (hence why the logo sounds different) and there is some variations between the English French language credits

But I honestly cannot figure out why the music stops playing whilst the credits are still rolling on the UK release?

A forty second time lapse in the end credit is not that big of a deal and personally, I wouldn't worry about it. The majority of viewers doesn't watch the end credits in its entirety anyway because, some end credits can be very long, at least 7-10 minutes depending on the movie.

[andreasy969]

Originally Posted by bigrob

[Show spoiler]Ok so interestingly on the UK 4K release of The Fifth Element, the end music finishes 40 seconds before the credits actually ends. Having compared the US 4K release, the French Blu-ray (with French titles and credit) and the original US Blu-ray, there is music until the very end?

So I'm aware that the UK release uses the US master as its foundation with a tweak at the beginning to remove the Columbia logo and replace it with the Gaumont logo (hence why the logo sounds different) and there is some variations between the English French language credits

But I honestly cannot figure out why the music stops playing whilst the credits are still rolling on the UK release?

I'm afraid you'll have to run the end credits of both side by side to find out. It's strange indeed, but I won't bother to find out (for now). There's no music missing at any rate and the start is the same. End credits going silent towards the end also isn't unheard of, but in this case here, the end credits of the UK 4K must be either longer (as in more actual content), must be running slower or both.

And yes, my Scandi BD (with Gaumont master), which I can add to your list, doesn't have this either, so, again, it is strange indeed and an oddity of the UK 4K.

So you know what you have to do now.

[Hedrox]

Originally Posted by bigrob

So I'm aware that the UK release uses the US master as its foundation with a tweak at the beginning to remove the Columbia logo and replace it with the Gaumont logo (hence why the logo sounds different) and there is some variations between the English French language credits

Pretty sure UK uses a newer master compared to the one Sony used on their 2017 release, as that one had the sharpening baked in. They may both come from the same 4K OCN scan but the masters are definitely different.

[indisposed]

Originally Posted by bigrob

Ok so interestingly on the UK 4K release of The Fifth Element, the end music finishes 40 seconds before the credits actually ends. Having compared the US 4K release, the French Blu-ray (with French titles and credit) and the original US Blu-ray, there is music until the very end?

So I'm aware that the UK release uses the US master as its foundation with a tweak at the beginning to remove the Columbia logo and replace it with the Gaumont logo (hence why the logo sounds different) and there is some variations between the English French language credits

But I honestly cannot figure out why the music stops playing whilst the credits are still rolling on the UK release?

I remember the Pathe 2 disc Special Edition DVD from 2003-ish had the same quirk with the music finishing before the credits did... God knows why

[indisposed]

Did anyone here see the recent U.S release of The Fifth Element? It had an interview with Besson and some outtakes at the end of it. Be interesting to see if they turn up elsewhere.

[moviemaker]

Is the new Japanese 4K edition from March 22, 2022 the same as the 2020 SC release?

It states that: "Japan's first UHD (Ultra HD Blu-ray) using the latest 4K HDR master!"
but it doesn't include Dolby Vision (only HDR10) and does not include the Dolby True HD 7.1 (only DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1ch) both of which gave me pause.

Thanks for any information. Apologies if this has been answered elsewhere. If no one knows maybe I'll have to take one for the team and purchase it.

[moviemaker]

I think The Japanese 4k Edition just may be the same as the Studio Canal plus it includes an Alt. TV Version?

The packaging says Dolby Vision and Dolby True HD & Atmos.

[Show spoiler]

I'll grab its as the Blu-ray is Region 2 and the cover art is so much better than the atrocious UK cover.

[Hedrox]

Originally Posted by moviemaker

I think The Japanese 4k Edition just may be the same as the Studio Canal plus it includes an Alt. TV Version?

The packaging says Dolby Vision and Dolby True HD & Atmos.

I'll grab its as the Blu-ray is Region 2 and the cover art is so much better than the atrocious UK cover.

They did a similar thing with Leon, including a TV version which BTW is only in Japanese.

This release has no English subtitles on either the movie or the TV version and no other extras are mentioned in the Amazon description (granted the SC release is barebones).

The 4K is on a BD-66 and they included the TV cut on that disc as well so expect a much lower bitrate compared to the SC release (which is on a BD100)

So all in all it really doesn't have too much going for it over the SC release outside of the cover, which is indeed better but you're paying quite a hefty price for.

[PonyoBellanote]

There's a chance ''Alternate TV version'' might be refering to a dub, not the movie itself.

[Darev]

I picked up the UK release that this thread is about and just did some back to back comparisons. In my decidedly barely amateur opinion, the UK version looks "warmer" overall. However, to me, the biggest improvement over the Sony 4K release is the sound. Maybe it's my imagination, but the sound felt "bigger."

I've got a mediocre system as far as Audio / Video. No OLED (VAVA UST with ALR screen) and Denon AVR-x1300w with Polk speakers (w/ SONY "atmos" upfiring speakers)

Now that I have a choice between the two, my "go to" version of this is this new UK release.