Oh, it's quite good, and the best version of the movie out there. It's just disappointing that Warner Bros. didn't give a classic like this that last bit of TLC to make it as good as it could possibly be.
can someone elaborate on why they would opt to master it like this ? is it an economic choice? If it is cheaper to do it this way I can understsand it. Not agree with it mind you just understand it.
In my opinion what Warner did wrong was not to release a new blu-ray from this master.
As Stephen pointed out in his typically thorough review in The Digital Bits: "Of course, the raw bitrate isn’t necessarily as important as is how well that that the compression was handled, but in this case, there are definitely some deficiencies in that regard. In the medium to long shots of Wheeler’s shirt, the textures are nicely defined when everything is static, but they can break up and smear when in motion. The grain is occasionally affected by the compression as well. As always, it’s worth remembering that most of these kinds of artifacts are only visible when viewed from up close on a larger screen, so they won’t be noticeable from normal viewing distances. Still, it’s disappointing that Warner Bros. wouldn’t pull out all the stops to ensure that Rio Bravo looks its best regardless of circumstances. Given the fact that the only extra on the disc is a commentary track, space shouldn’t have been a consideration."
I don't have 4K but would have bought it had a Blu-ray been included from the new master.
Frankly, I don’t think the studios cater to those that have projectors because they feel most of their consumers have displays that are 65” or less.
At the time i made that post amazon had raised the price from 29.99 up to 37.50, which is close in price to the 4k i just preordered of arrow's limited deluxe 4k of witness. They have now dropped rio bravo back down to 29.99. This is still too much for pretty much a bare bones 4k disc. I already own the blu ray of rio bravo so i will wait until they drop the price of the 4k to between 20 and 22 dollars before I purchase it. That is the current price for their 4k's of the maltese falcon and cool hand luke.
The “Maltese” Falcon.
It’s neither market nor manufacturing. It’s what’s called for by the film. In this case the film is soft by design.
Did you mean soft by design?
If manufacturing cost and availability were not a concern, would there be any downside to putting every UHD release on a BD-100 with a maxed out bitrate?
I did.
Why produce 33, 66 and 100?
Again, it looks very good as is. The encode still isn't as good as it could be, and there are artifacts as a result of that. Minor ones, that most people won't notice, but they're present. It's still a great disc, just not quite as great as it could have been. There's nuance here.
Looks like mastering a Dolby Vision triple-layer BD-100 is more labour-intensive:
tvtropes.org
