Very nice color scan of a tinted print. In rough shape, but grain looks natural and no restoration artifacting. No complaints about the encoding. Looks great!
I already had the Eureka release of The Oyster Princess (1919), so I didn’t watch Kino’s encode, but it has the same wonderful score.
Meyer from Berlin (1919) is transferred at 18fps and encoded at 24fps. From EYE Filmmuseum.
Natural grain. No unnecessary processing, no artifacting. Occasional hard subs are lamentable, but looks great overall. From the Cinémathèque de Toulouse.
Strike runs at 19fps and is encoded at 24fps. New English video intertitles.
I didn’t notice any restoration artifacting. It looks like it didn’t have any restoration processing, which is good! There is wear throughout, but it’s not an issue. Everything looks natural. Video encoding is very nice. Transferred and encoded at 24fps, so motion is perfect. A wonderful as-is presentation.
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.
Like The Valley of Silent Men on the first disc of the set, Back Pay (1922) looks like an as-is presentation. Natural grain, no obvious restoration processing, nice encoding. It looks wonderful.
Back Pay is transferred at 21fps and encoded at 24fps. Too stuttery, but as good as it’s gonna get in our 24fps-or-nothing world.