Man Who Knew Too Much has problems with color (generally unbalanced and too much), density, contrast, digital enhancement and missing printer functions.
Beyond that, and here's the great quotable part...
"The Man Who Knew Too Much is about as perfect a disc as is humanly attainable."
On one side, there are the professionals like Warner Bros. (George Feltenstein: Thank you so much for the recent wonderful releases!) and Criterion - on the other side are the dilettantic loosers, totally out of touch with their customer base. I don't want to be the judge on what side Universal is, but I do know that they continue to do a very bad job with their classic releases. There is only one way to satisfy the customer - paying a lot of hard-earned money for the DVDs: Creating new high-definition transfers and encode them professionally for DVD release.
I repeat my comments on this box set from another thread: Except for "Saboteur" and "The Trouble With Harry", I doubt that there is any new high definition telecine / film to video transfer involved. All titles seem to derive from the old masters, just with some "digital enhancements" made, like adding brightness and artificially sharpening the picture, along with more efficient encoding and some digital cleanup. This results only in part in visually "improved" DVDs, but certainly is far from the quality that could have been achieved by making real high-definition transfers from the original camera negatives.
By no means even close to Warner standard!
Excessive use of a noise filter in combination with artificially adding sharpness often results in visible edge enhancments, halos, jitter and aliasing effects. Best visible in "The Man Who Knew Too Much". A totally faulty transfer, partly unwatchable, where the edge enhancement sometimes makes the picture jitter so much that it almost seems to "move" vertically.
Vertigo anamorphic with improved picture quality and the "original" monaural soundtrack. A plus.
Psycho anamorphic, but - in my opinion- looking worse than the original release. Don't get me wrong: I love to see film grain and hate plain filtered transfers, but this is not FINE grain, it is "macro grain" of a standard definition master digitally framed for anamorphic encoding. Nothing else. Disappointing.
I'm a little confused about 'The Man Who Knew Too Much.'
I thought that this title was restored. Why wasn't the restored print used for the dvd? Or am I totally lost and the film elements are in really bad shape.
A fifth or sixth generation audio (which sounds quite good considering) derived from parts of different 35mm prints, with a high end that makes certain instruments in the orchestra disappear. Dirt abounds, as does wow and flutter in some areas of the music.
It is, however, the only extant version which comes close to being an example of what the film might have sounded like if the original track elements had not been ordered junked.
As such it serves as reasonable reference.
Except for the effects on the new track, which are a bit heavy, especially in areas where there were none, I still prefer the new stereo mix for the music.
I kind of thought you would say that, I agree with you about the 5.1 track with the caveat that I have not actually heard the mono track yet. But I have always claimed that the 5.1 track doesn't bother me as much as it does others....well now we all have a choice.
Robert, first of all, many thanks and appreciation for your restoration work on the film elements of Vertigo, my all-time favourite!
My "test equipment": Panasonic 50" HD-Plasma screen fed by a Denon A1XV (5910) via HDMI scaled to 1080i.
Well, I don't sit in front of the screen with an oscilloscope, checking every bit of data for errors... I just use my eyes and I can see that there is hardly any difference or improvement to the "old" R1 DVDs. I noticed some digital cleanup, e.g. on "Torn Curtain" (check the arrival scene at East-Berlin airport, where the print had a lot of scratches and defects) and some digital increase in contrast and brightness. The digitally enhanced "sharpness" is nothing else but edge enhancement with all negative "side-effects" visible. I think the times are over to sell "digitally remastered" DVDs and create the illusion of HD transfers just by excessivly using edge-enhancement.
I am not the kind of picky person complaining about minor flaws in transfers like the beautifully created new "Ben Hur" transfer by Warner. I also know that investing several millions of dollars can make the best transfer look even better... But the least I expect is the creation of new HD transfers on a "state-of-the-art" telecine like e.g. the "Spirit Datacine".
Even with little experience, I believe, one can differenciate, whether the DVD was created from an analogue, early digital (LD) or HD master.
It is a shame to see that, e.g., Sony/Columbia's B-Western "Bonanza Town" (1951) with Charles Starrett and Smiley Burnette got a wonderful HD-based transfer with fine grain and high density and Hitchcock's Masterpiece "Psycho" a second-class recycled SD transfer.
Check the following scenes of "The Man Who Knew Too Much": Beginning of chapters 4, 8, 9, 12. The edge-enhancement totally disturbs the picture. Almost hurting the eyes...
In general, I didn't say the transfers are BAD, but they are not up to today's standards and expectations. They are a vast improvement to the R2 releases for sure and perhaps a minor improvement to the previous R1 DVDs. Did you know that Universal released "The Birds" in Europe as a Pan/Scan transfer, where they panned and scanned within the already matted 35 mm frame? I think there is only one major studio capable of such cruelties....
The executives at Universal ought to know for sure now, that we, their customers, are NOT SATISFIED anymore with "half-hearted" recycled transfers. Period!
No. This is something which is still not generally accepted as fact. Reading (if memory serves) the London Times review re: the Psycho opening, may bring this into better focus.
I'm confused. Just how does "dirt abound" in a soundtrack? Can you hear "dirt" within an audio track? Or is this a hi-tech audiophile term I'm not familiar with? Just curious.