UHD Review A Few Words About A few words about...™ - The Abyss -- in 4k UHD (1 Viewer)

[DVDvision]

Well to complicate matters even more, the DCP of The Abyss SE is the same scan but without Park Road destructive pass. Mostly obvious in VFX shots, where different footage blended seamlessly around objects. It's true though the original scan from 10 years ago, has a different color timer and thus color timing. Some might prefer it.

 

[JoshZ]

Well to complicate matters even more, the DCP of The Abyss SE is the same scan but without Park Road destructive pass. Mostly obvious in VFX shots, where different footage blended seamlessly around objects.

What DCP is that? The one that played theatrically in December? Would not that have been from the new Cameron-approved Park Road master? When did The Abyss ever have a DCP that wasn't part of this Park Road remastering process?

As far as I was aware, prior to this past December, the Special Edition last played theatrically in 1993.

 

[JoshZ]

After many delays from Amazon, my copy of the disc finally came in last week. Finding three hours to watch the whole Special Edition then took another few days, but I finally did, and have now reviewed it. I agree that this is the best-looking of the three Skynet-derived remasters. Even without grain, it still looks somewhat film-like (more so than either Aliens or True Lies, anyway). It's not ideal, nor how I would choose to master the movie if I were in charge, but it's very watchable and a significant upgrade from the non-anamorphic DVD.

What it's definitely not, though, is HDR or Wide Color Gamut. This is absolutely another SDR Rec. 2020 encode mapped inside an HDR container. That really hurts during all the colorful stuff at the end.

 

[DVDvision]

That was the december DCP I guess.
As you probably noticed, not one deliverable on these films is 100% matching.
You have differences in framing, mixes etc.

 

[JoshZ]

That was the december DCP I guess.
As you probably noticed, not one deliverable on these films is 100% matching.
You have differences in framing, mixes etc.

I didn't go to the theatrical event in December, but I can't imagine that it was derived from anything other than this Park Road Post remaster. The whole point of Cameron finally allowing the film to be re-reissued is that he fell in love with this A.I. degraining and enhancement process.

 

[DVDvision]

Man, there are 30 to 50 different deliverables.
Tashi Trieu goes about it on his website.
They are all adjusted differently.
With T2 in 4K, the framing is different between the UHD and the Blu-ray.

So there's bound to be problems. That's why some mixes are corrected, other not, within the same packaging.

The december DCP doesn't use HDR, thus, is a different version from the 4K UHD.
They all come from the same mastering suite, but they all have sightly different looks.

 

[JoshZ]

The december DCP doesn't use HDR, thus, is a different version from the 4K UHD.
They all come from the same mastering suite, but they all have sightly different looks.

The UHD doesn't really have HDR either. It's SDR mapped inside an HDR container.

 

[Kyle_D]

The UHD doesn't really have HDR either. It's SDR mapped inside an HDR container.

It's a true HDR grade, albeit a very restrained one in the highlights. The metadata shows the disc has a peak light level of 800 nits, but the peak frame average light level is only 44 nits.

None of the Cameron/Park Road UHDs really take advantage of HDR highlights at all. It's the least revisionist thing about them.

 

[JoshZ]

It's a true HDR grade, albeit a very restrained one in the highlights. The metadata shows the disc has a peak light level of 800 nits, but the peak frame average light level is only 44 nits.

None of the Cameron/Park Road UHDs really take advantage of HDR highlights at all. It's the least revisionist thing about them.

Whatever the metadata may say, there's visible clipping in highlights, and absolutely nothing about the disc looks remotely HDR or Wide Color Gamut.

 

[Carl David]

After many delays from Amazon, my copy of the disc finally came in last week. Finding three hours to watch the whole Special Edition then took another few days, but I finally did, and have now reviewed it. I agree that this is the best-looking of the three Skynet-derived remasters. Even without grain, it still looks somewhat film-like (more so than either Aliens or True Lies, anyway). It's not ideal, nor how I would choose to master the movie if I were in charge, but it's very watchable and a significant upgrade from the non-anamorphic DVD.

What it's definitely not, though, is HDR or Wide Color Gamut. This is absolutely another SDR Rec. 2020 encode mapped inside an HDR container. That really hurts during all the colorful stuff at the end.

Can they do that legally?

Thought 4k discs had to have HDR to be classed as 4k UHD?

 

[sbjork]

Can they do that legally?

Thought 4k discs had to have HDR to be classed as 4k UHD?

Absolutely not. It's just one of the capabilities of the format. You have 4K with HDR, 4K with SDR Rec. 709, and even a few 4K with SDR BT.2020.

 

[sbjork]

Also, it's not a government standard, so the word "legal" doesn't really apply.

 

[JoshZ]

Thought 4k discs had to have HDR to be classed as 4k UHD?

Off the top of my head, Kino's UHD releases for Clint Eastwood's "Man with No Name" trilogy (A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, The Good the Bad and the Ugly) don't bother with HDR in any form. The discs are authored as 4K SDR.

These James Cameron UHDs pretend to be HDR. If you put it in your player, your display will kick into HDR mode and report receiving an HDR signal. But the actual image you get on screen has no sense of HDR or Wide Color Gamut at all. What the studio did is take an SDR master and mapped it inside an HDR container.

Absolutely not. It's just one of the capabilities of the format. You have 4K with HDR, 4K with SDR Rec. 709, and even a few 4K with SDR BT.2020.

I meant to say Rec. 709 above rather than 2020. I often get those confused.

 

[JoshZ]

My belief remains that all of these James Cameron remasters were based on existing masters the studio already had on hand, run through the new A.I. processing to remove grain and enhance detail. None of the movies received new film scans and no completely new masters were struck.

The source for Aliens is confirmed to be same master used for the 2010 Blu-ray (likely created a couple years before that). In the case of True Lies, the studio claims a 4K scan was done sometime after Aliens but I don't believe it. From appearance, that one may date back even further to the D-VHS master from 2003.

If the existing video masters didn't have HDR or Wide Color Gamut at the time they were originally created, rather than try to fake that by boosting contrast or color (which may have been tested and turned out unsatisfactory), the A.I. simply mapped the SDR encodes inside HDR containers.

 

[sbjork]

Whatever the metadata may say, there's visible clipping in highlights, and absolutely nothing about the disc looks remotely HDR or Wide Color Gamut.

It's true that metadata doesn't necessarily prove anything, especially since it's sometimes just plain wrong, but clipping in the highlights doesn't necessarily prove anything either. Plenty of UHDs (especially early ones) have clipping because they were mastered poorly. It's been a learning curve. Plus, I'm not always convinced that what's described as clipping really is clipping. Depending on how the negative was exposed, there may not have been any information on it to be clipped. Not saying that's true in this case, but just a general observation.

 

[sbjork]

I meant to say Rec. 709 above rather than 2020. I often get those confused.

It's pretty safe to assume that SDR on UHD is always going to be Rec. 709, but there are exceptions. All the Toho Godzilla UHDs are BT.2020. Depending on your display settings, you may have to manually switch to BT.2020 in order to prevent everything from looking desaturated. But with the correct settings, the colors are definitely richer than they would have been in Rec.709.

HDR vs. SDR isn't always as simple as it may seem.

 

[JoshZ]

It's true that metadata doesn't necessarily prove anything, especially since it's sometimes just plain wrong, but clipping in the highlights doesn't necessarily prove anything either. Plenty of UHDs (especially early ones) have clipping because they were mastered poorly. It's been a learning curve. Plus, I'm not always convinced that what's described as clipping really is clipping. Depending on how the negative was exposed, there may not have been any information on it to be clipped. Not saying that's true in this case, but just a general observation.

Well, I don't believe there's anything HDR about either The Abyss or True Lies. On Aliens I might be fooled into believing it has mild HDR (though a YouTube reviewer supposedly ran tests that prove otherwise), but these other two have no sign of it.