De-grained. There’s noise, but it doesn’t look natural.
Smeary. Dissolving damage. Frozen cloning. Screen tearing. Freeze-frames. Broken stabilization. Interpolation.
The broken stabilization is more apparent here:
And the shorts? All upscales.
Restored to death by The Chimney Pot. No grain, but a layer of dissolving fine noise on top instead. An overall smeary look. Not worth watching.
After finishing Ashkan, the Charmed Ring and Other Stories, I popped in the disc of A Holy Place (Sveto mesto, 1990), and, by damn, it has the same frame rate problem!
Just like with Ashkan, it drops a frame every second. What a waste of a beautiful transfer of a lightly-worn print.
I initially misread that as “one frame per shot,” which would have been no big deal. So, to see such choppiness really caught me off guard:
It’s really noticeable and distracting throughout the movie, though the hand-held shaky cam helped hide some of it.
If this is the best version, I have some questions. Why couldn’t the 25fps original be used? Does it still exist? The video that remains is basically slowed down; slowing the original down to 24fps would be effectively the same. Why couldn’t it be a 25fps->1080i60 conversion? What about the sound? Is it slowed or pitch-corrected?
I’m not thrilled with the video compression, but it could be worse:
A poor presentation. Whatever the price is for this four-disc set, it’s 25% too much.