North by Northwest (1959) 4K UHD Review: Essential Upgrade Compromised by Warner's Gonna Warner

#northbynorthwest #alfredhitchcock #warnerbros #4k #physicalmedia

I review the Warner 4K UHD release of the landmark masterpiece North by Northwest. This is the product of a brand new Warner Brothers high resolution costly restoration from a scan of the original camera negatives. As a result the new source master is a lightning leap forward in visual quality and improvements in color timing.

However, this is severely negated by typical examples of the ignorance of the Warner studio division’s handling of film transfers. This is what I typically refer to as “Warner’s Gonna Warner”.
The new UHD is still essential for the picture quality improvements, but you will have to live with: compromised lesser encoding resulting in a lower bit rate for the feature than it deserves, frozen grain artifacts as a product of overzealous grain management, overbright HDR 10 without nuance, an unnecessary Atmos remix of the bad 5.1 remix with new sound effects…and while this is the first release since 1996 to have the original mono mix-it is overprocessed and unrestored with some defects. It is actually worse than the original analog era mastering from 1983! The VHS hi-fi mono from 1983 remains the finest sounding presentation of one of Alfred Hitchcock’s greatest films.

Why anyone at Warner thought these were good or acceptable ideas after spending millions on a brand new restoration to address all the various problems and errors of past restorations and video masters is beyond me.

00:00 Intro Goof
06:54 Introduction
09:55 Transfer Discussion and Picture Quality: Giant improvements with MAJOR AVOIDABLE drawbacks
14:33 HDR10 presentation has major issues with pop out highlights
18:27 Typical Warner Bad Encoding and Lower Bitrate
20:52 The biggest problem: Frozen Grain Halos and overzealous Grain Management UNACCEPTABLE!
25:29 The BIZARRE smeary processed appearance of the the forest sequence
28:05 Audio Quality: Bad Remix of a Remix and Compromised Mono audio
28:25 Dolby Atmos laughably bad remix based on previous bad 5.1 remix
33:02 Thank goodness there is finally a version of the mono mix back but it's been managed and isn't restored!
35:36 The best original audio IS ON THE ORIGINAL MGM 1983 VHS RELEASE
FROM THE SAME AUDIO SOURCE WITHOUT THE DEFECTS OF THE UHD MONO TRACK!!!
40:42 Potential but unlikely possibility of a Perspecta Stereo mix
42:51 Packaging and Artwork: UK LE boxset, US Steelbook and Standard releases
49:52 This is UHD only with NO Blu-ray copy of new master.
50:20 Bundled Digital Copy is in Dolby Vision, UHD is HDR10!! Typical Warner Backwards Logic.
51:42 Supplemental Features
01:01:10 The two dropped MAJOR supplements
01:02:53 The overall disappointment with the supplemental section
01:04:44 Final Summary-Essential upgrade but deeply flawed release entirely due to Warner.
"Think Archivally" write that down Warner!