As those of you who have been following my thread will know I discovered earlier this year that Netflix were streaming a 1080p version of Die Hard which differed in a number of ways from the Blu release:
Stable titles/no telecine wobble
Cleaner, with film damage reduced or removed
Altered colour timing, varying from shot to shot so as to suggest a full regrade as opposed to a blanket tinting
More detail in many circumstances, usually static close-ups due to the way Netflix's compression operates
Obviously the film was restored in 4K a number of years, perhaps the master slipped out? In any case I felt it warranted a preservation, purely as a curiousity, so I capped it:
Captured from cable box at 1080p24 to an external USB capture device which hardware encoded to a high bitrate AVC file, visually identical to stream
Stream capture converted to Lagarith lossless and imported in NLE,
Blu ray indexed via DGAVCindex and downconverted to 480p Lagarith for sync,
Lossless stream synced to blu ray and menu cutaway removed during end titles,
Light 35mm film grain applied via grain plate, matched to what grain survived the encode,
Rendered out to UTvideo codec in YV12 for 2-pass encode via x264 CLI (veryslow preset, tune grain, av. bitrate 19Mbits/s, blu ray compliant)
Raw .264 file muxed to blu ray folder structure with audio and chapter stops from blu ray with tsMuxer.
Audio tracks (with huge thanks to DoomBot and PDB):
1. PCM Dolby Stereo from Initial Widescreen Laserdisc release (1666-80), closest to Theatrical Audio known available short of obtaining the optical track from a realease print
2. PCM Dolby Stereo from THX Widescreen Laserdisc remaster (8905-85), a beefed-up track said to be based on the 70mm 6-track, offered as an alternative listening experience.
As this is Blu ray synced alternative tracks can be ripped/muxed to your taste.
Obviously a streaming video can never match the bitrates of a commercial blu ray, there are compression artifacts mostly in shadow detail and out of focus/solid areas of colour. The grain plate helps to mitigate many of these. What I have aimed for here is to replicate the experience of streaming at the maximum quality available, offline with superior (and authentic) audio.
PM me for more information, feedback is appreciated, especially from anyone fortunate to catch the limited 4K DCP presentations. Depending on feedback and improved source material there may be a v1.1, also I will be keeping the original capture for the foreseeable and may make it available.
Happy trails!
Stable titles/no telecine wobble
Cleaner, with film damage reduced or removed
Altered colour timing, varying from shot to shot so as to suggest a full regrade as opposed to a blanket tinting
More detail in many circumstances, usually static close-ups due to the way Netflix's compression operates
Obviously the film was restored in 4K a number of years, perhaps the master slipped out? In any case I felt it warranted a preservation, purely as a curiousity, so I capped it:
Captured from cable box at 1080p24 to an external USB capture device which hardware encoded to a high bitrate AVC file, visually identical to stream
Stream capture converted to Lagarith lossless and imported in NLE,
Blu ray indexed via DGAVCindex and downconverted to 480p Lagarith for sync,
Lossless stream synced to blu ray and menu cutaway removed during end titles,
Light 35mm film grain applied via grain plate, matched to what grain survived the encode,
Rendered out to UTvideo codec in YV12 for 2-pass encode via x264 CLI (veryslow preset, tune grain, av. bitrate 19Mbits/s, blu ray compliant)
Raw .264 file muxed to blu ray folder structure with audio and chapter stops from blu ray with tsMuxer.
Audio tracks (with huge thanks to DoomBot and PDB):
1. PCM Dolby Stereo from Initial Widescreen Laserdisc release (1666-80), closest to Theatrical Audio known available short of obtaining the optical track from a realease print
2. PCM Dolby Stereo from THX Widescreen Laserdisc remaster (8905-85), a beefed-up track said to be based on the 70mm 6-track, offered as an alternative listening experience.
As this is Blu ray synced alternative tracks can be ripped/muxed to your taste.
Obviously a streaming video can never match the bitrates of a commercial blu ray, there are compression artifacts mostly in shadow detail and out of focus/solid areas of colour. The grain plate helps to mitigate many of these. What I have aimed for here is to replicate the experience of streaming at the maximum quality available, offline with superior (and authentic) audio.
PM me for more information, feedback is appreciated, especially from anyone fortunate to catch the limited 4K DCP presentations. Depending on feedback and improved source material there may be a v1.1, also I will be keeping the original capture for the foreseeable and may make it available.
Happy trails!