And remember what happened to the aborigines.
A more advanced race nearly wiped them out.
Hello and welcome to the second installment of our technical HDR reviews.
Today we're going to look at the Arrival 4K Blu-Ray.
Last time we went over some HDR concepts such as measuring brightness in nits, and how to
read the graph you're seeing on the screen right now.
I'm gonna add a link to the first review that we did for Star Trek Beyond in the description,
so go watch that one as well if you haven't.
But as a summary, older HDTVs could only go to about 100 nits, so everything above that
line is part of HDR highlights.
One new element that we've added in this review is the bitrate counter that you can see at
the bottom right of the screen right now.
Bitrate is usually proportional to image quality, so a higher bitrate often means a better looking
movie.
4K Blu-Ray disks are available in two sizes: dual layer sixty six gigabyte disks, and triple
layer one hundred gigabyte disks.
The reason I'm bringing this up is that the type of disk determines the maximum bitrate.
The dual layer ones can have a maximum bitrate of 108 megabits per second, while for the
triple layer ones the maximum bitrate is a hundred and twenty eight megabits per second.
Comparatively, normal 1080p Blu-Rays have a maximum bitrate of 48 megabits per second.
Of course, we cannot directly compare 1080p with 4K bitrates, because the codecs on the
disks are different.
The 4K disks contain a much more efficient codec than normal Blu-Rays, so they have both
a better codec, and higher bitrate.
As we go through the review take a look at the bitrate counter.
For comparison, the 1080p disk that comes in the same package has an average bitrate
of only 28 megabits per second.
Now let's talk about the 4K disk.
This is a dual layer disk that was mastered at a maximum of one thousand nits.
But in this case the maximum is only theoretical, because most of the movie is dark.
I have an OLED TV and watching Arrival was like putting up a grey pattern, in the sense
that it showed all the flaws of my TV's panel.
Let me show you how the brightness waveform looks like as I quickly scroll through 30
minutes of the movie.
As you can see, most scenes are below a hundred nits.
As we previously discussed this is normal since HDR should mostly be used for highlights.
What is unusual however is that even the highlights, such as the sun or bright lights, often do
not go much above a hundred nits.
Also, there are many scenes where the brightness is below ten nits, and some where it's even
one or two nits.
Well it's a lot more than that, you cheeky bastard.
Don't you see, they can't see, to follow our algebra.
Here are a few more scenes.
All the interior shots are quite dark, especially when they are inside tents.
But during most of the movie even the exterior shots either happen during the night, or they
are color graded to appear at dusk or dawn.
This scene happens at night and most of the shot is below one nit.
But pay close attention to the lights as well.
Normally when I shoot timelapses for this channel, these types of lights would have
a brightness far exceeding 200 nits.
So this choice to tone down the lights was made by the director and the colorist during
post-production.
I added a link to an interview with the colorist of this movie in the description.
If you read it you will see that the look of the movie was a deliberate artistic choice
of the director.
Here's another shot that happens outside.
Look at the sky above the tree line.
You can tell that the brightness of the sky was substantially lowered on purpose.
While the movie starts out very dark it gets brighter towards the end.
As humanity gets more enlightened, so does the brightness of the movie.
The scene you are watching right now shows a transition between dark and bright, between
shots on Earth which are dark, and shots inside the alien ship, which get brighter as Louise
gets closer to finding out why the aliens have arrived.
Even so, I haven't found many scenes that go above 500 nits, which means even the brightest
scenes are still at about half of the maximum brightness this disk is mastered at.
If you thought the Star Trek Beyond disk was controversial, you should check out the heated
debate in the Blu-Ray.com forums about this movie.
The problem with dark HDR movies is that when the TVs are in HDR mode there is almost no
control over the brightness, as each scene is defined in exact nits, as opposed to SDR
movies where the brightness can easily be adjusted.
So, let us know in the comments if you think this movie is too dark, or if we should just
accept the choices made by the director.
Also, I'm curious to see if you still think it's worth getting this as a 4K Blu-Ray instead
of a cheaper 1080p disk.