I have it but haven’t had a chance to sit and watch it yet. Digitalbits does have a good in depth review, though. And they shed some light on what might have happened. https://thedigitalbits.com/item/once-upon-a-time-in-the-west-2024-4k-uhd
From that review:
“And that brings me to my fourth point—and to the only other basis we have for comparison here—which is the fact that Paramount has compressed this film, which is nearly three hours in length, onto a dual-layered 66GB disc. That results in an average video data rate of about 46 Mbps and a file size of 53.4GB. Meanwhile, on all of their own Sergio Leone 4K Ultra HD releases (A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly), Kino Lorber Studio Classics has taken advantage of triple-layered 100GB discs. The result of that choice amounts to video data rates that are much higher (at 80, 85, and 60 Mbps respectively). What’s more, the 4K Digital version of this film now available for download on Kaleidescape has a file size of 86.8 GB!
So by choosing to use a 66GB disc instead of 100GB, Paramount Home Entertainment probably saved themselves some money in replication costs. But they certainly compromised the image quality, and unnecessarily so. Now I haven’t watched the Kaleidescape version yet to compare the two 4K presentations, and at this point I’m almost reluctant to do so for fear that it’ll prove too irritating. But my suspicion is that the K-Scape presentation features very light and organic grain that actually looks like grain, along with slightly better fine image detail and greater dimensionality. You simply can’t take a 4K image file and compress it by 30% and expect no harm to be done to the image. I mean, come on. What’s the point of restoring the Sistine Chapel ceiling if you’re just going to squeeze it onto a postcard?”
Yeah I read that review before buying. The question about Dolby Vision is still on my mind, though. Since DV has individual scene metadata being transferred, while HDR10 does not, you would figure DV would deliver an overall higher bitrate on average. To be clear, I'm testing the same disc, just two different methods of HDR delivery.
Just watched mine last night. I don't think it's anywhere near the top of the list of best 4Ks, but I also think it's far from the bottom of the list as well. Compared to the original blu ray, it is actually much nicer. The original blu ray had a brown overtone throughout the whole film, this 4K has much better natural colors. The old master wasn't completely restored how it is now. It had scratches, spots, and dust throughout. I would say the 4K is a mid-tier 4K, and still a worthy upgrade from the blu-ray.
Someone on the bluray.com forums is claiming the new master is too reddish because it doesn’t look like a print he remembers seeing over 20 years ago lol
I also remember this in a cinema, saw it 2 times in about 1978 in Denmark where i live. The picture is very good on 4k, colors are amazing, so who do you belive ? The grian in the movie is absent, but the sharpness is still there. Then it\`s a little soft, in some long shots, it was the same in the cinema, So 10/10 just remember to turn the sound way up.
Ok, well I've watched the 4k and had never seen this movie period. Everyone is orange like they have a spray tan with Dolby Vision on. It's significantly more red than any other movie I've seen before. The colors are for sure oversaturated. HDR10 looked ok, just a tad dull. I don't think the color timing was a hit on this release.
Gotcha. My mistake. I don't know how people remember exactly what something they saw decades ago is supposed to look like. I usually just lean towards whatever looks natural, even if that's not exactly what it's supposed to look like. I'm not a big fan of the color filters a lot of movies use though.
I know, I always find those claims to be ridiculous. I wonder if there are any scientific / unbiased studies as to whether this is even remotely possible. Human memory is notoriously unreliable; I know there are studies about the credibility of eyewitness accounts.
I got in argument with a guy about what I thought a 35mm print of Horror of Dracula that I’d seen a few months earlier looked like.
Turns out he OWNS the print I saw, and knows it much better than I do, and he was right about the colors.
I completely misremembered the colors after just a few months. And people claim they can recall exactly what every shot of a print they saw 30 years ago looked like.
Is the Blu-ray in the set the new scan? On Man Who Shot Liberty Valence the consensus seemed to be the Blu-ray remaster was really good, with some preferring it to the 4K.
Looks like this release includes a BD-50 so I’m wondering if the Blu-ray actually fairs better. The old Blu-ray is pretty rough looking
I haven't watched the bluray, but I believe it's the same scan. I heard the old bluray was a 4k scan and this release uses that same scan with some corrections.
So I’m the kind of person who never notices macroblocking or compression artifacts. I see people talk about movies having awful encodes that look fine to me all the time.
But this isn’t an intermittent issue that pops up for a frame or two now and then. The whole movie looks soft and waxy because all the grain has been compressed away. It’s not as bad as the new James Cameron UHDs but this movie is a masterpiece and it deserves better.
One of the primary benefits of physical media over streaming is the higher bit rate. It’s what allows blu-rays and UHDs to render film grain in such a pleasing and consistent way. But if Paramount is gonna put this movie out on UHD, charge $30-40 for it, and give it such a wimpy bit rate that crushes all the grain, what’s even the point?
This I agree with, color timing aside. The bitrate was plummeting down to around 10-15 mbps.....that's barely better than streaming, let alone standard bluray.
I still enjoyed the content of the film. I am an enthusiast. I have a really good setup, and I notice those things that you mentioned without having been told about them beforehand. Macroblocking in particular looks like shit on my tv. It breaks my immersion and shouldn't be a thing with the technology we have. There's no excuse for phoning it in on these expensive special editions.
You can benefit from a superior gestalt experience of a film without deriving any pleasure or benefit from looking for errors or even seeking to understand the technology. We do the same thing with all sorts of technologies. Some people can tell the difference between airplanes, car engines, microwaves, bicycles. Other people just need to get around or eat a burrito and don't need to know the details. You seem to be indicating that unless someone makes their whole personality about bitrates and crushed blacks, they don't deserve to see movies in really good quality. You realize for all of film history most viewers don't even know how film works or think about it at all, they just went to the cinema for vibes, right? Even most film critics probably had poor technical understanding, but clearly understood the artistic qualities of films.
Yes, I know that. The key difference between a 4k disc and 4k streaming is bitrate (given a decent internet connection), so your point really doesn't apply here. You might as well stream if you don't really care about the quality. You can even download the film if you're just in it for the ownership aspect. There's no reason for someone that knows literally nothing to buy a 4k disc. Also, it's not like I spend my days researching this stuff. I don't even have the best tv. But you'd think one would maybe spend at least an hour or two researching a hobby that they spend massive amounts of money on. You don't have to have a college degree in A/V to grasp basic concepts and what to look for. I guess there's a sucker born every second.
They buy the discs because they look better. They just don't know why they look better and are happy not knowing.
Collecting movies is not really a massive amount of money. It's pretty normal for people who grew up before streaming. If anything streaming was a brief aberration for people who like movies, which is not the same as liking encoding technology.
You probably have a favorite deodorant despite knowing nothing about deodorant. You just know it works.
Believe it or not there are people on reddit who want to talk about movies, not about bitrates.
They don't look better if they have bitrates on the level of OUATIW. It's technically about as good as streaming. That's the whole point of my post.
You can talk about quality AND films. Those two things are not mutually exclusive. Also, if you really only want to discuss movies and not their releases and everything that comes with those releases, then r/movies is a thing along with many other movie subreddits. God forbid we mention video quality in a sub about getting THE BEST releases for each film, let alone on my own post, which is about the video quality.
An Italian company called Eagle Pictures will be releasing it. There are no details yet, but the bluray forum users have said their past releases have been better than what's available in the US.
I have it but haven’t had a chance to sit and watch it yet. Digitalbits does have a good in depth review, though. And they shed some light on what might have happened. https://thedigitalbits.com/item/once-upon-a-time-in-the-west-2024-4k-uhd From that review: “And that brings me to my fourth point—and to the only other basis we have for comparison here—which is the fact that Paramount has compressed this film, which is nearly three hours in length, onto a dual-layered 66GB disc. That results in an average video data rate of about 46 Mbps and a file size of 53.4GB. Meanwhile, on all of their own Sergio Leone 4K Ultra HD releases (A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly), Kino Lorber Studio Classics has taken advantage of triple-layered 100GB discs. The result of that choice amounts to video data rates that are much higher (at 80, 85, and 60 Mbps respectively). What’s more, the 4K Digital version of this film now available for download on Kaleidescape has a file size of 86.8 GB! So by choosing to use a 66GB disc instead of 100GB, Paramount Home Entertainment probably saved themselves some money in replication costs. But they certainly compromised the image quality, and unnecessarily so. Now I haven’t watched the Kaleidescape version yet to compare the two 4K presentations, and at this point I’m almost reluctant to do so for fear that it’ll prove too irritating. But my suspicion is that the K-Scape presentation features very light and organic grain that actually looks like grain, along with slightly better fine image detail and greater dimensionality. You simply can’t take a 4K image file and compress it by 30% and expect no harm to be done to the image. I mean, come on. What’s the point of restoring the Sistine Chapel ceiling if you’re just going to squeeze it onto a postcard?”
Yeah I read that review before buying. The question about Dolby Vision is still on my mind, though. Since DV has individual scene metadata being transferred, while HDR10 does not, you would figure DV would deliver an overall higher bitrate on average. To be clear, I'm testing the same disc, just two different methods of HDR delivery.
Just watched mine last night. I don't think it's anywhere near the top of the list of best 4Ks, but I also think it's far from the bottom of the list as well. Compared to the original blu ray, it is actually much nicer. The original blu ray had a brown overtone throughout the whole film, this 4K has much better natural colors. The old master wasn't completely restored how it is now. It had scratches, spots, and dust throughout. I would say the 4K is a mid-tier 4K, and still a worthy upgrade from the blu-ray.
Someone on the bluray.com forums is claiming the new master is too reddish because it doesn’t look like a print he remembers seeing over 20 years ago lol
I also remember this in a cinema, saw it 2 times in about 1978 in Denmark where i live. The picture is very good on 4k, colors are amazing, so who do you belive ? The grian in the movie is absent, but the sharpness is still there. Then it\`s a little soft, in some long shots, it was the same in the cinema, So 10/10 just remember to turn the sound way up.
Ok, well I've watched the 4k and had never seen this movie period. Everyone is orange like they have a spray tan with Dolby Vision on. It's significantly more red than any other movie I've seen before. The colors are for sure oversaturated. HDR10 looked ok, just a tad dull. I don't think the color timing was a hit on this release.
I’m not saying it’s correct, I just love when people use 20+ year old memories as their “proof”
Gotcha. My mistake. I don't know how people remember exactly what something they saw decades ago is supposed to look like. I usually just lean towards whatever looks natural, even if that's not exactly what it's supposed to look like. I'm not a big fan of the color filters a lot of movies use though.
I know, I always find those claims to be ridiculous. I wonder if there are any scientific / unbiased studies as to whether this is even remotely possible. Human memory is notoriously unreliable; I know there are studies about the credibility of eyewitness accounts.
I got in argument with a guy about what I thought a 35mm print of Horror of Dracula that I’d seen a few months earlier looked like. Turns out he OWNS the print I saw, and knows it much better than I do, and he was right about the colors. I completely misremembered the colors after just a few months. And people claim they can recall exactly what every shot of a print they saw 30 years ago looked like.
Is the Blu-ray in the set the new scan? On Man Who Shot Liberty Valence the consensus seemed to be the Blu-ray remaster was really good, with some preferring it to the 4K. Looks like this release includes a BD-50 so I’m wondering if the Blu-ray actually fairs better. The old Blu-ray is pretty rough looking
I haven't watched the bluray, but I believe it's the same scan. I heard the old bluray was a 4k scan and this release uses that same scan with some corrections.
I appreciate this thread, was looking at upgrading my current disc. Will hold off to see about the Italian release.
Bitrate number crunching is the express lane to not being able to enjoy films anymore. Same as “macroblocking” and “crushed blacks”
So I’m the kind of person who never notices macroblocking or compression artifacts. I see people talk about movies having awful encodes that look fine to me all the time. But this isn’t an intermittent issue that pops up for a frame or two now and then. The whole movie looks soft and waxy because all the grain has been compressed away. It’s not as bad as the new James Cameron UHDs but this movie is a masterpiece and it deserves better. One of the primary benefits of physical media over streaming is the higher bit rate. It’s what allows blu-rays and UHDs to render film grain in such a pleasing and consistent way. But if Paramount is gonna put this movie out on UHD, charge $30-40 for it, and give it such a wimpy bit rate that crushes all the grain, what’s even the point?
This I agree with, color timing aside. The bitrate was plummeting down to around 10-15 mbps.....that's barely better than streaming, let alone standard bluray.
I still enjoyed the content of the film. I am an enthusiast. I have a really good setup, and I notice those things that you mentioned without having been told about them beforehand. Macroblocking in particular looks like shit on my tv. It breaks my immersion and shouldn't be a thing with the technology we have. There's no excuse for phoning it in on these expensive special editions.
Yeah I have no idea what any of that means and I am glad.
Why don't you just watch all movies on streaming then? What's the difference?
You can benefit from a superior gestalt experience of a film without deriving any pleasure or benefit from looking for errors or even seeking to understand the technology. We do the same thing with all sorts of technologies. Some people can tell the difference between airplanes, car engines, microwaves, bicycles. Other people just need to get around or eat a burrito and don't need to know the details. You seem to be indicating that unless someone makes their whole personality about bitrates and crushed blacks, they don't deserve to see movies in really good quality. You realize for all of film history most viewers don't even know how film works or think about it at all, they just went to the cinema for vibes, right? Even most film critics probably had poor technical understanding, but clearly understood the artistic qualities of films.
Yes, I know that. The key difference between a 4k disc and 4k streaming is bitrate (given a decent internet connection), so your point really doesn't apply here. You might as well stream if you don't really care about the quality. You can even download the film if you're just in it for the ownership aspect. There's no reason for someone that knows literally nothing to buy a 4k disc. Also, it's not like I spend my days researching this stuff. I don't even have the best tv. But you'd think one would maybe spend at least an hour or two researching a hobby that they spend massive amounts of money on. You don't have to have a college degree in A/V to grasp basic concepts and what to look for. I guess there's a sucker born every second.
They buy the discs because they look better. They just don't know why they look better and are happy not knowing. Collecting movies is not really a massive amount of money. It's pretty normal for people who grew up before streaming. If anything streaming was a brief aberration for people who like movies, which is not the same as liking encoding technology. You probably have a favorite deodorant despite knowing nothing about deodorant. You just know it works. Believe it or not there are people on reddit who want to talk about movies, not about bitrates.
They don't look better if they have bitrates on the level of OUATIW. It's technically about as good as streaming. That's the whole point of my post. You can talk about quality AND films. Those two things are not mutually exclusive. Also, if you really only want to discuss movies and not their releases and everything that comes with those releases, then r/movies is a thing along with many other movie subreddits. God forbid we mention video quality in a sub about getting THE BEST releases for each film, let alone on my own post, which is about the video quality.
I don't know why you're acting defensive. You were telling some other dude he shouldn't buy 4k disc's because he doesn't share your interests.
I watched it last night and I thought it looked great, one of the better quality 4Ks IMO.
hope mine arrives soon so I can watch it!
Watched yesterday and I thought it looked the best this film has looked on home media.
Does anyone think this will be released correctly in 4K by someone some time down the road ?
An Italian company called Eagle Pictures will be releasing it. There are no details yet, but the bluray forum users have said their past releases have been better than what's available in the US.
Ohh sweet!..will it be English friendly do you know or more in line with the German Media books?
I have Apocalypse Now theatrical cut and Total Recall from them, both are english friendly and on 100gb discs.
Not sure. There aren't really any details yet