The Crown Jewels of Iran (1965)
گنجینههای گوهر
Documentary • 15m
Director: Ebrahim Golestan
Cast: Ebrahim Golestan
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The Crown Jewels of Iran is a 1965 film commissioned and then banned by the Shah’s cultural ministry, featuring dazzling edits and camera movements and a charged narration assaulting economic disparities.
Director: Ivan Passer
Sources: Blu-ray.com (opens in a new tab) · slow.pics (opens in a new tab)
Though note its different color grading from the IP-sourced but poorly compressed Fun City Editions US Blu-ray (caps)
Judging from spectrograms at https://forum.blu-ray.com/showpost.php?p=23933756&postcount=57, Fun City Editions US Blu-ray appears to have marginally less filtering than Radiance 4K Blu-ray (whose padded 16-bit depth is a non-issue). There are also loudness differences, though it's unclear whether dynamic range also differs. Caveat: need to A/B both tracks to confirm, but no one has posted actual A/B impressions.
Director: Luchino Visconti
Video format: 1080p Blu-ray
Radiance 4K Blu-ray from nic:
Unadvertised HDR10 grade that looks better than the equivalent Blu-ray it's packaged with, grain rendered very clean even when it's heavy. FiM encode so surely it's better than the Media Blasters UHD, but there are still issues with frame stability, some shots have this jitter that kinda hurts to look at. Not a night and day upgrade over the Blu, but it's better and despite its issues, probably the best it'll ever be.
Director: Robert Bierman
More Documentary on Blu-ray
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While it's included on both Criterion The Palm Beach Story extras and Arrow's Sullivan's Travels' extras, Criterion uses a different source and is vastly superior, see caps
Director: Werner Herzog
DE Koch Media is presented in the correct 25fps and is likely better compressed than UK Dogwoof (29 vs 14 Mbps), but it doesn’t have English subtitles.
US Drafthouse is in 24fps for Region A compatibility, and is encoded at around 30 Mbps.
(Although bitrate does not solely determine the quality of the encode, the difference is large enough here and there are no publicly available caps.)
No info on the JP VAP Blu-ray.
DE Koch Media and US Drafthouse feature a lossless 5.1 track. Dogwoof offers only AC-3.
Director: Bert Stern
Sources: Blu-ray.com (opens in a new tab) · slow.pics (opens in a new tab)
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