Natural grain. No unnecessary processing, no artifacting. Occasional hard subs are lamentable, but looks great overall. From the Cinémathèque de Toulouse.
Strike runs at 19fps and is encoded at 24fps. New English video intertitles.
Two main issues: broken pulldown and microloops. The source print is step-printed and the video was stretched further for the BD, resulting in a very clumpy pulldown. You can see the strobing at the climax is completely broken.
The elements are there for a good presentation. Nice scan, nice encoding, no artifacting, but the technicians didn’t make the effort to fix the pulldown, even taking into consideration that they stretched to 24fps.
Microloops at
The source looks like a circulating repertory print with characteristic dirt buildup. I’m puzzled why Flicker Alley didn’t physically clean it before scanning.
Storm Over Asia runs at 6-24fps and is encoded at 24fps. The included Chess Fever is upscaled.
Restored to death by The Chimney Pot. No grain, but a layer of dissolving fine noise on top instead. An overall smeary look. Not worth watching.
The restoration isn’t heavily scrubbed, but the beginning has a flurry of interpolated repairs. You can see the picture slightly freeze in this brief clip (slow playback to .25x and it becomes obvious):
Interestingly, while the above splice got a sloppy repair, lots of messy original splices later in the movie were allowed to remain.
Slowpoke Pics currently has a comparison of all three UHDs of Seven Samurai (1954). The very first screencap, of the BFI disc, shows sloppy retouching:
(Full image here.)
The Toho UHD looks the same, but with different grading, cropping, and filtering. The Criterion UHD doesn’t have these smeary spots, but I don’t know how it looks in motion.
