Cheers. I just wonder how much polishing they can do on prints that never started off great.
The DAWN UHD BD set isn't made from a print, it's made from the original camera negs (wherever possible). That's the original film that ran through the camera on the day of the shoo. So you can disregard any poorer quality versions that might have been released before, since it's not the same source.
The Argento version is made from an interpositive (due to its edit history), which is the next best thing. There was no need to use an element as far away from the negative as a print for any of the three versions. It's extremely rare for prints to be used for home video transfers - they're really only ever used if the better sources have been seriously damaged or lost.
I'm 99% sure this is the first time the neg has been used for any home video version.
Dawn of the Dead: 4K UHD Limited Edition, Second Sight, Ultra HD Blu-ray & Region B BD, £70 Movie: Blending dark black comedy, stomach-churning gore effects and nail-biting tension – not to mention some slick satire – George A. Romero's 1978 zombie sequel Dawn of the Dead is regarded by many as the decades-spanning franchise's pinnacle. It has an interesting edit history, too. Fellow horror legend Dario Argento helped finance the film in exchange for international distribution rights, leading to his own alternate cut.
This isn’t the first time Dawn... has been resurrected on BD, or even 4K BD. Did you look at previous releases for comparison?
Honestly, not really, because they were made in such a different time and from different elements. This is the first time the film has been transferred from the original camera negative; that is to say, the exact film that ran through the camera on the day of the shoot, and not a downstream copy of it. The previous BD releases will have been made using some type of hi-def video telecine, probably from an interpositive film element, and were subjected to the kind of grain reduction processing that was seen as a good idea at the time – in other words, quite a different process to scanning the original negative to 4K data and keeping it natural with all of the detail intact.
For the Argento cut of the film, Second Sight accessed the same master that ESC in France used for its UHD Blu-ray [released in 2019]. Both post facilities involved – Final Frame and Fidelity in Motion – did some additional work on that version.
Having worked on both the Blu-ray and 4K releases, were there challenges that were unique to either format with this film?
From a video encoding perspective, each format has its own issues that need working around. A 4K scan from a 35mm camera neg has a lot of detail in it, and downscaling this to 1080p for the standard BD needs to be done in a way that doesn't stress the compression. Even the best encoders will show artefacts if you feed them an image with too much high-frequency detail, due to the sheer amount of approximation and data reduction necessary to fit a film on to a consumer format – rather than a server with 16 hard disks. So the downscaling has to be tuned in a way that gives a picture that's both detailed and free from obvious compression artefacts. Dawn... has all its bonuses on a fourth BD, so BDs 1-3 max out the available video bitrate.
For UHD BD, bit-budgeting – calculating the average bitrates for all elements to fit on the disc – is very different. Thanks to UHD BD's maximum video bitrate, which is more than double that of standard BD, you can overshoot the disc capacity much more easily. So with the UHD BD, there was more time needed to adjust compression parameters to make the most of the disc space.
I've been praying for a decent Blu-ray release of this for yeeeeeeeears!!
Azumi next please, Arrow. Then Sky High (not the Disney one...)
Lol well your wish has been answered at last
It also has a restoration of the 2004 versus Ultimate with the extra footage
Going to enjoy watching them both
It's £17.99 on Amazon but showing as release on the 7th
No idea how Zavvi shipped it so early lol
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