Displaying items by tag: 4K UltraHD

As you can imagine, things are a little busy here at The Bits this week, and for good reason. As I mentioned yesterday, I’m continuing to dig pretty deep with studio and industry sources on a number of significant home video rumors that have been circulating over the past few days.

I covered the status of the Star Trek: The Motion Picture – Director’s Edition remaster yesterday, so let’s move on to another title.

Today I have an update for you on another of the rumors you’ve probably read about online: Warner Bros. Home Entertainment’s plans for The Middle Earth 4K Collection, the long-awaited release of Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit films on physical 4K Ultra HD.

Here’s the latest from our sources... [Read on here...]

[Editor’s Note: This interview was originally posted on The Digital Bits on 5/4/01. It refers to the original and much-maligned Kubrick DVD collection release and also the better and properly remastered 2001 DVDs. It hints at future HD releases, but this was five years prior to the debut of Blu-ray and 4K Ultra HD was still well over the horizon. Read it as an artifact of the period. But our admiration of Vitali has only been enhanced by the recent and terrific documentary about his life, Filmworker, not to mention his fine work on the new 4K release of 2001: A Space Odyssey, so we thought it would be fun to share this vintage interview we did with him. It’s clear just how protective he was then – and remains now – of Stanley Kubrick’s body of work. We salute him for it. All Kubrick fans owe him a great debt.]

One thing you can say for sure about Leon Vitali, is that he knew Stanley Kubrick. Vitali first came into contact with Kubrick when he was cast to play the role of Lord Bullingdon in Barry Lyndon. The two quickly struck up a friendship, and Vitali soon found himself working side-by-side with the director as his assistant and a permanent part of Kubrick’s staff. Over an association of more than 25 years, Vitali personally worked on nearly every facet of Kubrick’s films, from scripting to casting, production, laboratory supervision and advertising. He even worked on the translations of Kubrick’s films into other languages for international markets. [Read on here...]