So I spent a couple hours up in Hollywood yesterday afternoon to cover something pretty interesting…

At a press event at the Screen Actors Guild, members of the UHD Alliance, three major consumer electronics manufacturers, and leading Hollywood filmmakers officially announced a new partnership effort to implement Filmmaker Mode as an extension of the 4K Ultra HD spec.

The idea is to ensure that when you watch a movie at home in 4K on your new Ultra HD display, whether from a disc, stream, or cable/satellite broadcast, it will look exactly as it should. UHD Alliance research suggests that as many as 80% of people who buy 4K TVs never change the settings out of the box. This means irritating features like motion smoothing and unnecessary processing are being applied to the image by default – processing that actually takes the picture away from the filmmakers’ intent.

What the Filmmaker Mode will do is to allow the user – either with one push of a button on the remote, or with a very easy and obvious menu setting – to set the TV’s display parameters to most accurately display the 4K content. This would be a baseline setting for the image – any added adjustments signaled by HDR10, HDR10+, or Dolby Vision metadata would happen on top of that setting. [Read on here...]

We’ve got some great news for you today, which is that Criterion has just announced their November slate of Blu-ray and DVD releases, and it’s truly one of their best line-ups yet!

Starting on 11/8, you’ll get Lone Wolf and Cub (Cat #841 – Blu-ray and DVD) which includes all six films in the series (Sword of Vengeance, Baby Cart at the River Styx, Baby Cart to Hades, Baby Cart in Peril, Baby Cart in the Land of Demons, and White Heaven in Hell) as well as the Shogun Assassin edit of the first two films, plus amazing extras. Next up on 11/15 are Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams (Cat #842 – Blu-ray and DVD) and Paul Thomas Anderson’s Punch-Drunk Love (Cat #843 – Blu-ray and DVD), both with great extras. Dreams will include a 150-minute documentary shot on the set by Nobuhiko Obayashi about the making of the film and more. Then on 11/22, look for Marlon Brando’s One-Eyed Jacks (Cat #844 – Blu-ray and DVD) and Noah Baumbach’s The Squid and the Whale (Cat #845 – Blu-ray and DVD), again each with great extras. You can see the cover artwork and pre-order each below. What an amazing slate!  [Read on here…]