Category Archives: Mastering Errors

Storm Over Asia (Flicker Alley)

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Two main issues: broken pulldown and microloops. The source print is step-printed and the video was stretched further for the BD, resulting in a very clumpy pulldown. You can see the strobing at the climax is completely broken.

BD on left; corrected to 60fps on right.

The elements are there for a good presentation. Nice scan, nice encoding, no artifacting, but the technicians didn’t make the effort to fix the pulldown, even taking into consideration that they stretched to 24fps.

Microloops at

  • 00;46;49;38
  • 00;26;47;01
  • 00;36;06;55
  • 02;05;56;20

The source looks like a circulating repertory print with characteristic dirt buildup. I’m puzzled why Flicker Alley didn’t physically clean it before scanning.

Storm Over Asia runs at 6-24fps and is encoded at 24fps. The included Chess Fever is upscaled.

The Time Bending Mysteries of Shahram Mokri (Deaf Crocodile)

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Click here for the first movie in the set.

Fish & Cat (2013)

For a 2013 movie, I expected this to look better. My guess is an inadequate camera. Look at that aliasing!

Clipped directly from the BD.

The running time is 141 minutes, not the 134 stated on the box.

Invasion (2017)

The first movie in the set that looks good.

Clipped directly from the BD.

However, the subtitles are horrible. There are typos throughout the set, but those for Invasion are the worst.

Later spelled “Daniel.”
Plus inconsistent placement of quotation marks.

Careless Crime (2020)

Another nice transfer.

Clipped directly from the BD.

These are probably fascinating in Farsi, but I was bored, and not having any of it by the time I got to Careless Crime. All the walking, monotonous dialog, and reading was just too taxing. I would be very interested to see Invasion, maybe even Fish & Cat, dubbed in English.

Abraham Lincoln (1930, Kino)

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Overall, very nice picture quality. Good grain, looks natural.

Clipped directly from the BD.

However, the 2.0 LPCM sound decodes as surround, not mono. It’s easy to fix, but something that should’ve been caught before the disc was released.

The restoration was also pretty good. I wasn’t noticing any obvious processing artifacts, until, at 1h24m:

Clipped directly from the BD.

Sloppy, 3-frame, quick-reversed, misaligned changeover cue removal (but only one of them). I don’t get the hatred for changeover cues. You’d see them if you went to a screening of a print. They are authentic and accurate. If all that exists has cues, then that’s okay. Leave them alone, especially when the retouching isn’t flawless and invisible.

This was the only restoration artifact I noticed. I’m sure there were more, but they didn’t stick out like this one.

The improper surround sound, though, was a serious error.

Ashkan, the Charmed Ring and Other Stories (Deaf Crocodile)

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[Ashkan] was shot on video at 25 frames per second. [This version was converted to 24fps] by removing 1 frame per second from the movie.

I initially misread that as “one frame per shot,” which would have been no big deal. So, to see such choppiness really caught me off guard:

Clipped directly from the BD.

It’s really noticeable and distracting throughout the movie, though the hand-held shaky cam helped hide some of it.

If this is the best version, I have some questions. Why couldn’t the 25fps original be used? Does it still exist? The video that remains is basically slowed down; slowing the original down to 24fps would be effectively the same. Why couldn’t it be a 25fps->1080i60 conversion? What about the sound? Is it slowed or pitch-corrected?

I’m not thrilled with the video compression, but it could be worse:

Clipped directly from the BD.

A poor presentation. Whatever the price is for this four-disc set, it’s 25% too much.