My favorite actor Johnny Depp and lovely Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl 2003, i bought it when it came out in 4k and it looks horrible. Of course hdr is icing on the cake when its done well, but i dont miss it if its not on a 4k release, the main thing is that detail and color is perfect or nearly.
I didnt do anything wrong, i bought the 4k disc and i used Topaz Video AI, result is just the way i wanted Disney to have released it on 4K. The question is have any of you done the same as i did with other releases that are disastrous?
I acquired my very first “poor” bluray this week - the 2010 transfer of Where Eagles Dare. To be honest I have a good number of plain DVDs that can completely blow this release away but from what I gather pristine prints were (are?) hard to come by so they must have worked with the best they could find. Nothing wrong with the technical transfer - very high bitrate as you would expect at 1080p24 - and about as detailed and sharp as you could reasonably expect for what is probably a worn third generation theatre distribution set of reels as the source (just my guess based on picture quality). But still, it was around the quality of a very good DVD but then let down by serious grain that is more like what I’d expect from an amateur 16mm camera. And the dark environment filming was no excuse for all that noise as the severe grain carried through to brightly lit indoor scenes as well.
But it seems that once again Topaz has performed a miracle - in this case Artemis. I strongly suspect had this been around 14 years ago, the producers probably would have used it themselves. Of course these days nothing will beat a new 4K scan from a pristine print, but in the absence of that…
I had the blu ray 1080p, and when the 4k disc came out i bought it, it´s got horrible picture. The blu ray 1080p is very good quality so i used that to make a 4k, and the result is great.
I have never experienced a 4K video (though I own about five commercial offerings now that combined a 4K and Bluray disk including the original Rambo, Terminator 2). Obviously I cannot comment on what differences may exist since I am stuck watching the Blurays but I have read quite a few times that the 4K transfers “suffer” from the problem I eluded to in another post of mine where I opined that sometimes a technically inferior render is subjectively better to a more “perfect” one because the former “softens out” some of the inner detail - and whilst a lot of that inner detail is desirable, some of it is not.
It is one of the reasons that all my Full HD Topaz output is done at 16 mbps H.265 constant rather than anything higher. As soon as I go to 24 mbps or beyond, the imperfections in the Topaz output become apparent to the point where they can be distracting, yet at 16 Mbps, they remain sufficiently well “hidden” so as not to intrude. This of course is no indictment upon Topaz - it is not a miracle worker (but is pretty close to it…).
So it would not surprise me that many people are a bit underwhelmed by 4K even though from a purely technical perspective it is superior. My own way of thinking is that 4K serves a different sort of purpose to Full HD. Full HD is sort of where we should have been from the beginning (as opposed to NTSC or PAL) since Full HD provides a very nice quality picture indeed on the sorts of smaller screens we all grew up with in the analogue 4:3 days as well as small to medium current generation TVs up to perhaps the high 40 inch to low 50 inch range depending upon viewing distance).
But where 4K will shine is in preserving that same quality but on a vastly larger screen yet again. Well, that is my take on it anyway. I suspect that people these days are so used to large TVs and being so close to them that when they can see each and every pixel on a 4K TV, they are going to see all the flaws as well.
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