By Chris Tribbey
There was a lot of work —
and a lot of thought — behind Paramount Home Media Distribution’s first two
Ultra High-Def (UHD) Blu-ray Disc releases, Star Trek and Star
Trek Into Darkness, both streeting June 14 (with a May 3 preorder
date).
Before the studio became
the fourth major (fifth if you include Lionsgate) to join the UHD release game
(Universal would announce their UHD BD release intent later in April),
Paramount spent a lot of time making sure their first releases would be top of
the line, according to Ed Hoxsie, SVP of worldwide product production and fulfillment
for the studio.
“We were working on these
films [for UHD] long before they were announced,” he said. “And we’re doing a
lot of work upstream to prepare. We prep
things from the theatrical release window to prepare for home entertainment to
do it.”
Knowing how important the
upgraded, 4K home viewing experience needed to be with these first releases
from the studio, Paramount had dozens of eyeballs on the picture, from master
to compression, along with people from the studio working directly with third
party quality control vendors to look at how the picture would come through on
as many screens and as players as possible.
“All monitors are not the
same, and not all players are the same,” Hoxsie said. “They all respond
differently. So what we do is look at
the best-case scenario, be sure we catch everything we can catch, then put them
on other types of systems, blow up brightness, gamut, whatever, and try to look
at it like a consumer who just takes something out of the box and puts it in
their living room.”
For these first two
Paramount UHD Blu-rays, the studio is also including HDR [high dynamic range]
10, the industry baseline standard for the upgrade contrast between the
brightest whites and darkest blacks, a feature being highly touted for 4K sets
and content. Additionally, Paramount is
including Dolby Atmos on both releases. Atmos is Dolby’s object-based, next-gen
sound technology, that puts sound above, below and all around the viewer.
“We’re going out with HDR
10, and we won’t release UHD without HDR. We feel it’s both the resolution and the high
dynamic range that makes the product great. And we’ve also updated the audio on these
first two titles to have Atmos, so it’s a full, immersive audio mix and visual
experience,” Hoxsie said. “We went back
to the [2009] Star Trek and actually had the original [sound] mixers go in
and do an Atmos mix from the ground up with the original elements. They’re perfect for Atmos. Since we’re doing HDR, we needed to bring up
the audio with it.”
He added that both UHD
Blu-rays were done on 66 GB discs, with just the film and a commentary track
found on the UHD discs (both films come with a standard Blu-ray of the film and
a bonus disc). The reasoning was simple:
don’t cram too much on and overload what’s meant to be a top-notch visual-audio
experience, Hoxsie said.
“Two years from now, if
we want to put UHD bonuses on these discs, the 100 GB will come into play,” he
added. “Or if one day we do a movie that’s three hours long, the 100 will do
that. We’re fanatics with our bit rates,
and I can say that both are sufficient, and hold enough to adapt the Atmos
tracks.”
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