Blade Runner 2099 finally has a confirmed premiere date, which after the delays is more than I expected this year. My first thought was not casting or plot. It was whether it will actually look like a Blade Runner thing once it goes down a streaming pipe.
2049 is about the hardest material there is for compression. Long dark shots, fog and dust catching light, huge flat expanses of near black with one neon source sitting in them. That is exactly where encoders start smearing: banding across a dim gradient, noise crawling around a bright sign in the dark, shadow detail collapsing into a single flat tone. A show shot in that register on a service tuned for the average living room is asking for trouble in a way a brightly lit procedural never is.
So the questions I care about are narrow: Dolby Vision or plain HDR10, is there an Atmos mix, and does anyone put it on disc afterwards. No answers on any of that yet as far as I can see, and I would rather nobody guess.
The pessimism might be misplaced. Some streaming originals have looked genuinely excellent lately when the platform bothered to allocate bitrate properly. But the pattern with this genre is that the bleakest, darkest, most carefully lit show is the one that turns up looking like a mud puddle on a big panel.
Anyone still trust streaming with dark material, or do you wait for a disc on principle?
2049 is about the hardest material there is for compression. Long dark shots, fog and dust catching light, huge flat expanses of near black with one neon source sitting in them. That is exactly where encoders start smearing: banding across a dim gradient, noise crawling around a bright sign in the dark, shadow detail collapsing into a single flat tone. A show shot in that register on a service tuned for the average living room is asking for trouble in a way a brightly lit procedural never is.
So the questions I care about are narrow: Dolby Vision or plain HDR10, is there an Atmos mix, and does anyone put it on disc afterwards. No answers on any of that yet as far as I can see, and I would rather nobody guess.
The pessimism might be misplaced. Some streaming originals have looked genuinely excellent lately when the platform bothered to allocate bitrate properly. But the pattern with this genre is that the bleakest, darkest, most carefully lit show is the one that turns up looking like a mud puddle on a big panel.
Anyone still trust streaming with dark material, or do you wait for a disc on principle?
