You_Too said:

Yep, the Japanese BD has just a little bit more grain "preserved", though I suspect that grain to be fake. When using such heavy DVNR on a film, how do you keep the grain at the same time? There's simply no way that grain can be real in my opinion. What do you guys think?

Either way doesn't matter though, since the movie will go through our little special treatment! That is reduction of "edge-enhancement", then sharpening the rest of the details to get a nice balance, then blurring it just a little to match the look of the other BDs and adding the grain from one of those releases to cover up all the DVNR.

Here are some early samples of a test I did with some screenshots a while back: http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/54630

We might add just a little more blur before adding the grain though, since I think that might make it look even more natural.

EDIT:

Here's an additional thing some might find interesting. It's an article about the restoration done to the extended (German theatrical) version. After reading it, I just can't believe they were actually talking about using such heavy DVNR. It makes me feel as if those guys really did an amazing job and then some newbie came along and added a filter over the whole thing before sending it to the film company. Unbelievable.

I agree. It looks like they did an amazing job with the remaster, only to ruin it all in the final stage with DNR. The behind-the-scenes featurette on the German disc shows them restoring it, and it is clearly visible at one point that they have DNR selected on their computer software - you can see their monitors with DNR selected. Usually you don't actually see evidence of them applying it like this.