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> Italy Eagle Pictures 4K Blu-ray > Lionsgate 4K Blu-ray

Arrow 4K Blu-ray  see caps

Geoff D impressions 

It's weird. Brightly lit scenes have zero grain. They look plenty detailed and not at all waxy and lifeless, but there's no grain. Darker scenes have a fine layer of it as befits the general rule of thumb with film. Either they shot this on the 50-speed EXR stock of the day - virtually grainless in the right conditions - or it's been expertly 'grain managed'. I say 'expertly' becuz there's no trailing artefacts, no sticky grain that I can see, it's some of the best such treatment I've ever seen. And IF it has been I can only think the edict came down from the director himself.

Both 4K discs include a mono downmix instead of a proper stereo.

Original Lionsgate disc was encoded in incorrect colorspace and used a lossy->lossless transcode for the 5.1 mix.

US/UK Arrow 4K Blu-ray has both the original Dolby Stereo 2.0 mix in its best quailty and the original Dolby Stereo 4-track discrete stems in 4.0.

Avoid the Germany Hanselab 4K Blu-ray, as it's riddled with oversaturated colors, poor encoding, AI upscaling, and DNR. The included Blu-ray is also DNRed.

• The BBC 4K collection and Shout! Factory 4K collection all use the same source, and are all unfortunately using AI upscaling and DNR'ed They are worse than the blurays and the 2023 US Shout! Factory collections are even prone to disc-rot.

• 2009 Lionsgate US (also prone to disc-rot) or UK 2 Entertain OOP Blu-ray will be the way to go.

• The 4K collection's Blu-ray seems to be a reprint of previous releases.

5.1 track for The Wrong Trousers is in its correct pitch both in music and voices https://forum.blu-ray.com/showpost.php?p=21535755&postcount=103

Unaltered track with the original music cues is on the LaserDisc.

(caveat: missing extras present on the Germany NSM Blu-ray mediabook)

WB Home Video US LaserDisc [23000] for the OG stereo

(the 2021 4K's 5.1 was flawed, with unnecessary bad tweaking)

Caps by cinemaniac

The DV FEL layer noticeably restores high-frequency detail that’s missing from the base layer. See caps. issue: the 4K disc is missing chyron in some beginning shots. TBC officially.

US Paramount 4K Blu-ray has Dolby Vision, while other countries Fox 4K Blu-ray only has HDR

2017 JP Kadokawa Blu-ray has the best encoding out of all the older discs.

Kino Lorber and Artificial Eye Blu-ray use the same master, between the two the PQ on Kino's release is slightly better, but the difference is negligible.

The 4K restoration (Criterion, 4K etc) are cropped to 2.35:1, have revisionistic colour grading and other changes.

Caps: old master, old master vs 4K restoration

Wong Kar-Wai on the framing:

With Fallen Angels, I have changed the format to cinemascope, because it was originally what I had intended to release the film in. When we were cutting the film, we accidentally turned the Steenbeck on anamorphic instead of standard. I felt that the film looked much more interesting because it enhanced the distance of the characters on top of the extreme wide angle that we shot on. Back then, it was impossible to shoot a film in standard and release it in anamorphic. With this restoration, we have successfully fulfilled this wish.