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Demo Scenes: Avengers: Endgame

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Avengers: Endgame

demo scenes | Avengers: Endgame

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The film’s finale isn’t just a great action scene but a demo-worthy showcase of the benefits of HDR

by Dennis Burger
August 2, 2019

“Avengers Assemble”
(Chapter 16 | 2:16:02–2:19:42)

Martin Mull (or maybe it was Frank Zappa?) once opined that talking about music is like dancing about architecture. Trying to convey the benefits of high dynamic range video can feel a little like that, given that most web browsers don’t support HDR by default, and still images just can’t do it justice. So those of us who champion this video innovation in written form are often reduced to hyperbolic-sounding statements that still don’t effectively get the point across. It’s brighter! It’s darker! It’s billions of colors! 

Want to see for yourself the difference HDR can truly make? Fire up your Kaleidescape, download the 4K HDR version of Avengers: Endgame, and cue up the climactic moments of the big final battle when (spoiler alert, in case it wasn’t already obvious) the heroes who fell in Infinity War return from non-existence and are magically teleported by Doctor Strange onto the battlefield alongside Captain America, Thor, and Iron Man. On Kaleidescape, it’s the scene named “Avengers Assemble,” for obvious reasons. If you’re watching via some other platform, you can skip to the timestamp listed above.

But don’t press that Play button just yet. Before you watch the scene in 4K HDR, check out the same sequence in the HD version. It’s epic, to be sure, even in Blu-ray quality. The battlefield feels immense. The shadows that hang over the sundered pile of rubble where Avengers HQ once stood are deep and inky. The layer of grime and streaks of blood marring Cap’s face are tangible and perfectly textured. Once you’ve soaked in all of that and gotten a good reminder of what state-of-the-art home video looked like barely more than three years ago, switch over to the 4K HDR version and prepare to have your hair blown back. 

There isn’t much of a difference in terms of resolution, given that Endgame was sourced from a 2K digital intermediate. And yet, the enhanced contrast HDR brings with it makes every shot feel crisper, more detailed, dimensional, and lifelike. (That is, as lifelike as a scene can look when it involves a bunch of grown folks running around in armored pajamas fighting a big purple space fascist.)

This isn’t just an academic study in video specs, though. What makes the HDR presentation of Endgame work so well—in this scene, in particular—is that it genuinely enhances the passion and poignancy of these moments. The portals Doctor Strange opens aren’t merely razzle-dazzle circles floating in the darkness, as they are in high-definition and standard dynamic range—they’re blinding rips in the spacetime continuum. The sun hanging over the horizon isn’t simply a yellow-white spot on your screen—it’s a stunning light source that pierces the darkness of the battlefield, and indeed of your room. 

These brilliant spots of light dancing through the darkness actually have a physiological effect, dilating your pupils a bit and tickling your wince reflex—though not pushing it to the point of discomfort. And given that you’re genuinely, physically engaged with the imagery, you can’t help but be drawn more deeply into it. You’re not merely a passive observer of this shield-throwing, lightning-calling, web-spinning battle for the fate of the universe—you’re more invested in the action because all of those photons pouring off of your screen literally invoke an involuntary biological response, yanking you into the heightened reality of it all. At that point, you’re not just watching a movie, you’re having an experience—one that simply wouldn’t be possible without HDR.

Dennis Burger is an avid Star Wars scholar, Tolkien fanatic, and Corvette enthusiast who somehow also manages to find time for technological passions including high-end audio, home automation, and video gaming. He lives in the armpit of Alabama with his wife Bethany and their four-legged child Bruno, a 75-pound American Staffordshire Terrier who thinks he’s a Pomeranian.

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The Strange Journey of Tom Waits

The Strange Journey of Tom Waits

The Strange Journey of Tom Waits

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A casual encounter with an early Waits album leads to a radical reevaluation of the arc of his career

by Michael Gaughn
August 29, 2020

Last Sunday evening, I had a chance to do something I hardly ever get to do—devote all my attention to listening to some music. After uncorking a Portuguese red I’d never tried before and flicking on a single, small incandescent lamp, I unsheathed and cued up Side One of Tom Waits’ Nighthawks at the Diner. 

The whole exercise felt a bit like a ritual, and I guess you could consider it the musical equivalent of comfort viewing—going to one of the very few things that has always made me feel grounded to reaffirm its ability to ring true no matter how much the world has changed around it. 

A 1975 Bones Howe-produced two-LP set recorded in front of a live audience at LA’s Record Plant, Nighthawks is Waits in full hipster mode, from the period when he was using his faux Kerouac routine to disarm audiences while going up hard against the pop-music mainstream. You were far more likely to know him at the time for Rusty Warren-type retreads like “The Piano Has Been Drinking” and “Pasties and a G String” as the epic “Tom Traubert’s Blues.”

The first cut, “Emotional Weather Report,” is an extended monologue-quasi-song with Waits resorting to every corny Vegas-comic gag to ingratiate himself, winking so hard the whole time that you can’t help but grin. “I’ve been playing nightclubs and staying out all night long, coming home late—gone for three months, come back and everything in the refrigerator turns into a science project.” “I’m so goddamned horny the crack of dawn better be careful around me.”

But parts of the song that had just struck me as laugh lines before—“with tornado watches issued Sunday for the areas including the western region of my mental health, and the northern portion of my ability to deal rationally with my disconcerted emotional situation—it’s cold out there”—felt strangely bittersweet, veering toward wrenching, this time around. 

Then, as Nighthawks slipped into “On a Foggy Night,” I had a kind of epiphany. It’s common knowledge Waits went through one of the most radical transformations in pop-music history, but it didn’t hit me until then that it was far more a maturation than any kind of rebranding. Once you go beneath the jokey surfaces, there’s actually an amazingly consistent through-line to his work. Songs like Nighthawks’ “Better Off Without a Wife” and 2002’s “All the World is Green” might seem to exist in completely different worlds, but just shift the emphasis a little here and there and the actual distance between them is so slight it’s barely there at all.

A lot of the stuff on Waits’ initial albums might seem gaggy and trite, but view it through the lens of everything he’s done since Swordfishtrombones and you realize how fundamentally poignant those early efforts are. They don’t have the rigor, incisive, often bitter, irony, or unflinching moral probity of his later work, but they aren’t just the throwaway ditties of some one-trick booze-addled clown. 

Then, around the time of “Warm Beer and Cold Women,” I was graced with another seeming insight—that not just his later efforts but the whole of Waits’ work stands at the pinnacle of the American songwriting tradition. Realizing how much Nighthawks honors and feeds from everything that preceded it, in a way then-popular stadium rock never could, made me realize how early on he blew past his contemporaries. 

Most pop performers write songs, but they’re not songwriters. Never having fully immersed themselves in either the history or the craft, instead donning and shedding styles the way they’d try on designer Ts, they not only don’t have a good grasp of the basic mechanics but lack the reverence and awe that would inspire them to match or exceed the best efforts to date. But it’s clear in retrospect that Waits is, and always was, a master, able to pluck the most vital, fertile, and redolent elements out of the musical stream until he was eventually creating songs where every turn of phrase was a perfect evocation of a different aspect of the American tradition, pivoting seamlessly from, say, Hoagy Carmichael to the Delta blues to Kurt Weill to Big Mama Thornton to Stephen Foster to early Satchmo to Tin Pan Alley to a Salvation Army band without ever using any of it as a crutch, and making it all feel whole.

I’m not saying Waits stands alone above his peers and their successors. Randy Newman occupies similar ground. Both used novelty songs early on to win over audiences, lacing them with just enough irony to let the intelligentsia know they were fashionably cynical, but both have gone far deeper than their contemporaries, showing a decidedly unfashionable vulnerability and sentimentality that actually lifts their work to a whole other level.

Newman, of course, is pared down, almost diffident compared to Waits’ flamboyance and radical experimentation. But each is a fully formed songsmith and not the usual mercenary faddist. And, far too honest in their work, neither would stand a chance if they were starting their careers during these far more intolerant and censorious times. 

None of the above is meant to suggest that I drifted from listening to Nighthawks into some kind of brooding meditation. Whatever thoughts I had came unbidden, and flickered just long enough to jot them down here. Maybe they were just a product of my mood or a reaction to listening to early Waits against the backdrop of the strangely trivial and parlous present. Or maybe it was just the wine.

Michael Gaughn—The Absolute Sound, The Perfect Vision, Wideband, Stereo Review, Sound & Vision, The Rayva Roundtablemarketing, product design, some theater designs, a couple TV shows, some commercials, and now this.

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