Starting March 2016, first UHD Blu-ray movies started to hit the shelves. While I was excited about the new format, bringing higher resolution, HDR, 10-bit precision and more colors, I was also well aware that not all movies were shot digitally in 4K or higher resolution and that even if they were, that does not mean that master format was 4K. Same goes for movies shot on film – digital intermediate could be done in 2K and then upscaled for UHD Blu-ray.
We already have 20+ UHD Blu-ray movies on the market, with over 100 titles to be available by the end of the year. There are many reviews already available, websites such as Blu-ray.com and High-Def Digest are doing a great job testing them in great detail – offering valuable information about picture and sound quality of each release. But for me, this isn’t enough – I want to know for each UHD Blu-ray release what were source and master formats – this will give me clearer indication on what can I expect from particular release. Was it mastered in 2K and then upscaled to 4K for UHD Blu-ray? In that case I do not believe that much benefit in terms of pure sharpness will be visible compared to standard Blu-ray. Wider color gamut and HDR are different topics.
In any case, I couldn’t find such overview online so I decided to make one – using technical info page on IMDb as my main source of data, I created:
UHD Blu-ray movies – Source & Master format (DI) database
On this page I compiled information which I consider to be important from technical point of view plus link to IMDb’s technical info page for each title and also link to review on either High-Def Digest of Blu-ray.com. You can easily sort and filter the page which at the moment holds 25 titles – I will update it with new releases for you to always have quick info.
As pretty much everything on the web, I consider this database as “beta”. If you have any tips on how to improve it or just want to share your opinion, please leave a comment either below this article on on database’ page.
