Category Archives: Bad restoration

F. P. 1 Doesn’t Answer (Kino)

Leave a reply

Automated Spot Removal

Watch the spot remover make the plane disappear. IN THE VERY FIRST SHOT.

Clipped directly from the BD.

The damage done, let’s look closer at the retouching:

Watch pieces and small details of the plane disappear:

Clipped directly from the BD.

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:

Clipped directly from the BD.

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.

Clipped directly from the BD.

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)

Leave a reply

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.

English version. Clipped directly from the BD.
German version. Clipped directly from the BD.

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)

Leave a reply

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.

In addition to damaging the text, the spot removal left an ugly retouched line at the top.
Watch Norman Kerry’s beads disappear.
Text disappears.
Obliterated text.

Also frequent is frozen temporal cloning:

There’s almost nothing left of the “restored” frame.
The top of the image suffers from misaligned frozen cloning and messy retouching. Spot removal was applied after stretching to 24fps.
This piece of frozen cloning in the lower right lasts three frames.

The next three examples each have multiple instances of frozen temporal cloning:

Sloppy retouching:

The retouching at top is misaligned, has a hard edge, and doesn’t even remove the cement splice.

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.

The top of this frame repeats.
Misaligned, hard-edged, quick-reverse temporal cloning at top.
Quick-reversing is easy to spot when it’s applied to motion.

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:

Pay attention to the horse at top right. Quick-reverse in action.

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.

Continue reading →

Lights of Old Broadway (Kino)

Leave a reply

The worst, most egregious restoration processing happens four minutes into the movie. There is a major scratch that the technician unwisely attempted to eliminate. Instead, it looks like the picture is melting:

Use the controls to slow down playback and you can clearly make out how shoddy the repair work is.

Look at the background. Notice how interpolation makes the bricks move and distort. Temporal clone repairs are misaligned on the window. Damage that normally lasts one frame now dissolves over several. Grain is completely ruined.

The upper half of this frame is frozen and the seam is obvious.

A completely interpolated frame. These never look good and they never look natural in motion. Notice how dirt, scratches, and grain get interpolated.

Frozen temporal cloning. The retouched area doesn’t even match.

Interpolation obliterates Marion Davies’ hands. It also interpolates that giant hole on the upper-right window, thereby creating even more damage. It also has a tendency to move stationary objects, seen in the wall to the right of the center window at the bottom of the frame. That “oh-so-horrible” scratching is still there.

Frozen temporal cloning, the scourge of most modern restorations, seen here most clearly on the moving platform.

The top of the frame is frozen and slightly misaligned. Perhaps done to remove a cement splice, but the result is screen tearing, which looks like garbage.

Interpolation ruins every bit of this frame. Notice the distortion of Davies and the man as they pass each other. Around them, the background distorts. Half the face of the right-most man disappears. A scratch at the top is propagated. Grain seizes up. It would be better to have no frame than a faked frame.

There is more than one shoddy repair in the above clip, but I’ll point out only one:

Frame interpolation should never be used.

Lights of Old Broadway is encoded at 24 fps. It is also transferred at 24, except for an inexplicable 20 seconds during the parade scene, when it switches to a stuttery variable frame rate.