nicwood napisał(a):I received my copy today and generally liked what I saw. The mentioning of Hiventy made me fear the worst in regards to the color grade and encode as Studiocanal seemingly make their restoration parties deal with the encoding as well.

The UHD is a UHD-100 with the film on it in DV and the interview with N.T. Binh (in French and only subtitled in German if you select German in the menu screen).

The color grade looks fantastic with rich, deep colors, depth and detail and no trace of an obvious lab tint or raised blacks. This is one of the best grades to come out of France and hopefully more to follow like this. No mentioning whether Kusturica supervised it or what they based their grade on.

The encode is surprisingly good but not perfect. I’m 100% sure this would’ve turned into an autopilot disaster encode one or two years ago á la Le cercle rouge. Except for the brightest of highlights, the encode is solid and from what I saw nothing stood out too negatively. Highlights don’t resolve as good, however the gradations from normal grain to a highlight where grain disappears (often when the sun is seen) are less drastic and less visibly attention-grabbing than on other encodes. I have a feeling that this partially is due to the bitrates being optimized a bit better. With Le cercle rouge, bitrates would go from 100+ MBs to single digits within seconds and in here, it’s mostly from 70-80 to 25-30 at the lowest from what I’ve seen. This should make a generally seamless experience, however I need to emphasize that this specifically applies to DV. In HDR10, things aren’t as perfect although the encode holds together surprisingly well and doesn’t look too much different on first glance. The elephant in the room is chroma noise though, which doesn’t look good in HDR if you’re aware of this and notice it in motion. If not, don’t worry, the film should look just fine for you. In DV, it’s better but not 100% perfect either. Nothing that ruins my experience though. It could have been a lot worse, no question.

Can’t report anything about the audio other than that it sounds nice and dynamic. They’ve restored the audio from the original tracks.