Broken frame rate

Criterion transferred The Unknown at a little under 23fps and encoded at 1080i. The motion should be perfect, right? Wrong! Somebody messed up and used a 24fps timeline, then exported at 1080i60. Notice how the motion stutters in the top sample below. The whole reason to use 1080i is to prevent that!

After deinterlacing, we can easily see the uneven, broken pulldown, worse than most silents authored at 24fps. Below screenshot is of a tool I wrote to help delete duplicated frames. What you see on the right is a long list of frame numbers. All frames highlighted in red are duplicates and can be safely deleted.

Encoding silents to 1080i60 applies its own unusual pulldown. So, the result of working in 24fps and exporting at 1080i60 is that two different pulldown patterns compounded to create terrible stuttering.

Poor retouching

Frozen cloning doesn’t match:

Interpolation

A flurry of interpolation right from the start. MGM surely didn’t film their logo anew for every movie. The people at George Eastman Museum couldn’t have lifted an intact one from some other film?

Interpolated spot repair:

Frozen cloning

The frozen bottom is easy to see, but check out the frozen face on the left sailor:

Splotchy:

Splotchy, streaking frozen cloning plus interpolated spot repair:

Misaligned. Misaligned ON A GRID PATTERN:

Microloops

Microloops combined with spot repair. In this example, even though three frames separate the repeated frame, it’s not enough to break persistence of vision. If viewed as frozen cloning, it doesn’t match well, either. This technique can only work if the distance is far enough, there is no distinctive damage, AND the subject is motionless (which people are not):

Mismatched sources

Eastman reconstructed the film from two prints. However, they don’t match. Not in the sense that the two prints look different, which is to be expected, but, and I’m guessing here, that they were not scanned in the same way.

As this editing error makes clear, in which we see the same frame repeated in each print, the difference is obvious. The sources look similar in quality, but one frame has crisp grain and nice contrast, while the other is blurry and gray, as if each print was scanned with different settings or different scanners.

The Unknown was reconstructed and processed by George Eastman Museum.