Solid video. I had low expectations for the movie, but it has an amazing red herring!
Steel and Lace (Vinegar Syndrome)
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Author Archives: Nick
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.
The Wizard of OZ (1939, Sphere Preview on CBS)
Every time there’s a restoration of The Wizard of OZ (1939), the promoters go on and on about how “now we can see her freckles!” For over 35 years they’ve been saying that. And now? Apparently no one gives a damn.
I admit, I’m curious to see this travesty at Sphere Las Vegas, but OMG, tickets are $114-349! Most I saw were in the $150 range. That’s more than I paid for an orchestra seat to see Napoleon (1927) at the Oakland Paramount.
From the gushing promo piece on CBS Sunday Morning (7/27/25):
So, a grainy close-up of Dorothy becomes richly detailed.
🤮
Magic Crystal (Vinegar Syndrome)
A light touch, but there’s so much damage, that it would’ve looked fine without any repairs. This is a bad restoration not because damage remains, but because the repairs are ugly, creating their own artifacts.
Interpolation:
Interpolated spot repair. These scenes are over an hour into the movie. Up to this point, I wasn’t even noticing repairs bad enough to take notes until large areas of grain suddenly started warping as if due to terrible compression:
Frozen temporal cloning:
Opening and end credits use some other source, which looks like a recreation, de-grained and filtered to death. Check out that aliasing!
The included interviews use clips from this older, altered source. First, a sample from VS’s version:
Now, this older version, clipped from the Wen Chao-Yu interview. No wires and no grain:
It could have been so much worse.
The Iceman Cometh (1973, Kino)
Another good transfer from the American Film Theatre series. Watching the long version, it’s fascinating to see the brutal editing they did to get it to three hours. The cut portions, unsurprisingly, don’t match particularly well, but the sound is consistent throughout. Very nice.