xREL.v3

EPS 4K Ultra HD HDR10 digital remaster and regrade for Inglorious Basterds (2009).

From the quirky Quentin Tarantino. This release is particularly special as Tarantino is not a fan of HDR and 4K really for that matter and will likely never release his films on 4K Bluray, which is as great a director he is, that is an awfully selfish act. Just as him keeping reference versions of his films close to his chest and release sub par quality Bluray transfers even for paying customers. It's no surprise a raw DCP 4K SDR cut one of his more recent films was leaked, he's not giving his audience what they want. Luckily we have outfits like Tekno3D and individuals like myself up to the task of doing our best to bring his films to 4K HDR.

Source as always for my 4K HDR Digital Remasters was a BD50 1080p disc, specifically the 2011 Special Edition Bluray which is highest quality available source to the public, being just a tiny bit smaller in resolution than the 2048 pixel width 2K Studio DI. This difference is insignificant for my purposes and methods as the 2011 1080p SDR Bluray is a rather good pressing, ideal for 4K UHD mastering and full HDR grading.

I was able to finish this one on just my 2nd HDR grading revision, partcularly in large part due having Tarantino style color in the back of my mind with Reservoir Dogs, so I was able to dial this one in fairly quickly and get it where I wanted. The 4K SDR digital mastering portion was very straight forward for this project as it usually is. And precise post production HDR10 analysis and completely custom mastering was done to ensure the highest quality and most accurate HDR10 experience.

The rich colors of Tarantino's films really benefit from proper and well done grading into 10Bit wide color gamut and High Dynamic Range. As it makes a big difference in color depth, contrast, black levels, color dynamic range and of course pure brightness and luminance. This combined with 4K Ultra HD makes for a truly awesome viewing experience of the film and a big upgrade over the studio 1080p SDR Bluray IMHO.

For audio I included 2 great audio tracks, primary being the untouched lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 mix directly from the 2011 Special Edition Bluray. And a completely custom secondary alternate/compatibility Dolby Digital Plus 5.1 lossy mix w/ a specialty very high quality 768k bitrate.

This is a very HQ release encode version to share with all of you, which also serves as my personal digital copy on my NAS for my movie library for home network streaming. Encoded as the highest quality, smallest x265 HEVC cut I was comfortable with for this 2.5 HR flick, and the encode is directly from the lossless 4K UHD HDR10 H.265 240GB master copy of the project, no transcoding in between whatsoever. You get 93-95% or better of that quality at a fraction of the DCP sized master copy and the difference is virtually indistinguishable, as it would have been also with a 55-70GB sized Remux cut as well which I did not encode... but rather straight to this very high quality sub remux network streamable cut.

Chapters are encoded plus an optional standard English subtitle track.