Warner Archive is still the only operation consistently doing this for black and white catalogue, and hardly anyone outside these threads talks about it. The latest is a remastered Blu-ray of The Bad Seed, Mervyn LeRoy's 1956 psychological thriller, and it lands the same week as a stack of announcements about which new release gets a 4K disc. Guess which one will still be worth owning in fifteen years.
My gripe is not with the discs, it is with how they get announced. "Newly remastered" is the entire technical description most of these arrive with. No word on whether it is a fresh scan or a cleanup of an existing master, nothing on which elements they went back to, no indication of the encode. For monochrome that matters more than it does for colour, because grain structure and black level are basically the whole picture, and a heavy-handed pass flattens a film like that into something that looks like it was shot yesterday on a phone. We end up waiting for the first person here to post screengrabs before anyone knows what they bought.
LeRoy is worth the attention regardless. He and Curtiz were the two directors at Warner in the thirties who could deliver on schedule without the result looking cheap, and he has never had the reputation that record deserves.
I have not seen the disc, so this is not a verdict on the transfer. It is a complaint about the information vacuum every one of these releases ships inside.
Has anyone got it yet? Specifically, how does the grain hold up in the darker interiors?
My gripe is not with the discs, it is with how they get announced. "Newly remastered" is the entire technical description most of these arrive with. No word on whether it is a fresh scan or a cleanup of an existing master, nothing on which elements they went back to, no indication of the encode. For monochrome that matters more than it does for colour, because grain structure and black level are basically the whole picture, and a heavy-handed pass flattens a film like that into something that looks like it was shot yesterday on a phone. We end up waiting for the first person here to post screengrabs before anyone knows what they bought.
LeRoy is worth the attention regardless. He and Curtiz were the two directors at Warner in the thirties who could deliver on schedule without the result looking cheap, and he has never had the reputation that record deserves.
I have not seen the disc, so this is not a verdict on the transfer. It is a complaint about the information vacuum every one of these releases ships inside.
Has anyone got it yet? Specifically, how does the grain hold up in the darker interiors?
