DNR software used on HD/UHD Bluray releases - Good & Bad

[Zack Birlew]

Hi, everybody, I occasionally listen in to some podcasts and Youtube reviews on upcoming home movie releases, particularly keeping an eye out for exciting upcoming 4K remasters, and I keep hearing about problems with digital noise reduction in certain releases and I admit I've seen some bad instances before. My question is, what DNR software is doing this? I would think that surely they would carefully use something like Neat Video to go through each shot as they color correct and adjust each remaster to get a clean noise removal overall but clearly that isn't the case as most releases these days have bad instances of DNR that drives viewers nuts. So, what software are these authoring companies using that's completely messing up these films? Anybody have any insight into what's going on with the home media front?

 

[Phil Holland]

I'll speak semi-candidly about this, but the tandem of upscaling with digital noise reduction is obviously not the best choice. A great deal of UHD 4K or even HD released didn't have the opportunity to do a remaster.

But when people have the time, budget, and care you see some rather special results. Films like Jaws come to mind and if you saw the 8K version of 2001 in Japan, well yeah, looks damn good.

I've also seem some rather sloppy efforts in mastering and releasing certain things, but that's another aspect to this.

IQ and QC are not exactly things that some of these projects can tackle without additional funds, talent, and time.

It's rarely the software's fault. It's mostly how people use things when it goes bad.

 

[Craig W. Bickerstaff]

It would be interesting to see what DNR software is being used for some of these releases, Neat video has such a good reputation you'd think it would be Neat Video but Neat Video doesn't seem to mention anything about these bigger film restorations on their websites.
I think some films are a lot more successful than others, I'm pretty sure the 4k releases of the Indiana Jones movies have some DNR work going on, after playing around in Neat Video they defiantly seem to have some of that Neat Video look going on which can be quite tasteful I've found though you also get other movies where movies are scrubbed until people start to look like wax.
The trailer for Get Back on youtube looked like it was pretty heavily scrubbed.
I also wonder what causes frozen grain, The most recent Star Wars releases are said to be plagued with frozen grain and if you watch They shall not grow old there are shots where you'll have sort of a part of an image which will have frozen grain and then the rest of the image is scrubbed.