Twenty years on from August 2006 and Talladega Nights is getting a 4K disc, with a review already up at HTF. I have not seen a word about the transfer itself yet, so I am going in with questions rather than opinions.
Mid-2000s studio comedies are an awkward category on 4K. Films from that window were typically shot on 35mm and finished on a 2K digital intermediate, and graded for a look that was deliberately flat and a bit warm, because that is what comedies looked like then. So the honest ceiling on a catalogue title from that era is often a clean upscale of the existing DI with a wider colour container and whatever grain survived. That is not nothing - it can be a real jump over a fifteen-year-old Blu-ray master - but it is not the same thing as a fresh scan of the negative, and studios are careful never to tell you which one you are buying.
What I would want to know before ordering: whether there was a new scan at all, whether HDR has been applied with any restraint or whether someone has pushed the daylight racing footage somewhere the DP never signed off on, and whether the audio is a new object-based mix or the original track carried across. Comedy is a dialogue format above everything else. A remix that buries the ad-libs under crowd noise ruins the only thing the film is good at.
Anniversary 4Ks are also where extras from the old release quietly go missing, so that is worth checking on the back of the box before you commit.
Anyone picked it up or read a proper transfer breakdown? Specifically whether it is a new scan or the old DI upscaled.
Mid-2000s studio comedies are an awkward category on 4K. Films from that window were typically shot on 35mm and finished on a 2K digital intermediate, and graded for a look that was deliberately flat and a bit warm, because that is what comedies looked like then. So the honest ceiling on a catalogue title from that era is often a clean upscale of the existing DI with a wider colour container and whatever grain survived. That is not nothing - it can be a real jump over a fifteen-year-old Blu-ray master - but it is not the same thing as a fresh scan of the negative, and studios are careful never to tell you which one you are buying.
What I would want to know before ordering: whether there was a new scan at all, whether HDR has been applied with any restraint or whether someone has pushed the daylight racing footage somewhere the DP never signed off on, and whether the audio is a new object-based mix or the original track carried across. Comedy is a dialogue format above everything else. A remix that buries the ad-libs under crowd noise ruins the only thing the film is good at.
Anniversary 4Ks are also where extras from the old release quietly go missing, so that is worth checking on the back of the box before you commit.
Anyone picked it up or read a proper transfer breakdown? Specifically whether it is a new scan or the old DI upscaled.
