Criterion transferred The Unknown at a little under 23fps and encoded at 1080i. The motion should be perfect, right? Wrong! Somebody messed up and used a 24fps timeline, then exported at 1080i60. Notice how the motion stutters in the top sample below. The whole reason to use 1080i is to prevent that!
After deinterlacing, we can easily see the uneven, broken pulldown, worse than most silents authored at 24fps. Below screenshot is of a tool I wrote to help delete duplicated frames. What you see on the right is a long list of frame numbers. All frames highlighted in red are duplicates and can be safely deleted.
Encoding silents to 1080i60 applies its own unusual pulldown. So, the result of working in 24fps and exporting at 1080i60 is that two different pulldown patterns compounded to create terrible stuttering.
Microloops galore. Nearly every shot begins with a microloop. Microloops frequently occur mid-shot, too. Duplicated frames are separated by one or two frames, never breaking persistence of vision. You won’t see them all, but you’ll definitely notice some of the ones that happen mid-shot. They are very hard to demonstrate. In these samples, I put the repeated frames next to each other, with the frame number on top, so you can see that these are the exact same frames.
Frozen cloning isn’t a huge issue, but it still happens, and it’s crude and ugly as sin:
The Flying House – Dreams of a Rarebit Fiend
My complaints with this interesting re-working are solely on technical issues (though no one should call this a restoration, ever).
Pulldown issues. Stuttering, like a speed-corrected silent encoded at 24 fps…
Frame number in yellow.
…and dropped frames, like a poor PAL-NTSC conversion:
Intertitle that loops a handful of frames for its duration. I hate it in new versions of silents, and it definitely shouldn’t happen when an artist has complete control on reworking an old work (still image sample):
Your Face / Guard Dog
In contrast to the feature, the two shorts look great. I didn’t see any restoration artifacts when spot-checking, whereas I came across multiple artifacts at every spot I looked at in The Tune.
About the disc itself…
I hate fancy disc menus. The BD menu has a short loop FROM THE CLIMAX of the film that plays over the entire menu. Heaven forbid you need more than a few seconds to make a selection. I rushed for the mute button.
Zoom shit:
I don’t care how interesting the interviews are, I’m not watching Zoom meetings. They’re low-effort and look like garbage. Look at that screenshot. They didn’t even agree on horizontal or vertical. Yeah, low budget, blah, blah. But you could, like, you know, EDIT. And FRAME. And CROP. We don’t need to watch a 10 GB hour-long video of this.
The Tune, Your Face, and Guard Dog were processed by Academy Film Archive.
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:
Hideous interpolated eyes.
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:
Vinegar Syndrome BD
Now, this older version, clipped from the Wen Chao-Yu interview. No wires and no grain:
A nice example of how nice the picture can look when you don’t filter out all the grain and fine scratches. Yes, there’s a lot of damage, but it’s clear and sharp.
However, the technicians couldn’t resist repairing it. A light touch overall, but if you look closely, there’s frozen cloning, interpolation, and microloops throughout. Worst hit are the opening titles and the climactic confrontation.
Dissolving, interpolated damage moves at a slow frame rate:
Screen tearing:
Frankly, with all the age-related damage, most repairs are easy to miss. However, the following scene got the works, with a flurry of obtrusive repairs that made me “yuck” out loud. The full shots look terrible in motion.
