I didn’t expect to go back to CCA, but looks like Sunrise fucked up another disc, so here we are… CCA in 4K is really frustrating to witness. The good news is that it’s a completely new transfer and not simply a regrade of the 2008 HD master. It’s sharper overall and the line art is much crisper and organic as a result. The new transfer also avoids any of the overexposure and oversaturation of the BD, but this comes at a cost… The HDR grade is tragically dark. I can’t really say what went wrong here, but I can take some guesses. For one thing, nothing is *lost* in the grade, meaning black levels aren’t crushed beyond belief, and the highlights are all intact, but basically everything in the middle is in this weird low contrast purgatory. The result is a drab, desaturated transfer that barely exceeds 500 nits or so, even at its brightest moments. There’s also a bit of a green tint in the midtones, and a blue tint overall. I checked the colors out a few different ways to make sure this wasn’t some HDR signaling issue; one in MPC with SDR Tonemapping enabled, another in DaVinci Resolve outputting to an LG CX OLED display over a Decklink Monitor card (both in HDR and converted SDR), and once more with a Roku Ultra hardware-decoding the file directly to the TV. In all instances, the image was lackluster. Now, it appears that some other rips out there have taken some liberties with their SDR approach, and I don’t say that as a criticism. Beatrice’s release appears pretty well balanced and nicely brightened/saturated. I wouldn’t be surprised if they referenced the BD in some way. I decided I had to do the same, but for both 4K HDR and 1080p SDR. Going back to DaVinci Resolve, I skimmed around the movie and looked for areas of extreme highlights (explosions, flashes, glowing effects, etc). These are reliable references for maximum brightness in an image, because they are supposed to completely blow out. As I said above, the film rarely exceeds 500 nits of brightness, with the majority of the image sitting in the well below 300 nits. Knowing that most HDR masters are graded to a roughly 1000nit spec, it can be safely assumed that there was a LOT of headroom for this grade to be pushed up. For reference, the CX (and most consumer OLEDs) can hit about 700-800nits in ideal conditions, with LCDs going quite a bit higher, but the standard expectation for a professional colorist is 1000nits. So the basic approach was to regrade the film in HDR, getting the image to roughly the perceived brightness of the BD, while taming highlights a bit so that they fit within a roughly 800nit threshold. This is obviously subject to some degree of taste. Simultaneously, I dialed down the blue tint quite a bit and made sure that the overall tonality of the increased shadow and highlight details were retained. The result is a MUCH higher contrast and more generous use of the HDR space. Highlights pop, shadows are cleanly separated, all while avoiding the issues that plagued the BD. Next was the SDR grade. While my 4K HDR grade can be tone mapped decently to SDR (and definitely better than the actual grade…), the greener midtones of the UHD transfer seem to be really exaggerated. I switched Resolve over to SDR mode and tested the exact same grade on the CX. I was hoping that the grade would translate a little better with color management, but it was much duller and like I said, greener, when simply converted, so I opted to do a separate SDR grade instead using the HDR grade as a starting point. MUCH more green was pulled out of the SDR version and the gamma was brought down significantly to give it a similar apparent contrast. Gain and highlights were pushed a bit as well. This grade could be considered less faithful to both the UHD BD and the original BD, but I think it translates a lot of the gains of the new master to HD SDR very well. So with that done, I exported both to HEVC 10-bit 4:2:0, and took the DTS-HD MA tracks from BluDragon’s UHD BD-Remux, converted them to Opus, and brought back the EG subtitle script from the most V2 of my BD release. I touched it up slightly and reformatted it for both 1080p and 2160p, then made a dumbed down SRT version to assist in hardware playback. The result is this release, presented with two different takes on a grade to make the most of the UHD BD. Original UHD BD: https://imgur.com/Ar8C9UX HDR Regraded, Tonemapped to SDR: https://imgur.com/pVz7187 SDR Regraded: https://imgur.com/IqiBsdI Video: 2160p HEVC 10-bit 4:2:0 Audio: Opus 4.1 (Japanese) and 2.0 (English) Subs: English Styled Subs (EG), English SRT (EG) See here for the 1080p SDR version: https://nyaa.si/view/1623641