I’m very confused by 4K (or UltraHD) movies. I own a dedicated UHD Blu-Ray player (and an Xbox One X), yet if we are to believe the likes of Samsung who don’t make them anymore (ordinary HD and 4K players) - the future is online digital video.
But the majority of online digital video sellers (Apple, Amazon,etc.) will happily take your money for content (regardless of resolution) and have the apparent right to remove the title from their system if the distributor/copyright owner demands it. Which means you need to download (if the service you’re using allows it - Amazon only lets you download to devices like tablets and phones) in order to keep it.
Tried an experiment with Apple TV Store recently. Downloaded 27 titles that I feel could be at risk from being removed from the Apple movies/TV store (mainly independent films). I set-up library sharing using Home Sharing on the Mac to watch via Apple TV device (since you can’t download movies to it). Anything with iTunes Extras had the extras missing. One title, Birds of Prey (the recent release from Warner Bros.) was missing. Looking at the “file” on the Mac, it has a strange package contents structure the other titles don’t have - it’s essentially a container, like a Mac app. Why can’t the Apple TV device recognise it and play it? Would I only be able to play it on a Mac if WB decided to withdraw it from sale?
So how am I to back up digital purchases with Apple if the process is so inconsistent and, quite frankly, horrible? With more studios looking to sell movies on these types of platform at a higher price while the cinemas are out of action, I am very wary of “buying” anything more now.
Physical media is here to stay. But another problem is that studios - particularly TV companies - deciding it’s too expensive to manufacture shows on Blu-Ray and either just stick to digital only or make DVD releases instead.
The entire movie industry likes to screw absolutely everybody over - those that work in it (and I have spent 6 years of my life in post production dealing with utter BS from studios) to consumers (as a film fan). Maybe just stick to subscription services and forget any nice extras?
The amazon link is to an ordinary bluray, no UHD to be found. I guess the 4k transfer had oversampling advantages.
Nostalgia is a powerful drug. But just because a film was a VHS staple doesn’t mean that we can discount the experience of seeing the film at it’s premiere, on a freshly maintained projector, under perfect conditions.
I have a bluray burner, but have never used it. Not sure what kind of discs to even buy, or if you can buy just one of them these days. Not sure how playable they even are in the devices I own, with the probable region coding. I don’t particularly want to watch in front of my computer, since it only has a 1080 monitor.
The conundrum itself, its own futuristic dystopia.
Yeah, they look kind of messy, but compared to VHS, or DVDs, or even your memories, there might be advantages.
I think there are huge advantages to seeing animation on a non-interlaced screen. Lines are crisp. If a cel was meant to be a solid, clean color, that’s how it appears on the bluray.
I wish I had some help to offer, but burning Bluray is outside my experience - all my local media files live on a small linux box running Plex, that I then view on the TV through a Roku.
The Harmy versions are available as AVCHD files (also as much larger .mov files), which is basically a blu-ray file system meant to be burned onto regular DVDs. They can then be played in 720p HD in a bluray player, which for most practical purposes is indistinguishable from 1080p. They look FANTASTIC, much better than the official releases of the blurays. Even putting aside the CGI nonsense that Lucas added, the color-timing was a crime against cinema. Harmy fixes ALL of that.
Why is is that whenever an older movie is released on Blu-ray or in 4K, there’s always a squad of miserable luddites saying it’s going to look terrible compared to standard definition formats? Things shot on film for cinema screens look excellent in high or ultra-high definition if mastered properly.
I own the original Blu-ray issue of Flash Gordon and it looks a lot better than any prior home format, but not great compared to newer discs because the master was made using dated technology and it’s smeary, denoised and degrained with an overly magenta colour bias. I’d be happy to upgrade because it’s a really nice, colourful movie and Blu-ray’s capable of wildly better colour than DVD or VHS.
People saying old special effects/props etc look terrible in high definition probably have motion-smoothing/frame interpolation activated on their TVs and so everything looks like a cheap soap opera. Some things are revealed to be fakery more readily in higher definition but most look about as good as they did in the cinema, and often the visible fakery is part of the charm of old films, especially camp like Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers.
There are some new amateur 4K scans of theatrical prints of Star Wars and Return of the Jedi available (search for 4K77 and 4K83). Empire (4K80) is in progress.
They’re not as sharp as the Harmy edits, but they look really nice and film-like and lack any of the visible fixes Harmy had to do. I believe Harmy will eventually release a 4K edit using these scans to paper over the cracks left by the special editions.
But we all know the greatest “special effects” in that film were the over the top acting of Max Von Sydow, BRIAN BLESSED!!!, Ornella Muti, Topol and Timothy Dalton.
More ham per square inch than a Boars Head warehouse
Someone seriously needs to use whatever deepfake/CGI technology currently exists to place Brian Blessed into every film ever made. It would improve most of them immeasurably.
