A/V Nerds: "The Matrix" on 4k UHD Blu-Ray

I recently completed my home 7.1.4 speaker setup and have been really enjoying digging into high-end Dolby Atmos and Dolby Vision material. Playing around with nip23 long-form content to share this kind of niche nerd stuff that doesn’t quite make sense as a regular nostr note.

tldr: This is the best The Matrix has ever looked or sounded. Find someone with a Dolby Vision-capable 4k blu-ray player (not as easy as you might think) and go watch it. Now. And, no, streaming doesn’t cut it.

See Blu-ray.com’s Matrix 4k review. Their reviews get pretty deep into the videophile / audiophile nerdosity.

The movie

Holds up amazingly well for being almost 25 years old. Bitcoiners have obsessed about the red (er, orange) pill meme for good reason.

The Matrix was astonishingly ahead of its time in 1999 and still feels futuristic. When old tech is onscreen (green CRTs were old even in 1999; old tube TV; rotary land line phones) it’s now even clearer that it was a stylistic choice; The Matrix’s simulation has frozen our progress in the past. I think phone booths still existed in 1999, but now they, along with the movie’s still-pretty-cool flip phones, read as just part of that time capsule effect.

Video

(aka why Dolby Vision is amazing) My older 4k blu-ray player started playing the disc in HDR10 (the baseline high dynamic range format). It looked good but there were all sorts of obvious flaws (primarily shadows being crushed to black). My screen wasn’t calibrated (contrast/brightness/color/etc tweaks) in its HDR10 mode. Ug, calibration for videophiles is such an OCD rabbithole.

But what happened to the disc’s Dolby Vision output? (Omitting longer story here. Deeper nerding happened)

Ah, now we’ve got Dolby Vision output!

And holy shit. It’s incredible. Shadows are now perfect. The pervasive computer green is SO richly green (thank you, high dynamic range color)! Yet human-toned reds (pink cheeks, red lips) still pop through.

The Matrix was shot on film so it doesn’t have the shot-on-digital, low-grain look of a modern movie, but the natural film grain looks great. The only glaringly bad effects shot was the physical prosthetic used when Neo’s mouth is sealed (the skin tone coloring just does not match).

For a sci-fi film shot in 1999, The Matrix’s Dolby Vision presentation has NO flaws and far exceeds expectations.

Audio

The Dolby Atmos mix has some nice gee-whiz 3d audio effects (e.g. the bullet-time shots w/sounds tracking around the room as the camera orbits Neo) but I kind of discount big loud action movies; yeah, of course shit’s blowing up all around you. The real win for Dolby Atmos is when it ISN’T explicitly grabbing your attention. The overall fullness and envelopment of the music and ambient sounds (the whole point of Atmos is that it adds ceiling speakers) is what people should really appreciate.

One critique: the source material does show its age a bit. At max orchestral and sound effects intensity, the limits of the original recordings are somewhat revealed. Really great recordings have a certain liveliness to their dynamic range; your ear is constantly intrigued and excited by certain resonances or richness or suddenness (e.g. the attack of a bow on a violin). Lower dynamic range audio is like being stuck in a tunnel. The liveliness is muted and as a whole the crescendos become more like a wall of noise rather than a collection of widely varied sounds.

Minor limitation and totally expected. The only real technical nitpick for this disc.