Superman: The Movie 4K

[BDgeek]

Are the problems with the BD and UHD audio mixes down being tampered with, bad compression or the DAC used while decoding / viewing?

IMO, it's mostly due to processing/clean up done prior to encode for BD or UHD.

In the urge to appease the greater crowd with 'crystal clear' sound, nowadays, just about every track gets re-equed with some filtering and level normalization used to accomodate for soundbars and/or lower end surround equipment.

[BDgeek]

CSchmidlapp,

just to further elaborate on this issue. I believe what goes on with the soundtracks of modern movie releases is very similar to the issue of 'Loundness war' on the music industry.

I'm not sure if you're familiar with that, but basically the majority of new releases and catalog remasters have their Dinamic Range totally compressed, rolling off low and (mostly) high frequencies (to get rid of the "hiss"), but raising to levels (volume) to 'compensate'. That totally sucks out the life of the tracks.

So it's a big contratiction that we get supposedly HQ formats like SACD, SHM-CD, Blue-SpecCD and in the end, the masters are completely screwed up.


And to take this debacle even further, I'm don't know if you're familar with the whole Disney 'Atmouse' mixes. They are taking soundtracks from just a few years ago, presented originally on BD in DTS-HD MA 7.1, and turning them into really anemic Dolby Atmos tracks for the UHDs. The latest Pirates of the Carribean (which was a day and date release), most of the Marvel movies and some Disney/Pixar Classics have been affected.

[Turisu]

And to take this debacle even further, I'm don't know if you're familar with the whole Disney 'Atmouse' mixes. They are taking soundtracks from just a few years ago, presented originally on BD in DTS-HD MA 7.1, and turning them into really anemic Dolby Atmos tracks for the UHDs. The latest Pirates of the Carribean (which was a day and date release), most of the Marvel movies and some Disney/Pixar Classics have been affected.

Interesting. So would the best thing be to mux audio tracks from the older BDs with the UHD video? And does this affect newer Disney BDs that are released alongside the UHDs?

[BDgeek]

Yes, for most of them it would be better to use the BD track indeed!

But we need to check them out one by one as there are exceptions. I was going to suggest we continue this debate on the UHD thread I started, but it seems you already found it 

The issue sometimes also affects newer releases (but nowadays, even the BDs DTS-HD MA 7.1 are usually tame now), that's what I referred as day and date releases like POTC.

Avengers Age Of Ultron on BD is the one that started the whole Disney 'Atmouse', even  though it was not an Atmos mix (if you understand what I mean . But it was an Atmos mix threatrically.

[captainsolo]

You took the words right out of my keyboard BDgeek. I've made reference to the loudness war for some time now and it's an invisible issue unfortunately most have no idea of spreading to films.
The US LBX LD and it's Japan counterpart have the 70mm mix in matrix 2.0 form and for years I swore it was the best sounding version out there figuring it was the 70mm mix.
The 78 Dolby stereo is so incredibly underwhelming that even screening a 35mm print it sounds mono-ish for most of the feature.

II also has audio mix issues as the original film got a limited release in bass enhanced Megasound. Then there was dolby stereo, a 5.1 remix that some say has some errors-and the Donner cut mix that has some modern mixing styles and effects and is thus not as good as the 1980 mix.

[TheLoon]

The colour grading on the UHD disc is so sloppy. Clearly the digital colourist loved using the qualifier tool to isolate certain colours or areas of the image in order to alter them. But the results are often amateurish. Here, the goal was obviously to bring down the exposure on the sky in order to bring up the mid-tones in the grass (WHY? Just leave the cinematography alone!!), but the results are so amateurish. Check out the two round highlights on the car in particular, ugh:



The theatrical Blu-ray for comparison:

[TheLoon]

More (UHD top):

[captainsolo]

Oh maaan why would they do that?
Here I've been lamenting the fact I'm not 4K capable yet so I can't watch this but now I don't feel so bad.