Wow sounds amazing! I remember the project for the hybrid first film which was amazing to watch the largest picture and longest version possible, so really looking forward to this.
I don’t think I’ll go the extended editions path but I might keep it in mind for a near future. HP 8 is almost finished and the amount of expanded aspect radio shots is quite impressive.
Sounds exciting! Since you’re releasing them in 1080p, they should play fine on my PC. 😃
How different is the colour grading between the 4K SDR and 1.78:1 releases?
For example, HP1 in 4K is a new master and color correction has been applied on scenes. The open matte version has the same color grading as sthe old HD master so it makes sense to merge them for shots that are not open matte (if there are any, cause the film seems to be completely open matte).
Another solution might be to tone map the 4K master to SDR, upscale the open matte to 4K, merge the 4K resolution of HP 1 back in the open matte version shot by shit and color match the expanded portions of the image with the 4K SDR. But it surely would take too much time, so I’m going the easy way at the moment, starting with HP 8.
The “gaia” upscaler in Topaz AI is the way to go if you end up doing a 4K upscale. It does a very good job with 1080p-to-4K (although it is quite slow). And then afterward maybe add back a very light grain to the image in Resolve.
Interesting, I’ve been testing the new IRIS upscaler on Topaz Video 4 and it seems to give even better results than Gaia. I might do some tests before choosing the right settings. What parameters are you using in manual mode ?