Category Archives: Bad restoration

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.

Wings (1927)

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The 2012 restoration of Wings (1927) is a mixed bag. The color work is beautiful. Ben Burtt’s sound effects really work. However, that all goes to waste due to the overprocessing.

This weekend, the Vista is running a 35mm print of this version. It uses the new sound track, but the print is three seconds out of sync. All the things that were gnawing at me when I first watched the BD are visible in 35mm: frozen cloning, interpolation, microloops. and terrible grain. Grain varies from shot to shot, but, for the most part, it’s smeary.

Clipped directly from the BD. Check out that magnetic grain!
Clipped directly from the BD.
Huge smeary retouching.

I still dislike the new arrangement of J. S. Zamecnik’s score. Too cheery, with excessive chimes. The recording lacks so much personality, that I thought it was mostly electronic. I was shocked when I saw the credits. This is perhaps the largest American recording of a score for a silent in over 20 years! If only the studios put in half as much effort into their silents as Paramount did for Wings.