I didn’t notice any restoration artifacting. It looks like it didn’t have any restoration processing, which is good! There is wear throughout, but it’s not an issue. Everything looks natural. Video encoding is very nice. Transferred and encoded at 24fps, so motion is perfect. A wonderful as-is presentation.
Watch the spot remover make the plane disappear. IN THE VERY FIRST SHOT.
The damage done, let’s look closer at the retouching:
Watch pieces and small details of the plane disappear:
Disappearing porthole:
Disappearing wall fixture:
Disappearing wall decor on upper right:
By far, the worst repair is freeze-framing the ends of shots. It’s hard to watch when the video keeps freezing. I consider it unwatchable. The bulk of it occurs during the first half, but never completely goes away. Check out the lousy spot removal here, too.
Interpolation here is often combined with spot repair. It’s not the worst, but grain still freezes, dissolves, becomes magnetic; damage sticks to surfaces, and there’s ghosting. Click to see them full screen.
Maybe you think the previous three don’t look visible in motion:
But notice how parts of the picture slow down, as if they got stuck in the mud. Without knowing anything, it’s easy to dismiss it as poor encoding or a streaming hiccup. However, these are intentionally introduced errors.
There’s some microlooping, but surprisingly sparsely used.
Additionally, the subtitles have major timing issues.
The English version looks much better, even though it suffers from aggressive spot removal, some dodgy stabilization, and wobbly masking. However, there wasn’t anything that made me turn off the movie or pause it to take notes.
I finally found a better term for quick-reversing. While sometimes the video reverses only one frame, most of the time, I see tiny loops that are two frames long or thereabouts. “Microloop” fits this perfectly and is much easier to say.
The English version of The Blue Angel (1930) looks wonderful and far better than the German version. It has natural looking grain and no restoration processing artifacts—a benefit of being the neglected version.
Grain on the German version looks blurry. Look closely at the second duck and you can see restoration artifacting.
However, the biggest problem with the German version is that the technicians tried to remove every cement splice, creating lots of interpolated and frozen errors. These are just two random ones I found. Pretty much every splice is like these:
Splices are visible in the English version, but they don’t detract at all.
Extras are all SD, and the ones from archival video sources are converted to 24fps instead of left at 50i/60i. Blech.
I’m surprised the English version is so ignored. Most of the movie is still in German and tacks closely to the German version. It works really well. Why read a movie when you don’t have to? English speakers should default to the English version, especially given the superior presentation.
L’Immagine Ritrovata did this restoration of The Kid Brother (1927). Compared to some of their other work, they used a light touch this time. However, they used interpolation, and I consider even a single instance too much. On the whole, though, it looks ok, if suspiciously clean.
Interpolation at the bottom:
Fully faked frame. It’s easy to tell which one by how ragged it looks:
Interpolation is subtle here, but view this full size, and you can see how it destroys vertical lines and fine fabric patterns:
On the other hand, the shorts have fantastic presentations. Looks like basic transfers, tasteful stabilization, with no obvious processing artifacts. Best of all, they’re encoded at 1080i to accommodate the slower frame rate, meaning the motion is perfect!
(Downscaling does no favors for interlacing. Expand the following clips to full screen, and they’ll look much better. TVs display interlacing just fine.)
The Kid Brother is transferred at 24fps. Gaylord Carter’s organ score is wonderful, as are many of the supplements. Skip the uninformative commentary, unless you like listening to people describe what’s happening on screen. I still prefer seeing one of UCLA’s 35mm prints.