Category Archives: Bad restoration

Devil’s Bride (1974, Deaf Crocodile)

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The technicians used interpolation in an attempt to remove all splices at each cut on the top of the frame:

And on the bottom:

Sometimes, retouching at the bottom doesn’t match at all, causing explicit screen tearing:

Retouching is so poor that the cement line is still present. Leave the flaw alone if you can’t do a flawless repair:

Frame blending on thrown grapes:

Full-frame interpolation. Not only is it ugly, at full speed, the picture appears to freeze:

See the mark that disappears in the upper-left corner? That’s part of the texture and supposed to be there:

Interpolation:

Interpolated spot repair propagates the scratch:

In motion, interpolation looks completely unnatural. Replacing one flaw with another is not an improvement.

Processed by Lithuanian Film Centre.

Edit 1/20/26 : The color looks absolutely bizarre. Is this really what it actually looks like? (I HAVE MY DOUBTS.)

Magic Crystal (Vinegar Syndrome)

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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:

Previous release.

It could have been so much worse.

The Cardinal (1936, Olive)

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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.

Interpolation:

Almost a freeze frame:

Cat City (Deaf Crocodile)

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There’s typical frozen temporal cloning. The bigger problem is that there are about 100 freeze frames. Some have negligible clone repairs, but usually the picture simply freezes.

Frozen picture. Yellow number indicates frame number.
Picture is mostly frozen, with some misaligned cloning.

The shorts got worse processing, especially at splices.

Let Us Get a Dog (1974)

Freeze frame:

Interpolation:

Frozen cloning, screen tearing, misalignment:

Can you spot it?

Where is the Limit? (1975)

Frozen cloning:

Screen tearing:

Interpolation:

This interpolated frame includes a microloop.

Restoration processing by Hungary National Film Institute Filmlab.

Samm Deighan’s irritating uptalk-filled commentary approaches the movie with the assumption that animation is for children. It sounds like a dry book-report academic lecture, instead of someone who is an expert in Hungarian cinema. Skip it.

Madame Dubarry (Kino)

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Some pretty ugly repairs-frozen cloning, interpolation, microloops-but they’re not pervasive. For the most part, though, it’s not excessively processed. Grain is intact and it looks ok. Given that the final result still has lots of damage, the repairs were a waste of effort.

Misaligned, frozen cloning:

Wall texture retouched to oblivion:

Nearly a freeze frame:

Interpolation and disappearing rope:

Madame Dubarry is transferred mostly at 20fps and encoded at 24fps.