FAR AND AWAY 4K UHD (Finally) Coming From Shout

[AndyDursin]

Worst kept secret!

[jkholm]

Will it have the 70mm version in the 2.20 aspect ratio?

[Monterey Jack]

Wonder if they’ll include the TV footage.

[AndyDursin]

Sounds like no. I have a good copy of it but it's not that amazing. It also ruins all of Williams music from the land rush sequence since they had to track it over to cover the added outtakes.

[Paul MacLean]

Mastered from the 65mm negative I hope?

I was disappointed in the Blu-ray, which looks like it was struck from a screener (i.e. 35mm) print.

[AndyDursin]

I don't know how accurate some of the people who post on Blu-ray.com are, but one poster who claims he has "inside knowledge" says it will be off a 35mm, which is a shame as the 65mm's been shown recently too.

[AndyDursin]

Ex-Shout rep weighs in on this release to the Blu-Ray.com message boarders:

Please understand that the current home entertainment market is living on very thins margins. Studios and boutique labels are pushing every day to continue providing us physical media releases against a landscape where there are less and less customers available to them. They're trying to appease two types of buyer right now... one that wants the absolute best quality and is willing to pay a premium for that and one that wants to pay little to nothing for their product but still demands the best quality. Guess which one is the bulk of the market? A transfer from 35mm is expensive. A transfer from 65mm is WAY more expensive. Are the people wanting a new transfer from the 65MM negative willing to pay $100-$200 for a copy of Far and Away? If so, you're an elite class because nobody else really is and so Shout has to manage production costs in such a way that makes it profitable for them to release the title. Because the other option is that they don't release it at all (which is essentially what Universal did with it, not even releasing a Blu-ray until 2018).

So stop fixating on what you think Shout cheaped out on (which you have no reason to complain about unless you were willing to pay for it) and start appreciating more what they DID do, which was to involve Mikael Salomon to oversee and approve the new 4K transfer. If Mikael Salomon says it good and he's happy, then the rest of us would do well to just shut the **** up, take his word for it, and enjoy the best version of Far and Away that's ever been released.

I can understand this. Nobody is going to fund a hugely expensive Criterion-level restoration of FAR AND AWAY.

If this turns out to be a big improvement on the Blu-Ray -- and it ought to be since it's a new 4K scan and Mikael Salomon is supervising it -- then it's still well worth investing in.

[Paul MacLean]

If this turns out to be a big improvement on the Blu-Ray -- and it ought to be since it's a new 4K scan and Mikael Salomon is supervising it -- then it's still well worth investing in.

Of course I'd love a release scanned from 65mm, but a transfer from a 35mm negative can look phenomenal.

Lets not forget some -- perhaps even most -- of the best-looking movies ever made were shot on 35mm.

In college, we were sometimes screened 16mm prints in class -- that's all the college could procure sometimes. In my Film Analysis class I watched an anamorphic 16mm print of 2001 -- a movie shot in 70mm. Did it look as good as a 70mm print? No. Did it good? Yes, it looked terrific actually.