melasnus

This must be frustrating for all the "browncoats" out there.
Surprised Whedon would allow this to happen...

Alan Smithee

JimRochester

Haven't seen it in a while but I don't remember being particularly disappointed in it. I do remember the audio was a huge improvement over the HD DVD I upgraded from. I'll have to check it out again and look closer.

Adam Tyner

Iron_Giant

There are MANY things I like about the 4K release of the Harry Potter Movies, but there is one thing I dislike.

The scrubbing of some of the grain also seemed to have remove some details from the kid's faces...the face look took clean and porcelain.

Swapped back and force on a few of the movie, and the blu-ray is really blurry at times and the 4k does blow the BR our of the water.

Iron_Giant

My Favorite 4K so far:

Lucy
Murder on the Orient Express
Aquaman
Fate of the Furious
2001 Space
Spider-Man Spidey Verse
Dunkirk

melasnus

I do have Aquaman and 2001 on 4K and the video quality is truly breathtaking.
Haven't seen the others on UHD.

Josh Z

Christmas Vacation and Elf are both in dire need of remasters, as the Blu-rays for both looked terrible (especially Elf). I'd be inclined to give Warner Bros the benefit of the doubt, as they've mostly done right with 4K, but they do occasionally screw up.

I've been working through the Batman '89-97 box set recently. While the first two movies were remastered, both were given hideous teal-and-orange color makeovers. The last two movies don't seem to be remastered at all, and look to be upconverted from old masters with DNR and sharpening problems.

ViewAskewbian

Yeah, I saw a side by side on the new Batman/Batman Returns transfers (as well as some of the new sound effects) and was like, naw, I'm out.

Josh Z

It's a shame, because the 4K image on both movies is really impressively sharp and detailed, but the coloring is atrocious.

Ironically, because the later two films weren't remastered, they don't suffer the teal/orange problem. Of course, Schumacher's colors are plenty obnoxious in their own right.

T-bone22

Josh Z

Was that eye-roll for me?

Personally, I don't consider this acceptable, but to each their own.

T-bone22

I've seen the UHD's personally on a calibrated screen and the "teal" is quite subtle, and I'm damn sure way more accurate to the original theatrical releases coloring than the warm toned bluray from the past. I feel sorry for those that will miss out on these stunning transfers because they saw some shitty, inaccurate 'comparison' images. It couldn't be further from "atrocious".

bunkaroo

I just checked out the scene above on the 4K disc. It’s actually the spotlights themselves that are very teal. So in that screengrab the spotlight has moved to left of the Joker. The rest of the frame isn’t quite as teal but it is weird the spotlight is so teal.

ViewAskewbian

There are other examples. As another posted said, it's a personal preference (like the less sepia recent release of the Godfather flicks) but I wasn't a fan of the teal cast but then again I might have proper calibration etc. I just know what I personally enjoy when it comes to a film I've watched since the 90s and the original blu looked more like what I remembered, rightly or wrongly.


4k Remaster

First Bluray release

ViewAskewbian

You do have a point regarding original intent if these photos of the camera negative in the Academy Film Archive and Library of Congress are accurate. Does appear to have a tealish cast.

Josh Z

Well, that's BS. I made the comparison I posted above myself, and the 2019 image is screengrabbed directly off the remastered Blu-ray that comes in the case with the UHD. (I don't have the ability to do screenshots from UHD yet, and even if I did, there's a host of problems downconverting HDR images to view on a computer monitor.)

I have watched the 4K disc on my calibrated screen, and it is equally teal in that shot. Go pull it up yourself and then tell me I'm wrong. You can't, because that is exactly what it looks like.

While I may concede that the old Blu-ray has a slight bit too much red, which gives whites a pinkish tinge, it's far preferable to the blanket of teal that's been smothered on the new master. Movies made in 1989 did not look like this. The teal-and-orange fad did not begin until the advent of digital color grading tools in the early 2000s.

I stand by my statement that the new color grade is atrocious.

The problem is that the color grade added too much green, which shifts any blues (which would include the approx. 4000K color temp of the light from that spotlight) to teal. This is a problem all throughout the movie, not just that scene. Any place there should be blue, it's now teal. Any whites in the image also have a teal tinge. It's not always as strong as that example, but it's there in practically every scene.

Josh Z

A couple points on this.

1) A camera negative is not color timed. In the analog days, color timing was performed at the Interpositive or Internegative stages. In today's digital era, color grading is done on the Digital Intermediate. The raw 35mm camera negative is not properly color balanced. In 1989, the release prints would have been timed for projection through an approx. 5400K Xenon projector lamp.

2) That's not a photo. It's a digital scan of some film frames. Many digital scanners will add a green bias, especially if set for a quick scan. When you add green to blue, it becomes teal.

When someone shows you an alleged scan of a camera negative, it's not necessarily representative of what a release print of the movie looked like when projected in a theater. The filmmakers knew the properties of their film stock and the projector lamps, and color timed the prints accordingly to get a result on screen that they wanted.

Josh Z

Some more horrifically teal-ified images from Batman and Batman Returns.

T-bone22

Josh Z

You think movies in the 1980s and '90s were teal-and-orange? There aren't enough eye-rolls in the universe to fully react to that.

zyzzle

Yuck... Have we lost all hope in the proper, color-appropriate restorations of classic catalogue titles? Why "upgrade" to 4k or 8k when you're just going to get 'remastered' garbage like these tealified messes?

I'm a stickler for good picture quality, good resolution. But, I'd rather watch a DVD of a favorite catalogue title which has proper theatrical color timing than an atrocious 'reimagining' of the same title in hot tealfied garbage transfer at 8k.

tealification / orange mess = scribbling graffiti over classic films. Makes them unwatchable and is criminal destruction of art!

This trend is even more infuriating than the widesreen / p&s debacle of 20 years ago. Thankfully, they finally got that one right. It took a good ten years of customers bitching to get them to do it, however.

John Pannozzi

Reminds me of how after everyone and their mother made fun of Han shooting first in the Special Edition of Star Wars, and replacing guns with walkie-talkies in the 20th Anniversary Edition of E.T., that type of movie revisionism became super unpopular. Yet by comparison, barely anyone who's not a film geek cares or pays much mind to orange and teal filters on vintage films.

bunkaroo

I have to say, I totally see what’s being discussed here when I pop in the discs on my OLED, but when I first watched these discs a couple years ago I didn’t notice it. Of course I’m not a pro reviewer or someone who has a critical eye. I’m not happy about it but I was thankfully able to enjoy them.

RocShemp

The other shots don't bother me too much but this one immediately sticks out to me like a fork in the eye.