Eureka’s BD of The Hands of Orlac (Orlacs Hände, 1924) has one of the most aggressive and inept restorations I’ve seen. Nearly every shot has restoration artifacts.
Be sure to click on the GIFs to see them full size.
Interpolation
The first and last frames of most shots are interpolated. Sometimes it looks like a duplicate pulldown frame. Other times, it introduces some serious distortions. Nearly every example in this section has frames that are completely computer-generated. Faked.
Conrad Veidt’s head stretches, Alexandra Sorina’s fingers split, grain and background warp, plus frozen temporal cloning at the top edge:
The pen is broken up and the rest of the frame is nearly frozen:
Stuck grain and warping throughout:
Hideous computer-generated teeth:
Not a freeze-frame, but interpolation:
Interpolation makes scratches stick to the image:
Here, interpolation is combined with spot removal. At first glance, it’s impressive. Look closer, and you can see that it leaves smudges in place of damage AND it leaves remnants behind:
Notice how the sheets of paper distort:
Here it’s combined with frame blending and frozen temporal cloning:
Interpolation utterly fails when it’s called upon to generate background, such as behind Veidt’s head. And check out his smashed head and hand:
Veidt’s hand becomes putty and merges with the sleeve. The sofa pulsates:
You can see magnetic scratches on the wall behind the now-breathing sofa:
I admit that it’s not always immediately apparent recognizing restoration artifacts on a small screen, but look how obvious it is here when displayed at a fraction of its full size! The man gets smashed. And that background…
Interpolation is combined with temporal cloning on the ceiling lamp and chairs on the left. They now bob up and down:
His body compresses and arm stretches, creating a second wrist. Yikes!
Veidt’s head smashes into an invisible curved ceiling:
Our villain’s fingertips disappear. The disembodied hand on the left is completely frozen:
Interpolation destroys the head:
An example of interpolation that is nearly a freeze-frame, plus some negligible spot removal:
The foot disappears:
Rotoscoping
Rotoscoping as used here can be thought of as the inverse of frozen temporal cloning. With frozen cloning, a relatively small spot freezes while the rest of the picture continues to move. On the other hand, a rotoscoped repair freezes the entire image, except for a small bit of motion.
Here, only the doors move. Everything else is frozen. Well, except for that one weird spot in the corner. You can also begin to see the unstable grading (more on that later):
Only Conrad Veidt moves, plus a few random spots:
I don’t understand why the technician retained the black spot near the center. Is it fully explained by lazy, sloppy masking? It doesn’t even match:
Frozen Temporal Cloning
I’ll leave it to you to find the frozen cloning in the below examples. Some are obvious, like the first example. Others have a frozen splotch on the background. Still others are utterly baffling, freezing everything, including the most important parts of the image, except for a few random spots. Cloning is often misaligned and applied with no attempt to match the new frame. Watching this restoration is to be subjected to a non-stop torrent of frozen cloning throughout the entire movie.
Screen Tearing
Screen tearing is a specific form of temporal cloning that shows up in restoration after restoration. At some point during the proliferation of digital restoration, the powers that be decided that visible cement splices are bad and needed to be removed, in spite of the fact that they were often visible, if you ever cared to look. Here in Los Angeles, I go to lots of screenings of 35mm prints, and it’s not unusual to see cement splices projected onto the screen masking. That’s how film is, and I’ve never heard of someone complaining about visible cement splices. Removing them erases part of the nature of film. It’s not restoration, but enhancement (and often, defacement).
So, to erase these splices, technicians often use temporal cloning, usually of the frozen or interpolated kind. It’s frequently misaligned and doesn’t match at all. The end result is screen tearing, as you’ll see in PC and video games. Screen tearing is so undesirable and irritating in gaming that v-sync is one of the most common settings in config menus.
Screen tearing is not better than cement splices.
Grading
Instead of a shot-by-shot grading, it looks like an automatic filter was applied. Many shots gradually and predictably brighten and darken, much like the auto-picture function found on many TVs. You can begin to see it in the example below in how the blacks turn gray, combined with some kind of cloning:
The colorist did not disable the dodge-and-burn layer on the black frame (Let’s ignore that giving old movies modern color grading distorts the original photography):
More Terrible Repairs
One of the worst repairs. Look how a shadow precedes the doctor before the splice:
Video Samples
You should be able to notice a lot of restoration artifacts on your own now. I’m not going to point out every instance of shoddy work in this section. The following are video samples, corrected to 60fps, allowing you to see how bad these repairs are when running at full speed. Use the playback controls to slow down to .25x for a closer look.
Lots of errors, but notice the weird magnetic and dissolving grain and scratches:
Frozen cloning at the end of the baton:
What’s with the weird dissolving leopard spots?
Grain and damage are magnetic and frozen to every surface:
This reel end got the works and it looks worse than it possibly could have been. Horrible:
A cloned scratch in the center of the frame persists for nearly two seconds:
Degrained and interpolated to death:
Lots of persistent frozen-cloned scratches above Veidt’s head:
More dissolving grain and damage:
A horrible restoration. The new score by Johannes Kalitzke also stinks. The only positive aspect of Eureka’s release is that it includes Kino’s DVD version. I spot-checked it, and it looks like a much better presentation, and with better music. Weirdly, even though it’s 480i, it’s 14.5GB, twice the size of a dual-layer DVD. I wonder what Eureka used as a source. If they merely re-encoded the DVD, then I’d recommend getting Kino’s disc instead.
The Hands of Orlac is transferred at 22fps and encoded at 24fps. Extremely stuttery.