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.
The Saragossa Manuscript (Yellow Veil)
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Category Archives: Bad restoration
Seven Samurai (BFI UHD)
Slowpoke Pics currently has a comparison of all three UHDs of Seven Samurai (1954). The very first screencap, of the BFI disc, shows sloppy retouching:
(Full image here.)
The Toho UHD looks the same, but with different grading, cropping, and filtering. The Criterion UHD doesn’t have these smeary spots, but I don’t know how it looks in motion.
F. P. 1 Doesn’t Answer (Kino)
Automated Spot Removal
Watch the spot remover make the plane disappear. IN THE VERY FIRST SHOT.
The damage done, let’s look closer at the retouching:
Watch pieces and small details of the plane disappear:
Disappearing porthole:
Disappearing wall fixture:
Disappearing wall decor on upper right:
Freezing
By far, the worst repair is freeze-framing the ends of shots. It’s hard to watch when the video keeps freezing. I consider it unwatchable. The bulk of it occurs during the first half, but never completely goes away. Check out the lousy spot removal here, too.
Frozen Temporal Cloning
Interpolation
Interpolation here is often combined with spot repair. It’s not the worst, but grain still freezes, dissolves, becomes magnetic; damage sticks to surfaces, and there’s ghosting. Click to see them full screen.
Maybe you think the previous three don’t look visible in motion:
But notice how parts of the picture slow down, as if they got stuck in the mud. Without knowing anything, it’s easy to dismiss it as poor encoding or a streaming hiccup. However, these are intentionally introduced errors.
There’s some microlooping, but surprisingly sparsely used.
Additionally, the subtitles have major timing issues.
The English version looks much better, even though it suffers from aggressive spot removal, some dodgy stabilization, and wobbly masking. However, there wasn’t anything that made me turn off the movie or pause it to take notes.
The Blue Angel (Eureka)
The English version of The Blue Angel (1930) looks wonderful and far better than the German version. It has natural looking grain and no restoration processing artifacts—a benefit of being the neglected version.
Grain on the German version looks blurry. Look closely at the second duck and you can see restoration artifacting.
However, the biggest problem with the German version is that the technicians tried to remove every cement splice, creating lots of interpolated and frozen errors. These are just two random ones I found. Pretty much every splice is like these:
Splices are visible in the English version, but they don’t detract at all.
Extras are all SD, and the ones from archival video sources are converted to 24fps instead of left at 50i/60i. Blech.
I’m surprised the English version is so ignored. Most of the movie is still in German and tacks closely to the German version. It works really well. Why read a movie when you don’t have to? English speakers should default to the English version, especially given the superior presentation.
The Hunchback of Notre Dame (Flicker Alley, Universal)
Two BD releases of The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923), both riddled with restoration artifacts.
Flicker Alley (FA)
I like that it’s a color scan of a tinted print, which allows the subtle, imperfect color variations inherent in the process. The tints on Universal’s version are recreated.
The most common artifact comes from either poor compression or automatic spot removal gone awry (I’m guessing the latter):
Most of the time they look like specks of dirt, but if you look closer, they are hard tiny blocks.
Also frequent is frozen temporal cloning:
The next three examples each have multiple instances of frozen temporal cloning:
Sloppy retouching:
Quick-reverse temporal cloning:
Quick-reversing is when frames are repeated in the manner of ABCDCDEF. It’s often applied to entire frames. For this edition, Flicker Alley combined it with temporal cloning. It’s no better than frozen temporal cloning, as you can see the picture “seize up.” Maybe not all the time, but done enough times, you’ll start to notice something’s off.
One thing I’ve heard in commentaries and interviews from the people that produce restorations is that these artifacts aren’t visible in motion. Well, up next, straight-from-the-disc at 21.5fps:
Stabilization:
Stabilization was applied relatively sparingly. I don’t particularly care for stabilized silents; they have a tendency to float and rotate around the center. Here is an egregious use of it:
Lon Chaney was in front of a wall, facing a camera locked to a tripod. Stabilization warps every bit of this shot.
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