nicwood napisał(a):The Pianist - BD-100, DV, German / UK / French disc - English 5.1 and 2.0, French and German 5.1 with English SDH, French and German subtitles. There are separate English subtitles for the foreign-language portions, although only full sentences appear to be subtitled. Exclamations like Halt! or Hinlegen! (Lay down) are not subtitled. These subtitles are HIDDEN and only accessible via your player’s menu, not the disc menu.

Restoration credits in spoiler:

THE PIANIST (2002) a film by Roman Polanski
Studiocanal and DI Factory are proud to present this 4K restoration.
As the 35mm archive elements were 2K Digital Negative, it has been decided to treat this restoration like a new post-production.
Under the supervision of the director of photography, Pawel Edelman, and Polish facilities DI Factory and reKino, the film has been fully recreated.
All the original shots have been recovered from 250 cans stored since 2002, and then scanned in 4K.
The VFX and color grading have been remade with the newest technology available.


Bad, bad news, maybe the year‘s worst.

It’s immediately apparent that the entire new master is heavily grain-managed. Some shots more, some slightly less, but not by much. From what I saw, it’s not a total disaster like Terminator 2 where the entire thing is DNR‘d to oblivion, meaning the OCN shots still have more detail than what’s seen in T2’s waxfest.

The proud announcement about „visual effects reconstruction“ could now be more problematic than ever. As mentioned yesterday, I haven’t seen the film yet but bits and pieces here and there. Now, in 4K you can immediately see an effects shot because they‘ve been „implanted“ into the 4K scan of the OCN, meaning that the original, low-res effects shot from the original DI has been copied out and inserted as-is into the new master. An example: A house photographed on-set and visually modified to have a bombed roof now has the majority of the house looking rather detailed and 4K „crisp“ (relative here) - and the altered roof is a seemingly unaltered, horrible, low-res digital effect of a bombed roof. As such, the house suddenly has two resolutions. You‘ll immediately see the borders and my God does it look horrible. Timestamp: 0:14:45 onwards.
I assume they simply copied all the VFX work inherent in the original DI and plastered them into the new master without alteration and without reconstructing them.
Depending on how many digital effects there are in the film, this may be an even bigger issue than the grain management.
Edit: Yes, the issue is gargantuan: 1:47:33, the shot of the tank firing is COMPLETELY taken from the 2K DI, upscaled and DNR‘d to hell. This is not the only instance - I assume the entire film is affected.

The grain management itself unfortunately looks awfully close to what Paramount does routinely. Grain moves quite weirdly, sometimes bends and hovers around people‘s faces in odd, unnatural manners. Timestamp: 1:07:42. Some exterior shots of the war-affected Poland look like one of these upscaled and colorized WWI clips on YouTube. It‘s horrendous.

Optical titles have been redone (and ironically like Paramount, the digital look is not very subtle either. See Blue Hawaii).

To be honest, I see many people here preferring to stick with their original BDs. Although the quality looks bad (I saw some glimpses in the restoration feature), at least it’s a consistent image.

Details on what is covered in the "About the Restoration" feature: https://forum.blu-ray.com/showpost.php?p=21481969&postcount=102