Sound & Vision has the announcement: Queen's Budapest show, filmed on 27 July 1986 and the last full concert captured with Freddie Mercury fronting the band, goes into cinemas and IMAX worldwide from 7 October through Trafalgar Releasing, with Sony Music Vision involved. Physical editions land three weeks later on 30 October as 4K UHD, 3LP and 2CD.
The cinema run is the part that makes me curious rather than excited. Budapest was shot on film in 1986 by a crew working a stadium at night, which means the source is going to be grainy, the lighting is going to be whatever the tour rig managed, and a lot of the concert footage from that era was cut with fairly aggressive zooms. IMAX presentation of that material is a scaling and grading exercise, not a resolution one. Done with restraint it can look wonderful. Done the way some catalogue concert films have been handled, you get noise reduction that turns Mercury's face into wax.
No detail yet on what the 4K disc actually carries, and I'd hold off preordering until someone confirms whether the transfer is a genuine new scan of the camera negative or an upscale of the existing master. The audio mix is the other open question and nobody has said anything about it.
For those who bought the earlier Queen concert releases: has Sony's handling of that catalogue on disc been good enough to buy this one blind?
The cinema run is the part that makes me curious rather than excited. Budapest was shot on film in 1986 by a crew working a stadium at night, which means the source is going to be grainy, the lighting is going to be whatever the tour rig managed, and a lot of the concert footage from that era was cut with fairly aggressive zooms. IMAX presentation of that material is a scaling and grading exercise, not a resolution one. Done with restraint it can look wonderful. Done the way some catalogue concert films have been handled, you get noise reduction that turns Mercury's face into wax.
No detail yet on what the 4K disc actually carries, and I'd hold off preordering until someone confirms whether the transfer is a genuine new scan of the camera negative or an upscale of the existing master. The audio mix is the other open question and nobody has said anything about it.
For those who bought the earlier Queen concert releases: has Sony's handling of that catalogue on disc been good enough to buy this one blind?
