Disney+ Star Wars is 4K

[litemakr]

Yeah, the HDR is almost certainly fake, but people seem quite pleased with the level of detail, even at the low bitrate.  And apparently the Atmos mixes aren't bad.  It would be interesting to hear what schorman and hairy_hen make of them.

I sampled all of them in Dolby Vision. The prequels look much better in terms of dynamic range and seem to have true HDR (or better fake HDR) to my eyes. It's too bad they didn't analyze them in that video. ROTS in particular looks very impressive to me. Hopefully this fake HDR thing isn't a new trend to save doing actual HDR re-grades.

Btw, Raiders of the Lost Ark was briefly in 4K Dolby Vision on Netflix. It wasn't advertised as such, but it triggered Dolby Vision on my LG OLED TV. It was still the revisionist blu-ray colors, but had more detail, more grain and the overexposed/flattened highlights were brightened back up (but not corrected to show the blown out detail). I am guessing that was a similar fake HDR situation, but it did look better. Netflix has since taken that copy down and it's back to HD SDR last time I checked.

[Chewtobacca]

Ah, you are probably right about the prequels. I was thinking only in terms of the OT.

Interesting to hear about Raiders! I wonder if somebody somewhere bagged it.

[litemakr]

Ah, you are probably right about the prequels.  I was thinking only in terms of the OT.

Interesting to hear about Raiders!  I wonder if somebody somewhere bagged it.

I watched the last 40 mins of ROTS and it really looks stunning. The lightsabers, lava and force lightening look bright and hot, much more so than the OT versions.

I hope that Netflix 4K version of Raiders is not what we ultimately get as an Ultra HD release. It looks better, but the basic flaws are still not fixed. I'm hoping they spend the cash to do a new OCN scan and a faithful color grade and audio remix for the upcoming 40th anniversary in 2021. That will coincide with the new movie, so it seems the most likely time to release it.

[deleted user]

I'm not sure I agree with the methodology of the reviewer. HDR doesn't mean the movie *has* to have all the dynamic range that's possible in HDR, merely that it has a higher dynamic range than SDR (Rec709) would allow. If they simply preserved the dynamic range of the scanned 35mm elements, which is - especially for the original negatives - higher than Rec709, they would end up with something that has a higher dynamic range than SDR but of course is nowhere near the intensity of a modern digital production in terms of dynamic range. So in other words, it might just be faithful, which I would welcome.

And there would still always be the benefit of non-clipped highlights. What true fake HDR would mean, in my opinion, is to take an SDR master with clipped highlights or with already applied tonemapping, and then just copy-pasting it into a HDR stream, preserving the tonemapped & clipped highlights.

So in my eyes, the proper test would be to find sequences of the original Blu Ray that had clipped highlights and comparing them to the HDR and seeing if they still clip.

Of course, if one has an SDR master without clipped highlights (competent tonemapping) one could in theory stretch those tonemapped highlights back out to restore the original dynamic range of the scan, if one knew the exact curves that were used for the tonemapping. This could be considered an "upconversion", yet might be indistinguishable from a HDR master of the movie that was simply never tonemapped to begin with.

It sounds to me like the reviewer would only consider it true HDR if they artificially added more brightness in the peaks than was there on the original film elements to begin with.

[Hitcher]

TrollUHD have ripped them.

[Beber]

I got A New Hope: sadly, they synchronized the Blu-ray dts HDMA instead of keeping the new Disney+ Atmos track, so no "McClunkey" to see/hear what the fuss is all about. Plus they kept the poorly done subtitles on the alien parts and cropped half of them out as they split the image and the bottom black bar. A messed up release...

[deleted user]

I got A New Hope: sadly, they synchronized the Blu-ray dts HDMA instead of keeping the new Disney+ Atmos track, so no "McClunkey" to see/hear what the fuss is all about. Plus they kept the poorly done subtitles on the alien parts and cropped half of them out as they split the image and the bottom black bar. A messed up release...

That audio part is sadly exactly what I suspected. Thanks for confirming.

The subtitles part sounds even worse. Hope someone does it better in the future.

[Beber]

The subtitles part sounds even worse. Hope someone does it better in the future.

[Chewtobacca]

Yeah, they are HDMI caps, not proper WEB-DLs, which is a shame. But at least you get to see what the new transfers look like. The color timing is a definite improvement on that of the BDs. There'll almost certainly be another scene release soon enough, one with Atmos.

[deleted user]

The subtitles part sounds even worse. Hope someone does it better in the future.

Yikes!