Author Archives: Nick

Pioneers: First Women Filmmakers (Part 2)

For part 1, click here.

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

Hypocrites

Pulldown error. Corrected to 60fps.

Sunshine Molly

Pulldown error. Corrected to 60fps.

Too Wise Wives

Microloop. Clipped directly from the BD.
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Pioneers: First Women Filmmakers (Part 1)

Kino’s set is a mixed bag. Some movies look great. Others are restored to death. I’ll be focusing on the latter. I give lots of examples, but this post is by no means comprehensive.

Mixed Pets (1911)

Editing error:

Corrected to 60fps

Frozen, splotchy, misaligned cloning. Terrible in every way:

Some shots are untouched, but frozen cloning is pervasive:

Intertitles look super fake, but this one has an erroneous line peeking through:

Processed by Library of Congress and Dayton Digital Filmworks.

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Le Beau Mec (Altered Innocence)

Opening titles are very blurry and smoothed, as if de-grained and filtered to death. However, the video soon clears up and is generally very nice all the way to the end.

Clipped directly from the BD.

The notes say that the primary source is the original reversal negative, which looks like it could benefit from more physical cleaning. I’m fine with dirt, but there comes a point when I’m sitting in a theater watching a fine but dirty print, and I want to yell to its owner, “Clean your print!”

I complain, but I still prefer to see dirt instead of artifact-inducing temporal cloning.

There weren’t any repairs that made me stop the disc, but I did catch this spot where a frame was held for the duration of three extra frames:

Frame number in yellow.

Instead of freezing, I’d much prefer to edit the sound, see black frames inserted, or, best, see the original damaged frames.

The U.S. and the Holocaust (PBS)

“Approx. 6 hours,” says the back of the BD cover. Given that it’s made for TV, I took that to mean three episodes slightly under two hours each. WRONG. Each episode was well over two hours, totaling 400 minutes. That’s WAY over six hours! Knowing the accurate running time in advance is very important! This is easy to get right.

As to this blog’s obsessions, quality of archival footage is all over the place, but generally very good. However, since the video runs at 24fps, much of it stutters. Full-frame interpolation is common, along with occasional blurry motion. Working in 60fps would have been much better.