After I had mentioned a “V3” to be even more preferable (combining the 2D version which has less DNR to begin with and the open matte 3D one), I was contacted by a member who suggested some Indian release of Titanic which was supposed to have no DNR and being open matte as well. Once I got a copy of that, it quickly turned out however to be exactly the same H.264 stream (just on one disc instead of two) from the left eye of the 3D version. Same size, same artefacts.
Taken the messed up UHD BD and older DVD or LD releases aside, there seem to be only two official HD variants: the less noise filtered cinema scope one provided by the US 2D BD, Spanish 2D BD, etc. and the more noise filtered open matte one provided by the US 3D BD, Indian 2D BD and some scene releases like the usual suspects such as “KRaLiMaRKo”, etc.
When I compared all that, I’ve noticed differences in sharpness though between the official open matte and Benito’s regrade.
In this scene, the carpet appears significantly sharper:
https://i.ibb.co/MVHSsGT/Titanic-Indian-2-D-OM-US-3-D-OM.png
https://i.ibb.co/R4FDGS8/Titanic-MJBenito-Regarde-V2-OM-2.png
Here Rose’ chain also looks a lot sharper. At the same time, some original detail is lost though, apparent on her dress as I mentioned before, but not only compared to the cropped 2D version, but also between the 3D original and Benito’s regrade:
https://i.ibb.co/y60v2mv/Caledon-Rose-Original.png
https://i.ibb.co/5GKc8hk/Caledon-Rose-Benito-Regrade.png
A zoomed part of her dress to emphasize the difference; parts of the dress’ strikes are masked by the noise:
https://i.ibb.co/SnSzsqV/Rose-Dress-Original.png
https://i.ibb.co/dDhXmtQ/Rose-Dress-Benito-Regrade.png
Which raises the following questions for me:
What’s the source? Is it indeed the official 3D one? Then the subjective sharpness increase is impressive but would also mean that you applied artificial sharpening and not only upscaling.
Overall, comparing the two, the data reduction, JPEG-like artefacts are somehow entirely replaced by some “error diffusion”-like dither. If my assumption is correct, I would be interested in a V3 with only upscaling and color correction and no filtering as at some point the detail of the dress has to go lost.
But maybe you had a different source after all and I happen to have a 3D BD which coincidently shares the “magic” Indian source.
In short, I have been successfully confused.