Cannot thank you enough Spence for your invaluable 'no stone unturned' reviews. They always help guide me as to what I keep in my 9000 plus movie collection!
As a lifelong classic Disney fan who bristles at the way these films have been treated on home video in the last few decades, it's heartening to hear this news.
It’s absolutely shocking to be honest. I still think it isn’t real that we got something this good even though it’s still not perfect. I’m definitely going to pick up Snow White to see that one in person. You’ll be absolutely stunned when you see this Cinderella UHD up close given just how appalling the Blu-ray was.
Excellent video, I have this as well and I totally agree that it’s far and away the best Home Video transfer of Cinderella ever. I can’t wait for you to cover the also wonderful recent 4K transfer of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and I hope we continue to get such high quality Disney restorations that stay true to the original.
A Disney 4k release actually being good is so shocking that I physically cannot believe it lol. Idk if I'll buy it yet, but I will credit to the people remastering this classic for a proper and (mostly) archival presentation.
Now, let's see a 4K version of FANTASIA which had what they called Fantasound, basically an early (1941) version of stereo, with speakers around the theater. The bluray seems ok, but it would be wonderful with proper HDR and properly upgraded visuals.
The Blu-Ray release of Fantasia has a rather narrow remix to where it doesn't resemble the mixes from the soundtrack album, the VHS release (1991) or the 60th Anniversary DVD (2000).
@@DamnFoolIdealisticCrusaderDon't quote me on this. But, if I'm not mistaken, Fantasound, both the original film and the equipment to play it, had degraded so badly that they used their last working Fantasound decoder to transfer it to magnetic tape, before the recording would become unusable. In the transfer process, it became just mono. I wonder what could be done with modern technology to separate the elements of the surviving mono track to attempt to recreate the original mix.
About the grain being so fine, I feel it’s reasonable that it would have been finer than live-action stuff at the time. In animation, you can expose a cel for as long as you want, and for as many times as you want, and you can use very slow film stock. I don’t know any details, but I feel it only makes sense that animators would have tried to minimize the grain as much as possible.
I wondered about that too. I figured it could be a mixture of that factor plus a desire to minimize any visible grain but I also fear possible degrain and then add back some at the end of the process.
Great video, extremely informative. I passed on the Blu-ray release for Cinderella, so I shall be picking this up, especially based on how good the quality is.
Thank you! Yes it’s an absolute must just for how the film has been handled. The disc encoding and HDR is sensational. It makes it all the more regrettable that this doesn’t have original audio though. Oh god the Blu-ray of Cinderella is so unbelievably bad. It’s one of the worst discs ever released.
I hope that you review Snow White's UHD next! There have been some unfair criticisms of things in it that are actually source issues, and can't be fixed without straight-up redrawing and reanimating stuff. I'm talking about the edges of some shots looking weirdly blurry, and also warping of the cels is visible. Disney's cel photography back then was still very unpolished, and a lot of the flaws wouldn’t have been really noticeable in a Technicolor dye print. If I remember correctly all of this, a point that was made in the official Disney doc about the 1993 digital restoration (which used the 1988 film restoration) is that when they made film prints in Eastmancolor for the 1988 re-release, a lot of scratches, dirt and Newton rings from the original photography now became painfully visible. In fact, the Snow White UHD removed most of those artifacts, a more through clean-up than the Mask Of The Phantasm UHD by Warner, for example, which has a lot of cel dirt.
That same documentary you mention states that Disney's technicians in the late 1980s went back to sourcing the prints for that 50th Anniversary re-release from an original film negative as opposed to a dupe print as would have used in the past; the problem being that the prints of the film itself were most presented as-is, with the cel dust and dirt becoming more obvious and that was the result of the film's original photography and not a fault of the transfer.
There was also a European 1997 CLV laserdisc and VHS restoration of Cinderella with more accurate color and slightly better definition. About the mono sound in the older Blu-ray and DVDs, it is a disaster just like the other multi-channel versions, all of them have two missing pieces of score in two scenes, one of them being the one where the mice are stealing the key from Tremaine's pocket while the Duke is reading the royal command, which now has no music at all, losing much of the tension it had originally; and the other one is a small segment of ~2 seconds of music when the mice see Drizella's necklace on the floor, the lucky discovery was accompanied of quick playing strings, which are now gone in full silence. These problems have not been corrected in the 4K version, and they are present in almost every release despite of the language or country, as most of the dubbings were remastered using the new versions provided by Disney.
Disney has always been world class in the archival of film itself, which made all of the historical gigantic levels of revisionism and DNR in home video releases a huge disrespect and disservice to their amazing archivists. Very happy to see things changing!
I’m hoping they use this as a stepping stone for more 4K releases of their animation titles, I wish they would do the same with the Renaissance movies as well, movies like Lion King and Aladdin had so much new animation touched up to them for the IMAX and 3D conversions that they desperately need to give us the original
In the case of the Renaissance films, we have to factor that many of the changes were made by the people behind those films. They are a case of the artists being revisionist.
@@matheus5230One also has to mention that they only did those changes because they felt that some scenes where more rush-jobs to get the film finished instead of how they wanted it to be, so when they had the opportunity to "fix" it, they did. IMO, if Disney were to make new masters, you should be able to choose between "original" and "remastered".
What a contrast in reviews. American Graffiti = Jack Daniels. Cinderrella = Sangria. Refreshing, hopeful and a possible ray of light. But I won't breakout the expensive stuff just yet Crusader. 😊
Walt Disney was a genius in the fact that he made animated films that were truly made for everyone. Snow White & the other OG 4 films truly improve as one ages. Hopefully Sleeping Beauty is next to get a 4K.
Thank you for this video, I have been wondering about this. Don't always agree 100% with some of your historical reviews - but I always respect the perspective and well defined critiques. Your endorsement of this disc, albeit with the reasonable audio criticism, greatly encourages my inclination to pick this up.
Thank you! It is definitely the first classic animated Disney disc release in decades that people should pick up. (Aside from the gold collection laserdisc ports and the occasional decent transfer that one could live with that popped up on DVD or Blu-ray very rarely.)
About the movement, it's nice you brought that up! This was a cheaper film than the most of the Golden Age ones, and the camera movement here is at times a bit juddery, not as polished as in Pinocchio or Bambi, for example. The judder is not common, but it happens a few times, and they are original source flaws.
@@DamnFoolIdealisticCrusaderIt makes sense. The camera here wasn't done with the same level of polish as Pinocchio and Bambi. What I love about the detail in these restorations is that the handmade nature of cel animation finally becomes clear, the brush strokes, color bleeding stuff like that!
If/when you do a Snow White UHD review, an important point to bring up is that Walt might have made a few moments of the film have the cels redone and re-photographed, even after the film's premiere. We don't know for sure if that happened, but it’s a very real possibility, and it wouldn’t be out-of-character considering Walt's perfectionism. The book The Fairest Of Them All, which is perhaps the greatest book on the film, points the brief moment of the prince walking towards Snow White as she is sleeping as very likely to have been re-shot, supposedly to fix a bad wobbling of the prince. The book goes more in-depth.
Welp, sounds like a project for me; muxing the 320 kbps mono track into the 4K remastered disc in this set before I'm rid of that original Blu-ray forever. Knowing what a weird and awful looking disc it is, I wasn't out any money, just 1000 Disney reward points years back when their Rewards program didn't suck.
The 4K arrived this afternoon, and I'm surprised to learn the remastered Blu-ray (but not the UHD itself) has a Stereo mix. I can't say for certain if it's this newest remix folded into two channels, or if it's from an earlier release, but why they did it this way baffles me.
That is the problem with Disney's 5.1/7.1 remixes of Mono films It is just taking mono trying to stereoise it, but it's just in the end a mono track in surround sound that you just want to listen to the audio track in its original form. So basically it's their mono restoration stretched out to other channels, But now you don't have the option to have the mono.
Cinderella's 4K master is ok. Still prefer Thunderbean's 16mm scan though. Though it's said that the 4K scan is closer to the Thunderbean 16mm scan. Snow White 4K though, just painful to look at. For that one, the Thunderbean scan is the best one. Lots of grain and vibrant colors. ❤️
Snow White 4K is great. Aren't you sure your TV isn't screwing up the colors? Most TVs aren’t great with 4K HDR content. Also, it's well known that Walt and the animators wanted a more relatively muted and delicate color palette for Snow White, inspired by old fairy tale books and gothic horror, as people back then thought that too vibrant colors in animation would hurt your eyes in feature-length. Eric Goldberg supervised the colors of the new restoration, and he is a Disney legend and perhaps no one in the world knows these movies better than him.
@@matheus5230 I watched it on Disney+. Still looked horrible and washed out. As much as I like Eric Goldberg, he didn't work on the film itself in the 1930s. The last time the actual animators had a say on one of the restorations of Snow White was either the 1994 version or the 2001 version. In my eyes, the unofficial Thunderbean scans blow these official "restorations" out of the water.
@@Mr-x129Either your TV is horribly screwing up the colors or you are trolling. I've seen even people who watched film prints before the 1990s lauding the UHD. I bet that Steve from Thunderbean would disagree with you. Ollie Johnston said that the colors of the 1993 restoration were pretty, nice, but not the colors from 1937.
@@Mr-x129What is your TV model? The Thunderbean scans are distributed in blu-rays, a format that is all SDR and Rec.709. Most TVs are at least decent to good with that. But HDR, and the color gamut of Rec. 2020, is another matter entirely. The vast majority of TVs on the market are crap at displaying any HDR content, and will often make it look very dull and washed out. Snow White 4K is in HDR and has a wider color gamut, and I know from my own experience that it will look crap in most TVs and displays. The same can be said for the vast majority of HDR content. I'm remembering a discussion in the Enter The Dragon 4K thread in a forum, where someone was complaining about washed-out, desaturated colors, which directly clashed with the reports and experiences of everyone else, people saying it looked very saturared in their top and properly calibrated TVs.
@@Mr-x129About the grain, of course the Thunderbean 16mm scans are gonna look grainier: they are sourced from 16mm prints, while the UHDs are sourced from the original camera negative in 35mm, which yields significante finer grain and greater detail! 16mm film is normally gonna look very grainy, as the size of each frame is literally far smaller than in 35mm film!
I was hoping to see the brand new restoration on the normal Blu-ray bundled with the UHD, just because I already had the "abominable 2012 Blu-ray". I'm from Europe. Let's just say I was a bit disappointed.
Yep...sorry you've got the crud disc on a second copy now....it sucks that studios either recycle discs or hardly include BDs at all in UHD releases now. It's so scattershot what BD will or won't turn up in each country's version.
i actually just received this title a few days ago… i‘ll check it out soon… From the sound of it they might have just added artificial unified grain after the fact… that‘s why it looks strange without the usual denoising sideeffects… looking forward to seeing this now…
I've been afraid of that too but without any information or being able to look at the raw 4K files it could either be a degraining then add something in once done or what amount of grain was left in after a degraining pass. It does look absolutely fantastic but suddenly you'll notice just how little grain there seems to be in the overall transfer. When it pops up it's VERY fine.
@@DamnFoolIdealisticCrusader a few days ago i started watching the naked gun 4k from paramount until i stopped it… because they did just that… they applied variing degrees of dnr and then slapped some grain on top of it. At first glance it looks alright but once you look closer it becomes a distracting nightmare… as far as i heard something similar happened to american graffiti but i wont buy that one to find out… because i saw your review… so i dont have to…
That will be the big one in terms of overall work and possible fidelity given its Super Technirama status and being top tier animation effort. It's never been done right on any release 100% and the previous few masters have been the appalling revisionism variety.
@@DamnFoolIdealisticCrusaderFor all the problems with the blu-ray, I liked that they did the full 2.55 aspect ratio of Sleeping Beauty. I've seen people saying that their experience watching Sleeping Beauty in 70mm was so dazzling, detailed sharp that it looked like a great 4K DCP, aside from the occasional nick and scratch. The film was not shot on 70mm, but Technirama was still a large format (VistaVision with anamorphic squeeze). Sleeping Beauty is often screened in 70mm festivals. And the movie itself has truly amazing production values. A properly done UHD should be pure eye-candy.
Great video! This is only speculation, but I think the "grain" you see is artificial grain applied in software after a DNR pass was applied. Same thing Warner Studio did with the BD release of the Max Fleischer Superman shorts. Why did they DNR it? Maybe to color time the film better, or to maintain consistent grain density levels across the runtime. The image has been DNR'd, but the tools they've used have gotten better over the years so as to not destroy detail. Personally, I think they should have just left the grain alone, but its not the worst thing ever. Overall, it is the best-looking release so far.
I'm afraid that might be the case but I have no idea honestly. I kept looking at it over and over trying to determine but the best term I could come up with was grain management because it's impossible to know if they completely degrained and then added something back later or if they just left this amount in.
I'm just curious, do you think there are perfect 4K releases? If so, and if there's more than one haha, would you consider doing a list / video on these?
There are agonizingly few and even fewer when I have to look at disc encoding and especially the handling of audio. Discs that would be perfect usually fail on these counts. All of the other reviews of Cinderella that praised it for example didn’t go into potential grain management and didn’t mark the release down for not having original audio. I have one or two UHDs that I’m 100% happy with so I’m trying to find a few more before making a video-but it has been on my mind to make a video about several reference UHDs that are perfect across the board.
Which titles are reanimated, have the layers separated into digital mattes paint out the grain and reassemble. Recomposited. Do we know which ones are actually off a negative or IP as is? I watched how they did the original restoration for Snow White, it reminded me of the Star Wars special edition.
Some films have it worse than others. Some of this stuff is so crazy and we have little official information to go off of. Cinderella had it really bad on the dvd and Blu-ray to the point of being a shadow of its former self.
I double checked my viewing notes, and I didn’t write any specific timestamps. I did write down the overall impressions I was getting because suddenly you’ll notice that there’s a very fine grain pattern that you can discern and then it’ll go back to seeming like there’s almost none.
Random question: have you been able to get the UHDs of Who Framed Roger Rabbit and The Nightmare Before Christmas? Even more random question: do you have the Lawrence Of Arabia UHD to review it eventually?
The Platinum Edition is based on the color revisionist master between the 2005 DVD to 2019 Blu-ray releases (Diamond Edition; reused in The Signature Collection) meaning Cinderella's dress is too blue instead of sliver, along with missing hidden details. If you don't mind the remix track and with minor DNR usage while keeping the original colors, you can still go with the 4K release regardless (along with the Blu-ray and Digital 4K). Despite the nitpick, I still recommend to get this and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs 4K releases to show Disney can restore their movies, even with the flaws it has.
I’m not an expert but I was thinking if the film grain has been given the same treatment as the recent James Cameron 4k masters, which apparently use an AI grain management system. As there Fox movies, and now sadly Disney, could there be a link?
The Cameron 4K films are only the work of Lightstorm, Cameron's own company. Disney had nothing to do with those restorations, they are independent, not made by Disney's own restoration team, which has done also great restorations of Snow White, Who Framed Roger Rabbit and The Nightmare Before Christmas. And there is nothing to indicate any kind of use of those tools in these Disney 4K restorations. Disney recently restored Spellbound, the Hitchcock classic, in 4K, and I'm curious to see the results whenever it gets a release by Criterion or something.
Bud can I please give you some feedback. I love your channel and your videos but you really need to invest in a microphone. The sound on your videos are low and especially some of your bond commentaries have really low sound.
I’ll look at it again. That’s odd to hear because I use a solid Samson mic for every video and manually sync and then edit audio. My commentary tracks I record with it directly in front of me, for videos I have it just out of camera range. I’ve never boosted volume levels in editing so maybe that causes things to sound lower especially on a phone or other devices-doubly so since most videos on UA-cam seem to have levels boosted a bit or mics too close.
Cannot thank you enough Spence for your invaluable 'no stone unturned' reviews. They always help guide me as to what I keep in my 9000 plus movie collection!
As a lifelong classic Disney fan who bristles at the way these films have been treated on home video in the last few decades, it's heartening to hear this news.
It’s absolutely shocking to be honest. I still think it isn’t real that we got something this good even though it’s still not perfect.
I’m definitely going to pick up Snow White to see that one in person.
You’ll be absolutely stunned when you see this Cinderella UHD up close given just how appalling the Blu-ray was.
Excellent video, I have this as well and I totally agree that it’s far and away the best Home Video transfer of Cinderella ever. I can’t wait for you to cover the also wonderful recent 4K transfer of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and I hope we continue to get such high quality Disney restorations that stay true to the original.
A Disney 4k release actually being good is so shocking that I physically cannot believe it lol. Idk if I'll buy it yet, but I will credit to the people remastering this classic for a proper and (mostly) archival presentation.
That was my exact reaction too. I frankly didn’t believe it and knew I would have to look at it up close.
Now, let's see a 4K version of FANTASIA which had what they called Fantasound, basically an early (1941) version of stereo, with speakers around the theater. The bluray seems ok, but it would be wonderful with proper HDR and properly upgraded visuals.
The Blu-Ray release of Fantasia has a rather narrow remix to where it doesn't resemble the mixes from the soundtrack album, the VHS release (1991) or the 60th Anniversary DVD (2000).
Fantasia properly restored with no changes and as much of the original Fanatasound mix as can be reconstructed is the dream.
@@DamnFoolIdealisticCrusaderDon't quote me on this. But, if I'm not mistaken, Fantasound, both the original film and the equipment to play it, had degraded so badly that they used their last working Fantasound decoder to transfer it to magnetic tape, before the recording would become unusable. In the transfer process, it became just mono.
I wonder what could be done with modern technology to separate the elements of the surviving mono track to attempt to recreate the original mix.
About the grain being so fine, I feel it’s reasonable that it would have been finer than live-action stuff at the time. In animation, you can expose a cel for as long as you want, and for as many times as you want, and you can use very slow film stock. I don’t know any details, but I feel it only makes sense that animators would have tried to minimize the grain as much as possible.
I wondered about that too. I figured it could be a mixture of that factor plus a desire to minimize any visible grain but I also fear possible degrain and then add back some at the end of the process.
Great video, extremely informative. I passed on the Blu-ray release for Cinderella, so I shall be picking this up, especially based on how good the quality is.
Thank you! Yes it’s an absolute must just for how the film has been handled. The disc encoding and HDR is sensational. It makes it all the more regrettable that this doesn’t have original audio though.
Oh god the Blu-ray of Cinderella is so unbelievably bad. It’s one of the worst discs ever released.
I hope that you review Snow White's UHD next! There have been some unfair criticisms of things in it that are actually source issues, and can't be fixed without straight-up redrawing and reanimating stuff. I'm talking about the edges of some shots looking weirdly blurry, and also warping of the cels is visible. Disney's cel photography back then was still very unpolished, and a lot of the flaws wouldn’t have been really noticeable in a Technicolor dye print.
If I remember correctly all of this, a point that was made in the official Disney doc about the 1993 digital restoration (which used the 1988 film restoration) is that when they made film prints in Eastmancolor for the 1988 re-release, a lot of scratches, dirt and Newton rings from the original photography now became painfully visible. In fact, the Snow White UHD removed most of those artifacts, a more through clean-up than the Mask Of The Phantasm UHD by Warner, for example, which has a lot of cel dirt.
That same documentary you mention states that Disney's technicians in the late 1980s went back to sourcing the prints for that 50th Anniversary re-release from an original film negative as opposed to a dupe print as would have used in the past; the problem being that the prints of the film itself were most presented as-is, with the cel dust and dirt becoming more obvious and that was the result of the film's original photography and not a fault of the transfer.
@@AndrewsMagicandMoreExactly
There was also a European 1997 CLV laserdisc and VHS restoration of Cinderella with more accurate color and slightly better definition.
About the mono sound in the older Blu-ray and DVDs, it is a disaster just like the other multi-channel versions, all of them have two missing pieces of score in two scenes, one of them being the one where the mice are stealing the key from Tremaine's pocket while the Duke is reading the royal command, which now has no music at all, losing much of the tension it had originally; and the other one is a small segment of ~2 seconds of music when the mice see Drizella's necklace on the floor, the lucky discovery was accompanied of quick playing strings, which are now gone in full silence.
These problems have not been corrected in the 4K version, and they are present in almost every release despite of the language or country, as most of the dubbings were remastered using the new versions provided by Disney.
Disney has always been world class in the archival of film itself, which made all of the historical gigantic levels of revisionism and DNR in home video releases a huge disrespect and disservice to their amazing archivists. Very happy to see things changing!
I’m hoping they use this as a stepping stone for more 4K releases of their animation titles, I wish they would do the same with the Renaissance movies as well, movies like Lion King and Aladdin had so much new animation touched up to them for the IMAX and 3D conversions that they desperately need to give us the original
In the case of the Renaissance films, we have to factor that many of the changes were made by the people behind those films. They are a case of the artists being revisionist.
Oh really? Didn’t know about that, I just assumed the Disney brass chose to do it without much input from them.
@@matheus5230One also has to mention that they only did those changes because they felt that some scenes where more rush-jobs to get the film finished instead of how they wanted it to be, so when they had the opportunity to "fix" it, they did. IMO, if Disney were to make new masters, you should be able to choose between "original" and "remastered".
@@robinanwaldtExactly
What a contrast in reviews. American Graffiti = Jack Daniels. Cinderrella = Sangria. Refreshing, hopeful and a possible ray of light. But I won't breakout the expensive stuff just yet Crusader. 😊
Haha! It is a possible ray of light for sure in regard to Disney titles.
Walt Disney was a genius in the fact that he made animated films that were truly made for everyone. Snow White & the other OG 4 films truly improve as one ages. Hopefully Sleeping Beauty is next to get a 4K.
Thank you for this video, I have been wondering about this. Don't always agree 100% with some of your historical reviews - but I always respect the perspective and well defined critiques. Your endorsement of this disc, albeit with the reasonable audio criticism, greatly encourages my inclination to pick this up.
Thank you! It is definitely the first classic animated Disney disc release in decades that people should pick up. (Aside from the gold collection laserdisc ports and the occasional decent transfer that one could live with that popped up on DVD or Blu-ray very rarely.)
About the movement, it's nice you brought that up! This was a cheaper film than the most of the Golden Age ones, and the camera movement here is at times a bit juddery, not as polished as in Pinocchio or Bambi, for example. The judder is not common, but it happens a few times, and they are original source flaws.
I was thrilled to see some of that natural movement pop up.
@@DamnFoolIdealisticCrusaderIt makes sense. The camera here wasn't done with the same level of polish as Pinocchio and Bambi.
What I love about the detail in these restorations is that the handmade nature of cel animation finally becomes clear, the brush strokes, color bleeding stuff like that!
If/when you do a Snow White UHD review, an important point to bring up is that Walt might have made a few moments of the film have the cels redone and re-photographed, even after the film's premiere. We don't know for sure if that happened, but it’s a very real possibility, and it wouldn’t be out-of-character considering Walt's perfectionism. The book The Fairest Of Them All, which is perhaps the greatest book on the film, points the brief moment of the prince walking towards Snow White as she is sleeping as very likely to have been re-shot, supposedly to fix a bad wobbling of the prince. The book goes more in-depth.
William Goldman was one difficult man...still looking forward to Marathon Man.
Welp, sounds like a project for me; muxing the 320 kbps mono track into the 4K remastered disc in this set before I'm rid of that original Blu-ray forever.
Knowing what a weird and awful looking disc it is, I wasn't out any money, just 1000 Disney reward points years back when their Rewards program didn't suck.
The LD analog mono from the CAV box is much better than the BD mono.
@@DamnFoolIdealisticCrusader I'm not LD ready.
@@KevinStriker the Blu-ray mono at least is OK and sadly the only other option besides that analog back up track
The 4K arrived this afternoon, and I'm surprised to learn the remastered Blu-ray (but not the UHD itself) has a Stereo mix. I can't say for certain if it's this newest remix folded into two channels, or if it's from an earlier release, but why they did it this way baffles me.
That is the problem with Disney's 5.1/7.1 remixes of Mono films It is just taking mono trying to stereoise it, but it's just in the end a mono track in surround sound that you just want to listen to the audio track in its original form. So basically it's their mono restoration stretched out to other channels, But now you don't have the option to have the mono.
Cinderella's 4K master is ok. Still prefer Thunderbean's 16mm scan though. Though it's said that the 4K scan is closer to the Thunderbean 16mm scan. Snow White 4K though, just painful to look at. For that one, the Thunderbean scan is the best one. Lots of grain and vibrant colors. ❤️
Snow White 4K is great. Aren't you sure your TV isn't screwing up the colors? Most TVs aren’t great with 4K HDR content. Also, it's well known that Walt and the animators wanted a more relatively muted and delicate color palette for Snow White, inspired by old fairy tale books and gothic horror, as people back then thought that too vibrant colors in animation would hurt your eyes in feature-length. Eric Goldberg supervised the colors of the new restoration, and he is a Disney legend and perhaps no one in the world knows these movies better than him.
@@matheus5230 I watched it on Disney+. Still looked horrible and washed out. As much as I like Eric Goldberg, he didn't work on the film itself in the 1930s. The last time the actual animators had a say on one of the restorations of Snow White was either the 1994 version or the 2001 version. In my eyes, the unofficial Thunderbean scans blow these official "restorations" out of the water.
@@Mr-x129Either your TV is horribly screwing up the colors or you are trolling. I've seen even people who watched film prints before the 1990s lauding the UHD.
I bet that Steve from Thunderbean would disagree with you.
Ollie Johnston said that the colors of the 1993 restoration were pretty, nice, but not the colors from 1937.
@@Mr-x129What is your TV model? The Thunderbean scans are distributed in blu-rays, a format that is all SDR and Rec.709. Most TVs are at least decent to good with that. But HDR, and the color gamut of Rec. 2020, is another matter entirely. The vast majority of TVs on the market are crap at displaying any HDR content, and will often make it look very dull and washed out. Snow White 4K is in HDR and has a wider color gamut, and I know from my own experience that it will look crap in most TVs and displays. The same can be said for the vast majority of HDR content.
I'm remembering a discussion in the Enter The Dragon 4K thread in a forum, where someone was complaining about washed-out, desaturated colors, which directly clashed with the reports and experiences of everyone else, people saying it looked very saturared in their top and properly calibrated TVs.
@@Mr-x129About the grain, of course the Thunderbean 16mm scans are gonna look grainier: they are sourced from 16mm prints, while the UHDs are sourced from the original camera negative in 35mm, which yields significante finer grain and greater detail! 16mm film is normally gonna look very grainy, as the size of each frame is literally far smaller than in 35mm film!
I was hoping to see the brand new restoration on the normal Blu-ray bundled with the UHD,
just because I already had the "abominable 2012 Blu-ray".
I'm from Europe. Let's just say I was a bit disappointed.
Yep...sorry you've got the crud disc on a second copy now....it sucks that studios either recycle discs or hardly include BDs at all in UHD releases now. It's so scattershot what BD will or won't turn up in each country's version.
i actually just received this title a few days ago… i‘ll check it out soon…
From the sound of it they might have just added artificial unified grain after the fact…
that‘s why it looks strange without the usual denoising sideeffects…
looking forward to seeing this now…
I've been afraid of that too but without any information or being able to look at the raw 4K files it could either be a degraining then add something in once done or what amount of grain was left in after a degraining pass.
It does look absolutely fantastic but suddenly you'll notice just how little grain there seems to be in the overall transfer. When it pops up it's VERY fine.
@@DamnFoolIdealisticCrusader
a few days ago i started watching the naked gun 4k from paramount until i stopped it… because they did just that… they applied variing degrees of dnr and then slapped some grain on top of it. At first glance it looks alright but once you look closer it becomes a distracting nightmare…
as far as i heard something similar happened to american graffiti but i wont buy that one to find out… because i saw your review… so i dont have to…
and this video comes out just after purchasing my blu ray copy of sleeping beauty :)
The video is about Cinderella though.
I think that Sleeping Beauty will get an UHD this year or next year though.
That will be the big one in terms of overall work and possible fidelity given its Super Technirama status and being top tier animation effort. It's never been done right on any release 100% and the previous few masters have been the appalling revisionism variety.
@@DamnFoolIdealisticCrusaderFor all the problems with the blu-ray, I liked that they did the full 2.55 aspect ratio of Sleeping Beauty.
I've seen people saying that their experience watching Sleeping Beauty in 70mm was so dazzling, detailed sharp that it looked like a great 4K DCP, aside from the occasional nick and scratch. The film was not shot on 70mm, but Technirama was still a large format (VistaVision with anamorphic squeeze). Sleeping Beauty is often screened in 70mm festivals. And the movie itself has truly amazing production values. A properly done UHD should be pure eye-candy.
I heard they did the same with Snow White
Great video! This is only speculation, but I think the "grain" you see is artificial grain applied in software after a DNR pass was applied. Same thing Warner Studio did with the BD release of the Max Fleischer Superman shorts. Why did they DNR it? Maybe to color time the film better, or to maintain consistent grain density levels across the runtime. The image has been DNR'd, but the tools they've used have gotten better over the years so as to not destroy detail. Personally, I think they should have just left the grain alone, but its not the worst thing ever. Overall, it is the best-looking release so far.
I'm afraid that might be the case but I have no idea honestly. I kept looking at it over and over trying to determine but the best term I could come up with was grain management because it's impossible to know if they completely degrained and then added something back later or if they just left this amount in.
I'm just curious, do you think there are perfect 4K releases? If so, and if there's more than one haha, would you consider doing a list / video on these?
There are agonizingly few and even fewer when I have to look at disc encoding and especially the handling of audio. Discs that would be perfect usually fail on these counts. All of the other reviews of Cinderella that praised it for example didn’t go into potential grain management and didn’t mark the release down for not having original audio.
I have one or two UHDs that I’m 100% happy with so I’m trying to find a few more before making a video-but it has been on my mind to make a video about several reference UHDs that are perfect across the board.
@@DamnFoolIdealisticCrusader Thanks, looking forward to it!
It would be interesting to know what you think of the Aladdin 4k.
Which titles are reanimated, have the layers separated into digital mattes paint out the grain and reassemble. Recomposited. Do we know which ones are actually off a negative or IP as is? I watched how they did the original restoration for Snow White, it reminded me of the Star Wars special edition.
Some films have it worse than others. Some of this stuff is so crazy and we have little official information to go off of. Cinderella had it really bad on the dvd and Blu-ray to the point of being a shadow of its former self.
Do you have any specific timestamps in mind where you noticed grain management?
I double checked my viewing notes, and I didn’t write any specific timestamps. I did write down the overall impressions I was getting because suddenly you’ll notice that there’s a very fine grain pattern that you can discern and then it’ll go back to seeming like there’s almost none.
@@DamnFoolIdealisticCrusaderThe darkest scenes look the grainiest if I remember well.
Random question: have you been able to get the UHDs of Who Framed Roger Rabbit and The Nightmare Before Christmas?
Even more random question: do you have the Lawrence Of Arabia UHD to review it eventually?
Is the DVD platinum edition from Disney good quality.
It’s better than the hideous Blu-ray at least and does have a form of the mono track but it sounds very poor.
The Platinum Edition is based on the color revisionist master between the 2005 DVD to 2019 Blu-ray releases (Diamond Edition; reused in The Signature Collection) meaning Cinderella's dress is too blue instead of sliver, along with missing hidden details. If you don't mind the remix track and with minor DNR usage while keeping the original colors, you can still go with the 4K release regardless (along with the Blu-ray and Digital 4K).
Despite the nitpick, I still recommend to get this and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs 4K releases to show Disney can restore their movies, even with the flaws it has.
I’m not an expert but I was thinking if the film grain has been given the same treatment as the recent James Cameron 4k masters, which apparently use an AI grain management system. As there Fox movies, and now sadly Disney, could there be a link?
The Cameron 4K films are only the work of Lightstorm, Cameron's own company. Disney had nothing to do with those restorations, they are independent, not made by Disney's own restoration team, which has done also great restorations of Snow White, Who Framed Roger Rabbit and The Nightmare Before Christmas. And there is nothing to indicate any kind of use of those tools in these Disney 4K restorations.
Disney recently restored Spellbound, the Hitchcock classic, in 4K, and I'm curious to see the results whenever it gets a release by Criterion or something.
Bud can I please give you some feedback. I love your channel and your videos but you really need to invest in a microphone. The sound on your videos are low and especially some of your bond commentaries have really low sound.
I’ll look at it again. That’s odd to hear because I use a solid Samson mic for every video and manually sync and then edit audio. My commentary tracks I record with it directly in front of me, for videos I have it just out of camera range. I’ve never boosted volume levels in editing so maybe that causes things to sound lower especially on a phone or other devices-doubly so since most videos on UA-cam seem to have levels boosted a bit or mics too close.