For part 1, click here.

Disc 2 is a lot better, but not without errors.

Hypocrites

Sunshine Molly

Too Wise Wives

Disc 3

The Purple Mask, Ep. 5

The Purple Mask, Ep. 12

Titles have microloops:

Terrible screen tearing:

The music by Rob Gal doesn’t really fit. It’s best to mute the TV.

A Daughter of “The Law”

New tinting error. Entire shot should be grayscale:

Pretty much every film is encoded at 24fps and has a stuttery pulldown. The video of this film is one of the more egregious:

’49-’17

Automated spot removal takes out bits of furniture and entire birds, leaving outlined smears:

Dude, Kino… This deserved a free do-over at the lab:

Mabel Lost and Won

Transferred at 20fps but encoded at 24fps, the source print has some step-printing, causing additional stutter.

“Ethnographic Films”

The first of three terrible scores by Renée Clark Baker and the Chicago Modern Orchestra Project. More on these people later.

Disc 4

Where Are My Children

Encoding errors.

Automated spot removal removes elements at windshield:

Her Defiance

Titles have microloops.

The Curse of Qwon Guong

Yeah, the shot is scratched to hell, but motion blur was added on top:

The Dream Lady

New, smaller, video titles, but the editor forgot to disable the track underneath:

Something New

Renée Clark Baker and the Chicago Modern Orchestra Project provided a terrible, completely inappropriate score that has no relation to the picture:

Disc 5

Bread

Editing Error:

Salome

Nearly every shot in the five minutes leading into Salome’s dance has ugly processing. Such a shame. I was looking forward to this movie the most, but it ended up being another hack job from Lobster.

Dislocating eye:

Frozen cloning:

Frozen cloning that doesn’t match at all:

Prolonged frozen cloning:

Frozen cloning combined with broken dirt removal:

I probably would have written off the automated dirt removal as source damage, had not the cloned sections provided literal before-and-after examples. The artifacting is obvious when seen full size:

Misaligned repair combined with broken spot removal:

Blunt retouching lacking in skill:

Outside of this portion, Salome otherwise looked very good. I wish Lobster would stop trying to “restore” things. They’re terrible at it.

The Red Kimona

No teeth due to automated spot removal:

Editing error:

Linda

Poor Linda. It got assaulted by another score from Renée Clark Baker and the Chicago Modern Orchestra Project.

It’s a lovely movie, but when it was over, my parents, who generally are not the kind of people to be terribly critical on works of art, simultaneously complained about the music. Condemned it.

Disc 6

Broadway Love

Destructive automatic spot removal. In motion, it often looks like bad encoding.

Back to God’s Country

Editing errors:

Extremely uneven pulldown at edit points. Many frames are held for the duration of three frames.

Much of Dana Reason’s score works (even though it often doesn’t match), but sometimes she adds broken operatic techno crap. This sample is from the end credits, but this same jarring bit of music happens during the feature:

The Song of Love

Editing error:

Interpolation:

Mismatched interpolated cloning:

There’s so much nitrate damage. What is the point of these puny repairs? Even at a glance, it doesn’t look “restored.”

CONCLUSION

There are more than 50 movies in the set. I called out about 30 here. Many flaws I pointed out are minor. Of these, there are only a few that I’d recommend you skip. I recognize that a fair bit is out of Kino’s hands, but many of these flaws are from their careless and heavy hands – a waste of time and resources. I don’t want to discourage you from buying or watching (many of the films are wonderful), but, whatever you do, mute the music from Renée Clark Baker and Rob Gal.